Smartypants
As
we all know perfectly well, only the subhuman scum can believe that
different people have a different value, and only stupid people can
believe that intelligence differences are important. Every day on the
blogosphere, people routinely insult each other for their lower
intelligence and then go on to deny that intelligence even exists. Even
so, perhaps I shall next present a few thoughts about this perplexing
topic. After all, when intelligent people act dumb on purpose, you know
that you are in presence of powerful forces.
After the book "The Bell Curve" came out, a torrent of angry criticism was hurled against it, since this book dared to claim that intelligence is a good thing and it predicts enormously well how somebody is going to do in life. Leftists, of course, snarled how they know some smart guy who never achieved anything and some average guy who is a really nice and good person, so intelligence is meaningless and therefore all claims in the book must be false. Curiously enough, no such criticism was ever heaved against the book "Emotional Intelligence", which made even worse claims about how some mental property predicts enormously well how somebody is going to do in life. But since leftists know that women and minorities are more "emotional", they happily accept this book since they think it proves that leftists are superior.
I have read many of these leftist criticisms of "The Bell Curve", and except for a few individual exceptions they just failed to impress me. As is typical to leftists, these criticisms mainly concentrated how bad the claims of the book made the leftist feel, and how the leftist vanguard has the sacred duty not to let these incorrect ideas spread, because otherwise the next thing you know is smoke coming out of the concentration camp. Intelligence and IQ can't possibly exist and be meaningful, because it would mean that people are different. And as we all know, we must always celebrate diversity as an abstract concept, but you can never actually say that people and groups differ in some important respects.
However, this torrent of criticism paradoxically turned out to be the best evidence for the claims presented in the book, which even boldly went on to predict what kind of people would oppose its message. It is truly hilarious how all these criticisms against "The Bell Curve" turn against themselves in the meta-level, in reality only proving what they aimed to disprove! How come? Well, here is my simple challenge: show me even one serious criticism against IQ, intelligence or "The Bell Curve" that is written by someone whose IQ is less than 85.
Since probably hundreds of articles that are critical of intelligence and "The Bell Curve" have been written and published in peer-reviewed academic journals, and they can't all be sokalian parodies of political correctness and pomo leftism, statistics alone dictate that there ought to be dozens of criticisms out there satisfying this condition. But of course there are none: one would be hard-pressed to even find a person whose IQ is under 85 and who has even heard about the book "The Bell Curve" and knows that there is some kind of controversy surrounding it. Even if the IQ upper limit was raised to 100, I doubt that anyone could find even one example. Raise it to 115, and you might start finding some.
So obviously IQ is not "meaningless", since at least it predicts whether someone has the ability to become a good leftist and claim that IQ is meaningless!
Another way to make the same point would be to measure if the academic IQ deniers work in departments whose IQ distribution in any way resembles the IQ distribution of the population as whole. If it doesn't (and of course it doesn't, not even in the place where the king IQ-denier himself Stephen Jay Gould worked), take away their funding until they stop unfairly discriminating based on intelligence, and give it back only after half of the people working and studying there have IQ less than 100.
Yet another much harder way to make the same point was if someone invented a pill that decreases IQ by 10 points. (I believe there was some form of industrial pollution that actually had this effect: at least some leftists told me so.) Since leftists claim that IQ is meaningless and measures only cultural programming and is oppressive, they should be happy to publicly take such a pill. Some of them might even be dumb enough to do this: in fact, I remember how one leftist once explained me that he wouldn't care at all if his IQ fell to 50, since all people that he knows whose IQ is 50 are really nice and happy and good people.
I actually once wondered what world would be like if the human race had evolved so that the average IQ was 50 (using the scale that we use today), and the human brain structure was such a dead end that it couldn't get any higher from this. After all, evolution is not teleological and does not magically aim for higher intelligence, since intelligence is useful for survival and reproductive success only in certain special circumstances. I believe that the massively successful plant kingdom proves me correct here every day. And of course, at some point of human evolution there necessarily must have been a phase where the average IQ was 50, with some one-in-a-billion supergenius having an IQ of 100.
Instead of being a pastoral leftist utopia where people live in harmony with nature and each other without even a whiff of sexism, racism, ableism, sizism or any other sins of the white man, so that everybody is smiling and happy all the time just like the mental defectives that we occasionally see going around today, I really can't see how such people possibly could have a society more complex than a chimpanzee troop. Their spoken language would consist of simple grunts, and they certainly would not have a written language of any kind. All thoughts would be fleeting, no ideas would stick, nothing would ever improve. There would be no housing or technology of any kind more complex than a rock or a club. Life would be cruel and short.
Some might now object that in our modern world, there are people who have an IQ of 50 and they do learn to speak and avoid soiling themselves. True, but that is because they have had the support of the unimaginably complex society that teaches these things to them. They would not be able to come up with these things on their own. The happy moronic smile of a happy moron would be quickly wiped off if he actually had to live in a society that consists only of morons.
