Why IQ Tests Don't Measure Intelligence

Consider a surgeon, a composer, an artist, and a physicist. Each is the world's best. Each therefore is highly intelligent as the Oxford English Dictionary defines intelligence:

the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills,

And as they are all highly intelligent, then, according to the psychologist's understanding of the term intelligence, they must all have really high IQ's. But do they? And even were it so, what would that mean?

The surgeon for all his astonishing deftness with a scalpel, and his knowledge of human anatomy, may be dumb as a brick at math, and not especially articulate either. The composer probably can't draw, and the artist may be unable to carry a tune. And the physicist,  may, like the great Paul Dirac,  be linguistically monosyllabic. So to say that these highly intelligent people are equally intelligent, even in the unlikely case that they scored equally on an IQ test, would be meaningless. They are not equally intelligent at all. They are each vastly more intelligent, than all the rest in their own particular way.

What's hard to understand about that? Everyone knows that that is how it is. Intelligence is not one thing, one faculty, one gift: it is an array of abilities, each person having intellectual strengths and weaknesses. How then did psychologists come to adopt the seemingly nonsensical idea that one number, the so-called Intelligence Quotient, could measure a persons intellectual worth?

The answer to that question is two-fold. First, IQ testing is like the busted science of phrenology — the reading of cranial bumps: it allows the practitioner to claim to know a person's intellectual standing in the world, and hence their future potential. It is this claimed ability to judge the worth of a man that places the psychologist in a position of authority.

The second reason that psychologists proclaim the power of IQ tests to measure mental horse-power is a piece of mathematical data manipulation invented by a Victorian eugenicist and statistician, Karl Pearson. The math in question is called factor analysis, and what factor analysis does is to examine the relationships among various characteristics of some class of things, for example, towns, countries, planets, acorns, or apples, thereby to discover whether there is a common factor or factors underlying these relationships.

An underlying factor, is exactly what the psychometricians — as the quantifiers of mental capacity call themselves — found when they examined variation from individual to individual in mental abilities. Those who score high on mathematical logic, tend to do relatively well on other tests such as verbal reasoning, or the interpretation of geometric puzzles. This factor, quantified by Pearson's factor analysis, they named "G" for "General Intelligence."

Having gone thus far, it was a small step to the conclusion that a person's mean score on the various components of a test of cognitive abilities was a valid way to estimate General Intelligence, hence the results of tests of multiple cognitive tasks was called an "Intelligence Quotient" or IQ, and the test itself, an IQ test.

This view led to a general belief that intelligence is just one thing, underlain by some as yet unidentified common factor, which determines a person's overall intellectual capacity.

But the correlations among cognitive capacities are low. In fact, mostly very low. See here, for example, where correlation coefficients (r values) among a large number of tests averaged less than 0.3. That means that, on average, less than 10% (r squared values) of the variation in any one ability is explained by variation in any other ability.

So yes, mental capacities share at least one common underlying factor, but its effect is weak, meaning that an individual's relative ability at one kind of mental activity will rarely be an accurate guide to their ability at another type of mental task.

It is the weakness of G, and the dependence upon it of their conception of IQ as a measure of intelligence, that psychologists have been loathe to admit. Thus has emerged a widely held idea that G as estimated from an IQ test score measures the essence of intelligence, just as chip speed measures the power of a computer central processing unit. What this is widely understood to imply is that intelligent mental activity depends on either a common mechanism, or a common feature of nerve cells that dictates the scope and power mental activity. However, the slightest awareness of brain anatomy and physiology would disabuse one of the notion that the brain has anything equivalent to a CPU, or even a uniform functional cellular capacity. On the contrary, different mental activities depend on different neural lobes, networks and ganglia, or on hierarchies of lobes, networks and ganglia.

Moreover, these components of the brain are far from identical in physiology and structure. There are many types of nerve cells or neurons and their supporting glial cells, as there are many different signalling methods within the brain, these involving at least eighty neurotransmitters. Despite the subjective unity of mind, the brain is thus a collection of many neurological machines, each with its own genetic determinants and its own history of past experience.

