Through Ezra (at his new blog!), I found this great review by Malcolm Gladwell of James Flynn’s What is Intelligence?. It’s quite timely now that the racists are trotting out their favorite theory that gets trotted out every few years, smacked down, and then trotted out again once they figure everyone has forgotten the last smackdown, the theory that the IQ gap between whites and blacks must reflect fundamental, immutable, genetic traits, ergo a racist caste system is organic and not the product of oppression. Lord Saletan played the racist sucker for this go-round, making ridiculous claims about having poured over the evidence and having to accept (with a supposedly heavy heart) that the IQ fundamentalist, KKK-propaganda generators were right. Gladwell politely and semi-obliquely calls bullshit on Saletan’s claims of heavy research.
“Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern,” Saletan declared, claiming to have been “soaking [his] head in each side’s computations and arguments.” One argument that Saletan never soaked his head in, however, was Flynn’s, because what Flynn discovered in his mailbox upsets the certainties upon which I.Q. fundamentalism rests. If whatever the thing is that I.Q. tests measure can jump so much in a generation, it can’t be all that immutable and it doesn’t look all that innate.
Saletan’s omission isn’t a small thing; James Flynn is famous enough in the field that Saletan claims to have soaked his head in that he’s got an entire phenomenon named after him, the Flynn Effect. The Effect, as far as I know, is not controversial, though I’m sure the racists really wish they could cast doubts on it. What Flynn discovered was that each generation tends to get “smarter” than the last by the standards measured by the IQ test, to the point where they have rewrite the entire thing every once in awhile to set the baseline back to 100 before the test starts demonstrating a noticeable surge in geniuses. Since the Flynn Effect is generational, it simply can’t be genetic because, you know, you inherit your genes from your parents and grandparents and their parents and so on back until you get to a point where the average person would be considered mentally retarded.
Thus, Flynn argues, IQ tests don’t measure a genetically determined intelligence so much as the amount of cognitive stimulation a person gets in their environment growing up, or how “modern” they are by Gladwell’s estimation. Steven Johnson made a lot of use out of the Flynn Effect in his book Everything Bad is Good for You, arguing that popular entertainment puts increasing demands on the viewer’s cognitive processes and is part of the cause of the Flynn Effect. Halo works the brain harder than Pong, and “The Sopranos” puts you through more mental hoops than “Dragnet”. People are increasingly under demands to engage in abstract thinking, and the IQ test measures how much your brain’s been working out in that regard.
One of the Flynn discoveries that really puts off the racist IQ fundamentalists is his discovery that the rate of IQ test improvement has been even faster for blacks than whites.
Two weeks ago, Flynn came to Manhattan to debate Charles Murray at a forum sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. Their subject was the black-white I.Q. gap in America. During the twenty-five years after the Second World War, that gap closed considerably. The I.Q.s of white Americans rose, as part of the general worldwide Flynn effect, but the I.Q.s of black Americans rose faster. Then, for about a period of twenty-five years, that trend stalled—and the question was why.
An intellectually honest person, faced with a handful of indisputable facts (that IQ is not immutable, that “race” is an artificial construct in the biological sense, etc.) would immediately be seized by the fact that the period of rapid gain correlated with a historical period of rapid gain by black people in the U.S., and that as the gains stalled during a period of pushback from reactionaries. A racist asshole who is unable to give up his ridiculous theory would bend over backwards to distort the evidence, which is what Murray did.
Murray showed a series of PowerPoint slides, each representing different statistical formulations of the I.Q. gap. He appeared to be pessimistic that the racial difference would narrow in the future. “By the nineteen-seventies, you had gotten most of the juice out of the environment that you were going to get,” he said. That gap, he seemed to think, reflected some inherent difference between the races. “Starting in the nineteen-seventies, to put it very crudely, you had a higher proportion of black kids being born to really dumb mothers,” he said. When the debate’s moderator, Jane Waldfogel, informed him that the most recent data showed that the race gap had begun to close again, Murray seemed unimpressed, as if the possibility that blacks could ever make further progress was inconceivable.
