Top all-time · #761
Steve Hsu
Personal blog · infoproc.blogspot.comsciencedata
Steve Hsu writes Information Processing, a personal blog at infoproc.blogspot.com about science and data. Since 2007, 85 different Hacker News readers have linked it 138 times, most often “Annals of psychometry: IQs of eminent scientists (2008)”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 9 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Steve Hsu's blog for its posts on IQ, genetics, SAT scores and science policy, and for interviews and podcast episodes that commenters recommend.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- Called 'a good discussion', 'interesting', 'good blog posts', 'instructive', and a 'good introduction'; recommended as an interview, podcast and reading.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will Favorite posts | Manifold podcast | Twitter: @hsu_steve
Most-linked posts?
- Annals of psychometry: IQs of eminent scientists (2008)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-05-19
- /2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=13 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-01-04
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-10-16
- /2008/01/no-scientific-basis-for-race.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-08-28
- /2020/06/twitter-attacks-and-defense-of.html?m=12 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-06-20
- Game Over: Genomic Prediction of Social Mobility2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-07-10
- Inside the 1%2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-03-14
- GWAS Lasso greatly improves genetic prediction of human traits2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-09-20
- Cognitive Thresholds For Math and Physics Majors2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-05-22
- Information Processing: The differences are enormous2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-08-11
What Hacker News says?
See: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/07/assortative-mating-regr...
Comment linking /2010/07/assortative-mating-regression-and-all.html
on “Diamonds Are Bullshit”Submitted Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans as a story · 192 points
HN discussionBasically if your research is considered bad for the dominant DEI narratives you're going to be in for a bad time. E.g. if your research gets the "wrong" results regarding police shootings then anyone who defends your research will have to resign: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2020/06/resignation.html?m=1 And anything regarding differences in crime numbers or IQ? Forget it.
Comment linking /2020/06/resignation.html?m=1
on “Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society”Submitted Gradient Descent Models Are Kernel Machines as a story · 161 points
HN discussionIn the blogpost "Roe devised her own high-end intelligence tests as follows: she obtained difficult problems in verbal, spatial and mathematical reasoning from the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, but also performs bespoke testing research for, e.g., the US military. Using these problems, she created three tests (V, S and M), which were administered to the 64 scientists, and also to a cohort o…
Comment linking /2009/01/horsepower-matters-psychometrics-works.html
on “You can increase your intelligence”Submitted SAT score distributions in Michigan as a story · 157 points
HN discussionhttp://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of-psychometry-i... [Review] Anne Roe: The Making of a Scientist After 120 IQ points, it doesn't make much of a difference to winning a Nobel Prize. Not true Test (Low / Median / High) Verbal 121 / 166 / 177 Spatial 123 / 137 / 164 Mathematical 128 / 154 / 194
Comment linking /2008/07/annals-of-psychometry-iqs-of-eminent.html
on “You can increase your intelligence”Submitted MSU Vice President of research & innovation Steve Hsu has been forced to resign as a story · 148 points
HN discussionThis is a good discussion of the accounting of biofuels, with a guy called Tim Searchinger (there is a transcript if you don't want to listen): https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2019/11/manifold-podcast-23-ti... One takeaway is that you should think of farming trees as fuel as a competitor for land use. If it displaces growing food crops, then they will be grown elsewhere, possibly in newly cleared rainforest. Even if n…
Comment linking /2019/11/manifold-podcast-23-tim-searchinger.html
on “Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power”Submitted Remarks on the Decline of American Empire as a story · 80 points
HN discussionThe SATs are specifically designed to meet these goals, among others: - Preparation not required. - Preparation not beneficial . And it shouldn't be surprising that they achieve that well. Consider these scatterplots comparing students who took the SAT without preparation to students who prepped: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/02/test-preparation-and-s... . As further described at the same link, research quite c…
Comment linking /2012/02/test-preparation-and-sat-scores.html