Thus, G or general intelligence, far from representing a fundamental component of intelligence, reflects only the dependence of the functioning of the entire brain on either other organs or some weakly influential characteristic of all brain tissue.

For example, brains without oxygen die within seconds, which means that brain function depends on lungs, heart and the vascular system. Moreover, without a continuous supply of glucose brains cannot function, which means a dependence on the liver and on the endocrine system that controls blood sugar. And without means to dispose of waste products, the brain is rapidly poisoned, meaning dependence on the kidneys. As to general properties of brain tissue, effective function depends on  many general features such as mitochondria, ribosomes, microtubules, and much else, all of which must function properly or the brain will function poorly or not at all.

Thus the mystery of G is revealed. It is a reflection, simply, of the brain's dependence on the rest of the body and on the cellular machinery common to all nerve cells. If all supporting systems and sub-cellular components are in the highest working condition, then the multiple components of the brain can all function at the peak capacity. But all defects or limitations in the performance of supporting systems and cellular organelles limit mental performance. Thus, beside variation in relative power of the various components of the brain there will be variation from brain to brain due the functionality of the brains support systems and components.

Thus just as a large town will tend to have more crime, traffic congestion and air pollution than a small town, so those with the best overall health and the best cellular machinery, will tend to have higher IQ's than those whose mental function dependent on defective support systems or cellular machinery. But still, among individuals, the big differences in intellect, are on specific tasks not on overall performance, or G, as assessed by a so-called IQ test.

So, yes, IQ-ism is largely bunk and the sooner we're rid of it the sooner will psychologists be able to study intelligence more intelligently.

What Is Intelligence?

Over at the Unz Review, an innocent named Sam complains that in writing about IQ, resident psychologist, James Thomson:

… does not address that/those portion(s) of the human brain that deal with intelligence.

But like the psychologists, Sam has the wrong model. The brain isn’t like a computer. There is no central processing unit that determines computing power, FLOPS or IQ.

The brain is the product of evolution. It is built on the Rube Goldberg principle. A bunch of junk put together and then endlessly tested in the struggle for existence, endlessly modified by mutation, and endlessly retested.

The end product of this evolutionary process does all kinds of amazing things in amazing ways, but not in the neat tidy ways a good engineer would design things to work, but maybe completely crazy ways, but ways that work nevertheless — somehow, just…

The result is that intelligence is not one thing. It is not the product of one bit of brain or one brain module. It is the product of numerous neurological modules and networks, each doing its own thing, each dependent on its own particular structure and biochemistry, each subject in its development to its own set of controlling genes. Did you know that, in the male brain, there’s even a specialized knot of neurons that seems to have no function except to light up at a girl’s smile? Cool.

That’s why IQ testing is nonsense. It’s possible to be both a genius and an idiot — in different areas of mental activity: an obvious fact, but one that seems rarely to have crossed the mind of a psychologist.

But the IQ-ist's notion of intelligence is much wronger than would result merely from the mistaken notion that intelligence is a single thing embodied in a single bit of the brain, equally involved in the composition of a symphony, the formulation of a mathematical theorem, or the deftness of the artist's or surgeon's hand, and hence to be viewed as a single variable defined by one number, or intelligence quotient.

The IQ-ist compounds the error of assuming that the brain has a central processing unit that determines the intelligence of every thought or action, by making the further error of assuming that intelligence is strongly genetically determined. This idea leads IQ-ists naturally to a toxic belief in the existence of immutable racial and class hierarchies in intelligence, an idea bolstered by test results that blatantly confuse cultural and environmental differences in cognitive development with racial and class differences in genetic endowment for intelligence.

It is true that intelligence has a genetic basis, as does every other organismal trait. But the influence of genetics is always modified by environment. Raise a child in an iron cage without human contact, as was the fate of the Russian Tsar, Ivan VI (1740-1764), crowned at the age of two months but deposed a year later and then held in solitary confinement until his murder 23 years later, and it will severely stunt the mind, as was the case with poor Ivan. From that we can deduce that  intelligence is not fixed, but is something that grows or withers in response to experience and use.