I like how he made sure to make his dripping evil as sexist as possible, too. All things considered, I wouldn’t call Murray’s approach to the idea that the IQ gap closing had stalled “pessimistic”. I’d say he’s downright optimistic about it, and he treated the news that black people’s fortunes might be improving as if it were bad news, which says everything you need to know about his supposed devotion to science over ideology. As for the ridiculous “dumb mothers” complaint, I’m going to bet the record number of black women getting higher education has everything to do with improved fortunes in closing the IQ gap. But even stating that as some sort of goal is a bit off-putting, because it implies that IQ measures something more substantial than the ease of cognitive functions that have been determined more important than others by the powers that be. Which is completely cultural and relative.
The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?
The IQ test then is most like the SATs, which is that it measures skills deemed important to have for culturally mandated reasons. That’s not a small thing, since you have to get by in the culture you live in. Closing the gap between black and white people isn’t a goal to take on for its own sake, but insofar as it reflects the reduction in obstacles to full participation in society for black people, it’s a good thing.
61 Responses to “Why do immutable things keep inconveniently changing?”
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As someone with a knack for taking IQ tests, I find the whole “my IQ is bigger than yours” game quite tiresome, whether it is expressed on a personal or population level.
I’ll just have to add this Lord Saletan to my list of fools who really need to be dropped in the Australian Outback with their IQ scores and the clothes on their backs. Then they will be left to survive by their wits, with or without the support of their “intellectual inferiors” who possess the intelligences necessary for their survival - abilities that are unmeasured by standard IQ measurement instruments.
BTW, blood lead levels played a not-so-subtle role in the supression of IQ in urbanized populations until paint and gasoline no longer contained it. We have a couple of generations of urbanites who demonstrate subtle but measurable deficits in their cognitive abilities.
Guess whose environments did and still contain the most lead? African Americans. When did the “stall out” start? Around the time lead was banned in paint and gasoline (but still remains in paint and soil in more impoverished areas with heavy traffic).
Awesome. Black people are not stupider, but old people are. This so totally supports my worldview. Not even joking.
Just out of curiosity (too lazy to Google it), has anyone ever compared test scores between black kids in the US and black kids in Canada? It’s pretty much the same racial mixture as in the US since a fair number of Afro-Canadians are descended from American slaves who escaped up north. My suspicion is that there are few to no racial differences in Canada because they have a better school system, but I don’t know if anyone has ever done the study.
I wonder what Bob and Doug MacKenzie’s scores do to white Canadian IQ averages…?
-beating dead horse
And, of course, even if (gack) there was some reason why there was a measurable genetically based difference in any given characteristic (intelligence, sports ability, pie-eating capacity, “rhythm”, whatever). it ONLY applies to an entire population. I have never, ever, ever, heard anyone try to propose one of these racially-based (or gender-based, or orientation-based, etc) stereotypes without immediately leaping to some variation of “and therefore, I am better than you” (for some value of “you”).
As far as I am concerned, anyone who invests any personal value in the question of race-based IQ scores has just scientifically demonstrated that they are themselves in the bottom percentiles for their own group.
Just one nitpick with your post. We are not *just* a combination of our parents genetic material there are some mutations involved there (or else we would cease to evolve). That being said genetic recombination cannot account for the Flloyd effect.
Other than that you are spot on. IQ is very much a cultural and relative test- much like all standardized test. Which is quite frankly why it is frustrating that people put so much store in it.
If IQ is so immutable how can they explain the 20-30 point jump in IQ on Michael Oher from the 8th grade when he was tested at 80 and his freshman year in college? Oher’s story of going from homeless black kid in Memphis to being adopted by a well-to do family, supported and pushed through private school with a tutor, is described by Michael Lewis in “Blnd Side”. Quite a remarkable book, even for non-football fans (you can skip the football chapters).
Oher is a junior at University of Mississippi and was named first team all-SEC for offensive lineman.
The whole concept of IQ is very silly. It is (as pointed out) absolutely not a test of actual intelligence as it relates to dealing with the world, only certain cognitive functions which have been deemed important.
My wife is always going on about how they don’t really test common sense much, which is far more important than what they do test. How well you can get along in the world is far more important than most of the questions.
I recall someone mentioning that if you take a bunch of kids from an inner-city school, sit them down to do a two hour test when they couldn’t give a rats ass about teh result, and then compare them to a bunch of kids from a suburban school who consider such tests important, then you shouldn’t be surprised if differences show up…
My father worked on IQ testing in Quebec back in the ’70s and ’80s. Quebecois children were testing significantly lower than their French age mates and rural Quebecois were testing even lower than their urban schoolmates. He argued that the tests were culturally biased and rewrote the tests. Lo and behold he was able to prove that Quebecois children didn’t live in Paris. France later rewrote the test and the difference between urban and rural French children disappeared. IQ tests test what governments and academics deem important.