We can take this thought experiment to the other direction and ask what my life would be like if I were transported to a society whose average IQ is 300. For leftists, such world would be a horrible dystopia, since they consider intelligence to be inherently evil, unless they get to proclaim that they are more intelligent and wise than others. Of course in reality, a world where the average IQ was 300 would be an unimaginably happy and rich place to live, a true paradise. And just like our society can take a moron and have him achieve much more than he could ever achieve in a society of morons, the society of super-intelligent people could take our normal person and turn him into something that we would consider a superhuman.
In our present world, IQ strongly correlates with our subjective estimates of how "smart" other people are. When some people are not that smart, as evidenced by their behaviour, interests and choices, they often turn out to "bad at taking standardized tests", and when people are smart, they surprisingly often tend to do well in standardized tests. People on welfare and in prisons have lower IQ's than people in boardrooms and laboratories, exceptions to this rule being so rare they do not matter. If somebody has an IQ that is 50 points lower than mine, I know that I am never going to be impressed by that person's smarts, and if it is 75 points lower, I know that I can never have anything to even talk about with that person, since he cannot even function in the real world because of his many life-threateningly incorrect beliefs of how reality works.
After the book "The Bell Curve" came out, a torrent of angry criticism was hurled against it, since this book dared to claim that intelligence is a good thing and it predicts enormously well how somebody is going to do in life. Leftists, of course, snarled how they know some smart guy who never achieved anything and some average guy who is a really nice and good person, so intelligence is meaningless and therefore all claims in the book must be false. Curiously enough, no such criticism was ever heaved against the book "Emotional Intelligence", which made even worse claims about how some mental property predicts enormously well how somebody is going to do in life. But since leftists know that women and minorities are more "emotional", they happily accept this book since they think it proves that leftists are superior.
I have read many of these leftist criticisms of "The Bell Curve", and except for a few individual exceptions they just failed to impress me. As is typical to leftists, these criticisms mainly concentrated how bad the claims of the book made the leftist feel, and how the leftist vanguard has the sacred duty not to let these incorrect ideas spread, because otherwise the next thing you know is smoke coming out of the concentration camp. Intelligence and IQ can't possibly exist and be meaningful, because it would mean that people are different. And as we all know, we must always celebrate diversity as an abstract concept, but you can never actually say that people and groups differ in some important respects.
However, this torrent of criticism paradoxically turned out to be the best evidence for the claims presented in the book, which even boldly went on to predict what kind of people would oppose its message. It is truly hilarious how all these criticisms against "The Bell Curve" turn against themselves in the meta-level, in reality only proving what they aimed to disprove! How come? Well, here is my simple challenge: show me even one serious criticism against IQ, intelligence or "The Bell Curve" that is written by someone whose IQ is less than 85.
Since probably hundreds of articles that are critical of intelligence and "The Bell Curve" have been written and published in peer-reviewed academic journals, and they can't all be sokalian parodies of political correctness and pomo leftism, statistics alone dictate that there ought to be dozens of criticisms out there satisfying this condition. But of course there are none: one would be hard-pressed to even find a person whose IQ is under 85 and who has even heard about the book "The Bell Curve" and knows that there is some kind of controversy surrounding it. Even if the IQ upper limit was raised to 100, I doubt that anyone could find even one example. Raise it to 115, and you might start finding some.
So obviously IQ is not "meaningless", since at least it predicts whether someone has the ability to become a good leftist and claim that IQ is meaningless!
Another way to make the same point would be to measure if the academic IQ deniers work in departments whose IQ distribution in any way resembles the IQ distribution of the population as whole. If it doesn't (and of course it doesn't, not even in the place where the king IQ-denier himself Stephen Jay Gould worked), take away their funding until they stop unfairly discriminating based on intelligence, and give it back only after half of the people working and studying there have IQ less than 100.
Yet another much harder way to make the same point was if someone invented a pill that decreases IQ by 10 points. (I believe there was some form of industrial pollution that actually had this effect: at least some leftists told me so.) Since leftists claim that IQ is meaningless and measures only cultural programming and is oppressive, they should be happy to publicly take such a pill. Some of them might even be dumb enough to do this: in fact, I remember how one leftist once explained me that he wouldn't care at all if his IQ fell to 50, since all people that he knows whose IQ is 50 are really nice and happy and good people.
I actually once wondered what world would be like if the human race had evolved so that the average IQ was 50 (using the scale that we use today), and the human brain structure was such a dead end that it couldn't get any higher from this. After all, evolution is not teleological and does not magically aim for higher intelligence, since intelligence is useful for survival and reproductive success only in certain special circumstances. I believe that the massively successful plant kingdom proves me correct here every day. And of course, at some point of human evolution there necessarily must have been a phase where the average IQ was 50, with some one-in-a-billion supergenius having an IQ of 100.