on “Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview”Submitted The cult of genius? as a story · 62 points
HN discussionBTW the author of this article, Stephen Hsu, has a blog which frequently has interesting comments on such things (and AI, and much else): http://infoproc.blogspot.com/
Comment linking /
on “Scientists Tie 52 Genes to Human Intelligence”Submitted Psychometric Thresholds for Physics and Mathematics as a story · 38 points
HN discussionWhy not? Von Neumann himself did, in a lighthearted way. > I told Banach about an expression Johnny had used with me in Princeton before stating some non-Jewish mathematician's result, "Die Goim haben den folgenden satz beweisen" (The goys have proved the following theorem). Banach, who was pure goy, thought it was one of the funniest sayings he had ever heard. He was enchanted by its implication that if the goys co…
Comment linking /2021/12/adventures-of-mathematician-ulam-von.html
on “The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]”Submitted Does Harvard discriminate against Asian-Americans? as a story · 35 points
HN discussionI was just telling a friend how much I hated this article. So many flaws, of assumptions, reasoning and ethics. 1. The article assumes that IQ is "normally distributed" and that there are no extreme outliers, but how true is this really? First of all, IQ is a constructed metric that consists of multiple dimensions, and is normalized to mean 100, std 15. That's means it will be approximately normal, but not actually.…
Comment linking /2014/10/big-chickens.html
on “The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms”Submitted Frequentists vs Bayesians as a story · 30 points
HN discussionRelayed by Nick Metropolis: Fermi and von Neumann overlapped. They collaborated on problems of Taylor instabilities and they wrote a report. When Fermi went back to Chicago after that work he called in his very close collaborator, namely Herbert Anderson, a young Ph.D. student at Columbia, a collaboration that began from Fermi's very first days at Columbia and lasted up until the very last moment. Herb was an experi…
Comment linking /2012/03/differences-are-enormous.html
on “What John von Neumann did at Los Alamos (2020)”Submitted The Map of Science: a directed citation graph showing the interdependence of fields as a story · 23 points
HN discussionI've gone from just sort of blankly accepting that, of course, global warming is true + catastrophic, to now wondering if it's over-hyped or uncertain. The kinds of arguments around it make it seem more like a moral or even religious hysteria than a well-supported belief. Science should invite skepticism and questioning, not try to shut it down w/ shouts of someone being a "denier". A little bit of warming seems cer…
Comment linking /2017/06/epistemic-caution-and-climate-change.html
on “The Money Behind The Climate Denial Movement (2013)”Submitted The marshmallow experiment as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI applaud for the P < 0.01. There are too many non reproducible results with real life harm: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/02/perverse-incentives-and...
Comment linking /2017/02/perverse-incentives-and-replication-in.html
on “No publication without confirmation”Submitted Are entrepreneurs hypomanic? as a story · 10 points
HN discussion> or they have something they want to hide. Indeed. I recommend this interview with Jeffrey Sachs, who headed Lancet's commision to investigate Covid-19. https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/10/jeffrey-sachs-lessons-... You may find your eyebrows a couple inches higher after listening :-)
Comment linking /2022/10/jeffrey-sachs-lessons-from-covid.html
on “Researchers’ tests of lab-made version of Covid virus draw scrutiny”Submitted 1 in 4 Biostatisticians Surveyed Say They Were Asked to Commit Scientific Fraud as a story · 9 points
HN discussion> They did to a degree Where? I’m fairly facile with causal inference; this is the crudest observational “study” without even qualitative heuristics to make the comparisons apples-to-apples. > and expand on why that particular quote offends you? Generic low tolerance for high V, low M academics: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1 This is the paper he links to, where you can find references t…
Comment linking /2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1
on “US newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offering subjects a 'clean slate'”Submitted Supercomputer Use at the BGI in China to Study the Genetic Neture of IQ as a story · 9 points
HN discussionLooks like the two good comments were taken (Feynman, Kahnemann). I'll just leave a couple quotes I thought of when I read a few paragraphs further about the hierarchy for ability in math and how it can be quite upsetting to discover how far up it goes beyond you, when you thought you were pretty high up. >> [Pascal Costanza] Why is it that programmers always seem to think that the rest of the world is stupid? > Bec…
Comment linking /2012/03/differences-are-enormous.html
on “Avoiding Intellectual Phase Lock”Submitted Game Over: Genomic Prediction of Social Mobility as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