The phrase is “pored over the evidence”, not “poured over the evidence”. Sorry to get all grammar police, but that one steps on a pet peeve of mine.
Testing people from very similar cultures and environments, you can attribute some of their differences to heritable differences. When you compare people from different cultures and environments, the differences you get will reflect the those environmental differences more so than anything genetic. This applies to things like height, too.
While I’m a big fan of Flynn, I don’t know that one can say that IQ is *meaningless*. Do you think that all of the findings showing a correlation between fetal-alcohol syndrome and IQ, or lead levels in children’s blood, and IQ, are meaningless?
Thank GOD no one said it was “meaningless” or you’d have a point. What we said was that it was not genetic nor does it measure some immutable trait called “intelligence”. But perhaps your IQ is not high enough for you to grasp abstract reasoning?
Interesting that the gap between white and black test results should be stalling just about the time that white flight reached its peak and inequality of income throughout the US economy began rising sharply.
Murray’s line about getting all of the environmental effect that you could is telling because it was just about then that the improvement in learning environments started tanking…
John Colapinto wrote a fascinating article a few months ago for the New Yorker about the Piraha people of Brazil, who have a language structure that linguists basically claim is completely impossible:
Basically, if you tried to IQ test them, every person in the tribe would show up as profoundly retarded. And yet they’re very intelligent people who survive under very harsh conditions. They just have a language and a way of understanding the world that’s completely unlike any other known culture.
The whole article is fascinating and highly recommended.
I doubt that anyone here is likely to say that IQ testing is meaningless, what we will argue is that the meaning assigned to the results is often misleading or not particularly useful in the context of the individuals tested. The thing about fetal alcohol and lead poisoning is that both effect neurological function to the point that standard IQ testing is often an ineffective way of isolating the problem. The test results can often mislead to the point that a more appropriate test is not given and inefficient programs are instituted in the child’s education and healthcare with the result that the fundamental problems are not addressed at an early enough age. IQ tests show how a child is progressing along a curricula but not what medical conditions may be impacting that progress.
“Starting in the nineteen-seventies, to put it very crudely, you had a higher proportion of black kids being born to really dumb mothers,”
Some of you may be shocked (or maybe not so shocked) at the number of black conservatives who buy into this argument.
poured over the evidence
Pored over.
Saletan is not merely wrong; he is, wittingly or unwittingly aiding and abetting the cause of racist politics. Because the research he cites was published in a public policy and law journal, the authors give us an unusually candid appraisal of what kinds of policy prescriptions these alleged biological facts would entail. Rushton and Jensen assert that because racial differences in IQ appear to have a genetic basis,
“a demonstration of differential racial performance (good or bad) could not, by itself, be offered as proof of racial discrimination because, as the evidence review in this article demonstrates, genetic factors play a role in producing these differences. Rather, the burden would be on the plaintiffs to prove that the defendants had discriminated on the basis of race and not educational or vocational performance associated with race” (282).
Rushton and Jensen wrongly imply that a demonstration of differential racial performance can, by itself, be offered as legal proof of racial discrimination. The law currently requires proof of intent. So Rushton and Jensen’s proposal would make discrimination cases based on racial disparity virtually impossible to prove, since the plaintiff would have to prove, first, that the disparity cannot be accounted for by genetic racial inferiority, and, second, that the disparity was the result of intentional discrimination. If Rushton and Jensen have their way, there would be no recourse to discrimination law for even severe racial disparity in health, education, or income level, or wealth. Further, through their research, Rushton and Jensen explicitly aim to discredit affirmative action, and criticism of racial bias in standardized testing (282-3)…
read on at: http://radicalnegative.blogspot.com/2007/11/j-rushton-arthur-jensen-and-william.html
Saletan is not merely wrong; he is, wittingly or unwittingly aiding and abetting the cause of racist politics. Because the research he cites was published in a public policy and law journal, the authors give us an unusually candid appraisal of what kinds of policy prescriptions these alleged biological facts would entail. Rushton and Jensen assert that because racial differences in IQ appear to have a genetic basis,
“a demonstration of differential racial performance (good or bad) could not, by itself, be offered as proof of racial discrimination because, as the evidence review in this article demonstrates, genetic factors play a role in producing these differences. Rather, the burden would be on the plaintiffs to prove that the defendants had discriminated on the basis of race and not educational or vocational performance associated with race” (282).