Instead of being a pastoral leftist utopia where people live in harmony with nature and each other without even a whiff of sexism, racism, ableism, sizism or any other sins of the white man, so that everybody is smiling and happy all the time just like the mental defectives that we occasionally see going around today, I really can't see how such people possibly could have a society more complex than a chimpanzee troop. Their spoken language would consist of simple grunts, and they certainly would not have a written language of any kind. All thoughts would be fleeting, no ideas would stick, nothing would ever improve. There would be no housing or technology of any kind more complex than a rock or a club. Life would be cruel and short.
Some might now object that in our modern world, there are people who have an IQ of 50 and they do learn to speak and avoid soiling themselves. True, but that is because they have had the support of the unimaginably complex society that teaches these things to them. They would not be able to come up with these things on their own. The happy moronic smile of a happy moron would be quickly wiped off if he actually had to live in a society that consists only of morons.
We can take this thought experiment to the other direction and ask what my life would be like if I were transported to a society whose average IQ is 300. For leftists, such world would be a horrible dystopia, since they consider intelligence to be inherently evil, unless they get to proclaim that they are more intelligent and wise than others. Of course in reality, a world where the average IQ was 300 would be an unimaginably happy and rich place to live, a true paradise. And just like our society can take a moron and have him achieve much more than he could ever achieve in a society of morons, the society of super-intelligent people could take our normal person and turn him into something that we would consider a superhuman.
In our present world, IQ strongly correlates with our subjective estimates of how "smart" other people are. When some people are not that smart, as evidenced by their behaviour, interests and choices, they often turn out to "bad at taking standardized tests", and when people are smart, they surprisingly often tend to do well in standardized tests. People on welfare and in prisons have lower IQ's than people in boardrooms and laboratories, exceptions to this rule being so rare they do not matter. If somebody has an IQ that is 50 points lower than mine, I know that I am never going to be impressed by that person's smarts, and if it is 75 points lower, I know that I can never have anything to even talk about with that person, since he cannot even function in the real world because of his many life-threateningly incorrect beliefs of how reality works.
Can you list those few leftist criticisms that you found worthy?
Posted by beenaround | 12:33 PM
They were so long ago that I have already forgotten them.
Posted by Ilkka | 12:44 PM
I believe there was some form of industrial pollution that actually had this effect
Lead.
Posted by Tiedemies | 2:06 PM
Lead.
Indeed, but I do believe there was a more recent example in America, so that the corporation had to pay compensation to families whose children had lost some IQ points because of their pollution.
Funny thing, I bet that no leftist complained at that point that IQ tests don't really measure anything and are culturally biased.
Posted by Ilkka | 4:46 PM
I think your average IQ 50 comments are not correct. Assuming the same standard deviation (15) in an IQ 50 world, IQ's of 100+ would be as common as IQ's of 150+ in our world. These are rare (1/2330) but not one-in-a-billion rare. Also the 50 could not be any sort of absolute limit since with that much variation a few hundred generations of selective breeding would push the average up substantially (just as 100 is not any sort of absolute limit for us).
As for the comparison with chimps, IQ 50 is a lot smarter than the average chimp so one would expect more complex societies. Note the average IQ of African Bushmen has been reported to be 54.
On the other hand a 100 point IQ delta above the average is an one in 76 billion chance which means we have no idea what an average IQ 200 (much less 300) society would look like and that it is doubtful that average IQ 300 could be achieved through selective breeding while staying human.
Posted by James B. Shearer | 11:58 PM
it is doubtful that average IQ 300 could be achieved through selective breeding while staying human.
Why not? Marilyn Vos Savant seems to be a well-adjusted adult. Her IQ measured in adulthood is estimated to be 5.4 standard deviations above the mean, corresponding to a rarity of one in 30 million.
I see no reason to suspect her intelligence has to be close to any kind of hard upper limit for an unaugmented human. I see no reason why the brain could not be optimized further by natural selection to produce a human, say, twice as efficient at whatever Marilyn Vos Savant is good at.
Differences in the order of magnitude in intelligence, however, are a different story. The computational capacity of the unaugmented human brain will be hopelessly outclassed by computers by the end of the century, should the cheapening of computational resources continue at the present rate. Ilkka has stated in the past that he does not believe artificial intelligence will ever match human intelligence. I disagree. At the very least, nanotechnology together with massive increases in computing power will open completely new avenues, enabling the reverse engineering of the brain. Even if classical AI research got stuck, the essence of how the brain produces intelligence will eventually be understood and replicated in other substrates.
Posted by Markku | 6:32 AM
A 200 point delta is a rarity of 1 in 10**40. It is one thing to use selective breeding to change the frequencies of genes already present in a population, it is another thing to produce changes requiring new genes. I suspect getting to 300 would require enough changes to produce a new species. Perhaps not, dogs have proven to be pretty adaptible but it is not clear humans would be as flexible.
Posted by James B. Shearer | 4:04 PM
wouldn't the average IQ be 100 regardless of how much we breed the human species.
Anatov
Posted by Anonymous | 9:52 AM