Rushton and Jensen wrongly imply that a demonstration of differential racial performance can, by itself, be offered as legal proof of racial discrimination. The law currently requires proof of intent. So Rushton and Jensen’s proposal would make discrimination cases based on racial disparity virtually impossible to prove, since the plaintiff would have to prove, first, that the disparity cannot be accounted for by genetic racial inferiority, and, second, that the disparity was the result of intentional discrimination. If Rushton and Jensen have their way, there would be no recourse to discrimination law for even severe racial disparity in health, education, or income level, or wealth. Further, through their research, Rushton and Jensen explicitly aim to discredit affirmative action, and criticism of racial bias in standardized testing (282-3)…
read on at: http://radicalnegative.blogspot.com/2007/11/j-rushton-arthur-jensen-and-william.html
Forrester,
Amanda’s non-pissy response could have been to refer you back to the last paragraph in her main essay:
I’m not a thorough student of IQ testing but it does seem to measure some important criteria of ability. Even these ailities of individuals, it seems to me, can change over time. More importantly, those “IQ abilities” are not even the most important for success in the culture. Hard work and diligence are no doubt more important. There are loads of people with less “IQ ability” than I have who are doing much better on just about any measure of success you care to name. I attribute that fact to those folk’s greater capacity for diligent hard work than I have.
“Intelligence” is such a nebulous, impossible-to-define concept that trying to base any sort of public policy on it is like trying to build a snowman out of half-melted slush.
Ooooh, snap!
———————–
Amanda Marcotte
December 13, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Thank GOD no one said it was “meaningless” or you’d have a point. What we said was that it was not genetic nor does it measure some immutable trait called “intelligence”. But perhaps your IQ is not high enough for you to grasp abstract reasoning?
———————–
Matthew, Patron Saint of Affogato
December 13, 2007 at 11:41 am
The whole concept of IQ is very silly.
———————–
I’ve been in discussions like this before, and it’s inevitable that folks come out of the woodwork insisting that IQ is a meaningless construct. (Are you claiming ’silly’ doesn’t count as a synonym?) My (fake) apology for not noting that I was addressing the tone and content of some of the commenters, and not that of the original post.
If I get a vote, I certainly don’t think that “silly” and “meaningless” are synonyms. There’s a lot of overlap in practical reality, but they really are different concepts.
Since we are talking, in part, about racial differences (real, percieved, or invented), it is a good thing to use as an example of a situation where they are not the same thing. I think it is silly to use race as the basis for any qualitative decision, especially anything relating to human dignity or value, but it is hardly meaningless that it happens.
Lovely (fake) apology, by the way. Sure seems you posted for the express purpose of being able to cry foul and be (fake) offended by the result. If so, you seem to have done so quite effectively. I sense a thread hijack well in progress.
it’s inevitable that folks come out of the woodwork insisting that IQ is a meaningless construct. (Are you claiming ’silly’ doesn’t count as a synonym?)
Actually there’s a pretty big difference between “IQ is meaningless” and “the concept of IQ is very silly”
The first one can be parsed as “IQ scores don ‘t mean anything” which is clearly false, but no one has asserted it.
But if you actually want to defend the concept of IQ, as opposed to insisting redundantly that scores on IQ tests correlate with some other stuff, then maybe you should start by reading this:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html
That antecdote about the Kpelle tribe is fascinating. It would seem that their cognitive preferences tend toward relational thinking, rather than hierarchical thinking. Database theorists concluded that relational models are superior to hierarchical ones over 30 years ago…
Well, given that there is no real agreement on how that theoretical construct is defined or what composes it, “intelligence” is obviously going to be rather tough to measure. It is far easier to measure something you can actually define, which is what SAT tests (which are indeed very much like “IQ” tests in content) purportedly do. They are SCHOLASTIC APTITUDE tests, and they are supposed to indicate one’s likelihood at succeeding in a Western formal-education environment. That is ALL. And they actually do a pretty good job of that (with some amount of individual error, of course). Someone from an environment that did not stress or require those skills (say, a Bangladeshi farmer) could be extremely “intelligent” (whatever we mean by that) but would do very poorly on an SAT. And that would probably be a correct measurement, since that person likely would not do very well in a western college program. But the test result does not say anything about the person’s inherent intelligence.
I used to teach a course on psychological testing and measurement, and one of the main points I hammered away at was that it’s important to be clear on precisely what you are measuring, and not generalize results beyond that. The realm of intelligence/aptitude testing is the one area where such misuse and misinterpretation of results is such a huge, common problem.
I dunno Forrester, “silly” and “meaningless” are two very different words to me. “Silly” implies flippancy, outlandishness, oddity, and hilarity, but none of those things denote that something is meaningless.
Andrea, others:
Silly:
—Synonyms 1. witless, senseless, dull-witted, dim-witted. See foolish. 2. inane, asinine, nonsensical, preposterous.
Meaningless:
adj. Having no meaning or significance.
I apologize for my impertinent act of actually considering the terms near-synonymous. Clearly, the terms ’senseless’ and ‘no meaning’ imply very, very different things.
And finally, no, I did not post for the sole purpose of being attacked so that I could complain about being attacked. Just wanted to caution people that it doesn’t make sense to go too far in the other direction.
Thanks for pointing to the Colapinto article, Mnemosyne. That some seriously amazing stuff there.
Sorry for chopping up my syntax. What I was trying to say was I really liked the article. :/
I’ll gladly say that. IQ testing is meaningless. Has anyone here ever seen what kinds of questions are on an IQ test?
An IQ test measures how well you do on IQ tests. Nothing more.
Quite frankly I think anyone who believes IQ tests are a valuable measure of anything are not all that smart. The fact that you can practice and get better at them totally obliterates their supposed value, and “measures skills deemed important to have for culturally mandated reasons” is a bogus backfilled rationalization.
IQ tests don’t measure culturally important skills any more than Trivial Pursuit, Jeopardy or a crossword puzzle. For the most part you could replace an IQ test with “how many books have you read?” and get the same results.
Forrester: Yes, I phrased it badly. Silly in this case was meant to be preposterous, in the sense that it’s labeled “Intelligence Quotient,” which is not what it actually measures. See my next paragraph comments about measuring ability to actually get along in the world.
The skills they test can often be matters of rote memorization, which is an important skill to be sure, but it is merely one aspect of intelligence. Same with math skills. They don’t test social skills very well, which are critical to getting along in any society. They don’t test “common sense,” which is often enough just very practical critical thinking. For that matter, the few internet IQ tests I’ve done don’t test critical thinking that well.
So it’s silly in that it purports to measure something it doesn’t, and many people take it for far more than it is.
As a mathematician it often horrifies me to think of how Factor Analysis, a rather abstract technique of data reduction, can be used to reify ‘IQ’/'intelligence/’g’ as some kind of immutable physical trait. As a method I use in my own work it is often nice to be able to reduce an initial list of 200-300 variables to a set of 10-15 factors. That does not mean that I should assume that those 10-15 factors have any ‘real’ or unchanging existence outside of some kind of Platonic-realm. Further, when used in practice F.A. is often more like an art than a science: Does it make more sense to reduce to 3 factors or 4 factors?; What kind of rotations should I use? Etc., etc. . . .
I should add that I’m wrong to say IQ tests are worthless, they actually have negative worth as they are complete misrepresentations.
Trying to rebrand them as something other than measures of innate intellgence (at which they utterly fail) is like selling someone a computer then claiming, when it won’t turn on, that it’s really a paperweight.
Here is a link to a fairly culturally neutral IQ test. Come back and report your score. Take it again and again and see if your score changes. That is, see if you observe a Flynn effect.
http://iqtest.dk/main.swf
IQ testing is meaningless because it utterly fails to account for a crucial factor: the willingness of the test subject to take the test in the manner the proctor/tester/researcher considers appropriate. The shorter version: subjects resist the test in a variety of ways from simple test anxiety to outright insubordination.
For people with developmental or cognitive issues it may not seem valuable or important to concentrate on filling in dots, or they may be incapable or unwilling to fill in the dots precisely enough to score. Others may simply fill the dots in according to patterns they want to see.
For “normal” people who are acting out their resistance to racial, ethnic, gender, or other biases they may actively choose the wrong answers to screw up your results. This phenomenon includes those actively resisting and those who want to fit in or avoid repercussions, e.g. “acting white.” Testing regimes such as those brought about by NCLB implementation can bring out either a team effort or resistance and resentment.
As a creative person, I was subjected to a battery of tests in the second grade because I overthought the questions and there was no room for essay answers. When asked what the red number was on the color blindness test, I counted the bubbles first and gave a ratio of red/green bubbles, then the red circle outline represented a zero, and then the number depicted by patterned bubbles in the center of the colorblindness test. The test givers got to where they threw up their hands, but I was right in ways they were too narrowly focused to see.
So IQ tests are not only meaningless, they are an oppressive tool to subjugate and abuse the individual by forcing one to self-select themselves into social categories dictated by the “master race,” to relinquish their individuality and creativity, and abandon the cultural and social norms of their communities for the narrative of their ethnic, national, gender or color “superiors.” Run, Forrester, Run!
“I’ll just have to add this Lord Saletan to my list of fools who really need to be dropped in the Australian Outback with their IQ scores and the clothes on their backs.”
Hear hear, Ms. Kate.
My partner Ingrid wants to make a whole passel of right-wing pundits play “Survivor: TL.” Put them in the Tenderloin (the “bad neighborhood” in San Francisco, full of homeless people and residence hotels and such), with no access to their bank accounts, homes, cars, credit cards, etc. — and with nothing but a General Assistance check. And see how they manage.
I mean, I probably wouldn’t survive that. Much less the Australian Outback. And I’m a smart person. Intelligence is damn near impossible to even define — much less measure, and even much less measure quantitatively and cross-culturally.
Jim B, that test is utter crap for measuring anything besides how long will you put up with eye-crossing spatial shapes and patterns.
A creative person will look at this test and utterly disregard the patterning the testers are looking for the subject to replicate in favor of picking the most pleasing. A bored person will just start filling in random answers or all the same just to get it over with. A resistant person will spell words with the letters, create acronyms, or use the test materials inappropriately to demonstrate publicly their disdain for the test and the system it represents.
Further, the patterning is subject to cultural interpretations and linguistic preferences. A Chinese reader would interpret the patterning differently from an Indoeuropean reader simply because of the direction their text is written in. Further, one must consider the whole of the patterns in Chinese and other pictograph based languages, such that the meaning of the whole pattern must be harmonious with the individual components. In some Native American cultures the glyphs have meanings independent of those intended by the testers which may form independent meanings: especially since some of the glyphs look like Inuktitut writing.
Unless the subject is a willing partner capable of not only understanding the testing but the meta-test, the reasoning behind the testing and has a shared understanding of what the expectations are for the final test, even this Danish brainteaser is nothing at best but a measure for acculturation to the normative ideation of the tester’s concept of the dominant culture.
Quite frankly I think anyone who believes IQ tests are a valuable measure of anything are not all that smart.
Hey, that’s an IQ test right there. But wait…
Not gonna lie, Matthew - I’m wary of anyone that goes that far the other way in saying that “common sense” is the really important thing, because then you get people like my ex, who despite his upper-middle-class upbringing, had this odd reverse elitist thing on about how he was better than me because *he* dropped out of honors classes so he would be dealing with ‘real’ people, not us smart kids.
Yes, I’m bitter, but it’s kind of comforting to know now that, consciously or not, he said things like that and that ‘maybe I just wasn’t mature enough to work with adults, and I should work at a daycare’ because he resented me being demonstrably smarter than him (at least, on scales of IQ, ACT scores, grades, abstract thinking skills, writing, math, and science…)
and the statistics of this notion of intelligence is well and truly dissected in these posts
The author, Shalizi, is a statistician, so it is densely argued.
Clearly, the terms ’senseless’ and ‘no meaning’ imply very, very different things.
yes. yes they do.
“I think we should replace the current tax code with one that bases taxation on the number of pets a person owns” is senseless, but not meaningless.
Any identity statement “Silly things are silly” is meaningless, but not senseless.
For someone who’s championing the value of IQ tests, you sure must have done poorly on the verbal section.
philosophizer: Not what I’m trying to say. What I’m saying is that IQ is often thought of as a measure of how successful a person will be, as it supposedly measures intelligence. I’m saying that’s BS. It has nothing to do with success, and only a little to do with intelligence.
Like yourself, I do do very well at the kind of things that IQ tests measure. But that’s not all there is to intelligence, and the other factors are not measured at all. “Common sense” also isn’t the only thing. Ambition is a huge factor, as is luck, hard work, all kinds of things. The inflated importance of IQ test scores annoys the hell out of me, though, and I think they’re… yeah. Over-rated. Little understood.
I wrote elsewhere:
Which confirms to me my prejudice that IQ-ology is not science, it is a merely a social process that has the trappings of science (professors, published papers, laboratories, tests, etc.) but is really seeking to find an objective basis for racism. It should not take 27 years for IQ-ologists to abandon erroneous theories.
Culture is learned, and IMO, an important component is learning how to learn. Based on very limited experience, I’d think this “learning how to learn” is what is involved in the different IQ outcomes.
and
The other ideological use of IQ is to promote the idea that the US is a meritocratic society. Which is patently wrong as well. Another one, which we have seen in recent times, is to promote the idea that feminism has reached its limits, women cannot really improve their performance in math and science.
One should be suspicious that IQ “science” always, without fail, historically and in the present day, always confirms the prevailing power structure in its position.
The IQ nonsense are as great illusions, and infinitely more damaging that “In 2002, Saddam has weapons of mass destruction”, “Iraq was involved in 9/11″, and so on. There can be no rationalization that these ideas are a little bit true and so acting on them is a little bit legitimate.
The biggest shame of Western academia is that Jensen, Rushton, Murray, Herrnstein, etc., are able to rise within that system, and no amount of exposure of the falsity of their ideas results in anything; even in 2007, their ideas are discussed as if legitimate.
It is as though we have a permanent school of “deny climate science”.
It also boggles my mind that after insisting that people who do not follow taxonomic categorization are less intelligent (or even less modern), we then have endless workshops for manager-types to loosen up their thinking and to think “with their right brain”, to shake themselves out of the orthodox categories of thinking.
Matthew, didn’t mean to sound like I was attacking you. Your wife’s phrasing just brought up some bad memories, and I thought I should subject the internets to them
I just wrote an article on my blog concerning urban education and race. The main point is that regardless of whatever statistical data you want to assign to intellect, the numbers really have no intrinsic value. Even if there were some genetic difference would it translate only to suggest a limit to the possibility of a black student from coming up with a theory to support the development of cold fusion or some other eccentric intellectual pursuit? If so who cares? The real point is all of our children possess the intellectual capacity to master the learning objectives of any curriculum presented in primary, secondary, or post high school education. So the focus needs to be on our educators and how the deliver educational content in school rather that trying to deflect the responsibility to a theoretical quantification of an abstract concept like “intellect”
sorry for the rant!
By standard IQ measures, I was a genius in third grade.
Since then . . . not so much.
Sigh.
I’m not hugely familiar with this area of research, but (on sort of a tangent) I wonder we tend to ignore motivation far too much when we consider how “smart” someone is(apart from how successful they’ll be in life, which could be different).
One of my colleagues at work used to work with disabled people who did not have normal language capacity. One way of teaching them to communicate was to get them to associate a real object with a symbol of that object, and that using the symbol of that object would get them the object. You didn’t know until you tried the therapy how well they’d respond or what kind of language facilities they had.
The problem came mostly with those who didn’t want anything, and they were very hard to teach, sometimes impossible. I think this is probably similar to how it is for the rest of us, if we really cared about something (and had the time/money etc) we’d do it a lot and become good at it. For some people, their interests intersect with what IQ/SAT tests measure, for others that’s not the case. And that’s without all the social factors affecting what we can be interested in.
Leandra: That’s why I mentioned ambition. My wife is a whole lot more ambitious than me, which is why she was (in some ways) further ahead when we met. In part that’s why we work out as a couple; she drags me forward (not through her efforts directly, I just feel guilty if I’m not helping us as a family move forward).
I’m a reasonably smart guy and perfectly capable of hard work, but without her around I wouldn’t be working as hard as I am. My abilities aren’t worth a lot without the drive to use them.
I agree with those saying ambition is really the key. Hard work? You can drift through life working hard, but not getting anywhere because you don’t put yourself forward. Intelligence? There’s a reason there’s a joke that a Philosophy Major’s most frequently asked question after graduation is “Do you want fries with that?”
Without the desire and ability to set a goal and stick to it, it’s hard to get anywhere at all. AND there’s very little done to help kids, even the ones with high potential, to understand and follow up on goal-setting. I’m 38 and I still have troubles finding ambition.
No time yet to read prior comments; just my first impressions from the post itself:
1) Lord Saletan should certainly go “soak his head” in something.
2) I was one of those dudes who test on the standardized tests real real well, both the Stanford-Binet (as it existed in the 1970s anyway) and later on SATs and the like. Despite the nightmare that studying for the GREs in the late 1990s was, I pretty well aced that thing too.
People still tell me I present as a “smart” person. As a child I identified with Charlie Brown; as Lucy once asked him, after a several-panel discourse on the theory and practice of kite-flying in which they were following the downed kite string: “You certainly do know a lot about kites, Charlie Brown…” He says “Well, yes, I suppose I can say that I do.” “Then why is your kite down the sewer?”
As someone who was able to significantly raise my math SATs, enough to make a big difference in my prospects for admission to Caltech, just by studying the test (and not really changing my level of understanding or proficiency in math at all); as someone who remembers how damned irrelevant a lot of the questions on the Stanford-Binet are to any sort of mental processesing and how entirely dependent they are to one’s having a certained stereotyped knowledge base (Can everyone here name the capital of Greece? I trust most of us can–but of what practical value is that to those of us not involved in diplomatic or NATO operations? Why should a bright person be assumed to know that, in the modern world?)–I have been calling bullshit on these tests for decades now.
Amanda, I think it lends far too much credence to the claims of the testers to be measuring something “innate” to credit actually rising cognitive ability for the “Flynn Effect.” If video games and the like are actually excercising and stimulating some of our abilities, well and good, though it seems just as likely to me that at least some of the curmudgeonly charges that mass media actually turn one’s brain to cottage cheese are also well-founded. I suspect that overall it’s a wash.
But what is definitely changing in the mass-media world is general access to information, and especially exposure to the conventional mentalities that these tests really measure. I suspect part of the general improvement is because people get hip to the tests’ agendas and are getting more and more training in general in how to beat tests in general. And the rest is mostly due to the buzzwords, catchphrases, and shibboleths being in more and more general circulation. Whether one buys the mentality behind them or not, it is at least possible to fake it if one knows what one is supposed to think.
All of which merely underscores the basic point that the claims of IQ testers to have data about innate racial and gender differences in ability are so much tripe and always have been.
Athens
Well, sure, someone named Antigone would know THAT!
you know, Joe- I noticed that as well. I’m sure many people did. They just aren’t dicks about it.
oh, and you, too, Righteous Bubba.
Correcting people is a pet peeve of mine.
dr. ngo, Phil Graves and beth- nailed it!
and, of course, Static Age. I didn’t want to sound biased, but he did. if what he said sounds confusing, I’d encourage people to read his comment again.
I think this is probably similar to how it is for the rest of us, if we really cared about something (and had the time/money etc) we’d do it a lot and become good at it.
I got into an argument with someone else here at Pandagon (I’m sure they remember who they are, but I don’t, sorry) when we were talking about “innate” abilities like art and music, and I do have a slightly more nuanced view than was coming across. Basically, in theory every person could learn to draw really well, but not a lot of people enjoy it enough to spend the huge amounts of time that it takes to learn to draw really well. Same with music — when I say that someone is more “naturally gifted,” that means that it’s someone for whom (a) the initial parts come fairly easily to them AND (b) it’s interesting enough to them that they persist even when the run into the parts that aren’t so easy.
By that measure, it’s turning out that I’m a “naturally” gifted knitter after finally learning how to do it less than a year ago. It’s not that I picked up the needles and yarn and magically made a sweater on my first try, it’s that I find it interesting enough that I really work at it and am always seeking out new challenges. And yet I know people who’ve been knitting longer than I have who have never moved beyond making garter stitch scarves, because it just doesn’t interest them as much as it does me.
Mnemosyne,
I caught that nuance the last time, and I agree with you both times. I’m sure the idea fits into this conversation somehow - raising the question of whether there is something innate (and/or socially conditioned into some individuals but not others, even within a family) that makes that passion or interest something they pursue rather than others.
I had a fascinating conversation with someone once that was along the same lines. Sure, doing a standing backflip was “easy for him” in discussion an Olympic gymnast, and yes, if he and I were standing next to each other and you told us both to do it, it WOULD be “easy for him” and impossible for me, but that leaves out the years of practice that made responding in the moment possible.
Not sure how that fits with the IQ question, but I think it fits into the neighborhood somewhere.