That, in turn, means that intelligence is not fixed genetically or socially. It develops over time, increasing or decreasing according to circumstances. Hence, the idle Harvard undergraduate with a perfect SAT score may be outpaced intellectually by the committed student of lesser SAT-endorsed intelligence who strives for mastery whether in academia, socially or in some other sphere of endeavor.  

Accompanying growth or atrophy of intellectual skills occur radical changes in brain structure. During infancy,  hundreds of thousands of the brain's synaptic connections are eliminated every second over a period of many months. Later, during adolescence, much of the tissue of the cerebral cortex, the supposed seat of intelligence, is eliminated. Such developmental processes undermine the idea, common among IQ-ists, that intelligence is a function of brain mass. The implication, rather, is that, depending on mental effort and experience, intelligence grows or fails to grow whatever the individuals genetic endowment. 

And that is obvious when you come to think of it. Give a plumber a plumbing problem and he'll likely figure it out faster than you could, even if you've got a high IQ and understand hydraulics. Same in any field: hard work and experience increases performance, including problem-solving skill, and that equals increased intelligence. 

IQ-ism: the Third Phase in the Development of Psychology as a Pathological Discipline

One of the things I have to tell you about IQ research is this: if you don't buy IQ research, you might as well throw away all the rest of psychology. And the reason for that is that the psychologists who developed "intelligence testing" were among the early psychologists that instantiated the statistical techniques that all psychologists use to verify and test all of their hypotheses. So you end up throwing the baby out with the bath water.

And the IQ people have defined intelligence in a more stringent and accurate way that we have been abnle to define almost any other psychological construct. So if you toss out the one that is most well defined, then you're kind of stuck with the problem [of] what are you going to do with all the other ones that you have left over.... whose predictive validity is much less.
Jordan B. Peterson

In a comment thread at the Unz Review, among the most thoughtful and well-informed participants remarked on  what they held to be the importance of IQ research. The claim prompted me to the following remarks dismissing the entire business of what may be called IQ-ism as, at best, a scholastic blunder of epic proportions, and at worst, a grotesque fraud:

Speaking of "reasons to support IQ research," I would say that there are none. IQ-ism is just a phase in the development of psychology as a pathological intellectual discipline. IQ-ism is the latest in a series of attempts to comprehend the vast complexity of the operation of the brain by alchemically simplistic means.

First, in the history of this crackpot discipline was psychoanalysis, aptly described by Peter Medowar as:

... like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth century thought.

Then there was Behaviorism, which sought to explain human behavior and personality in their entirety solely in terms of the acquisition of operant conditioned reflexes. That theory crashed and burned as cybernetics confirmed what Behaviorists had denied, namely, that humans are conscious beings and that what consciousness tells of our feelings and intentions is a valid source of information.

And now we have IQism, which claims to be able to quantify a person's intelligence on a unidimensional scale by means of a simple paper and pencil test involving a few logical puzzles plus, depending on the test of choice, miscellaneous other items.

How do the IQ-ists sell this idea? Primarily by the artful use of language. Their little test, they call an "intelligence test," thereby establishing in the minds of the masses the unquestioned assumption that intelligence is what the IQ-ist's test measures. In fact, however, as a Google search will confirm, intelligence is the ability to acquire and to use information, whereas an IQ test measures neither except in an incredibly limited domain and with a test the results of which are subject to massive circumstantial bias.

But the IQ-ist scam has worked so well for so long that psychology has yet to even broach the real scientific questions that must underlie the measurement of  intelligence: namely, how to measure the capacity for information acquisition; and how to measure skill, effectiveness, Darwinian fitness, or whatever, in the use of information.

When one considers the measurement of intelligence in those terms, one is immediately confronted with the complexity of reality, and in particular, the fact that information is acquired via multiple channels, auditory, olfactory, visual, proprioceptive, etc. with data from each channel processed by a specialized brain module, or probably in most if not all cases, by multiple specialized brain modules.

So now if we take account of the fact that there are hundreds if not thousands of structural genes that impact the development and characteristics of those sensory channels and processing modules, we see that the capacity for the acquisition of information is not dependent on a single characteristic of the brain but on a large collection of independent variables. This fact is well known to common sense. People vary hugely in powers of memory and, moreover, that variation is type specific. Mozart transcribed the entire Allegri miserere after a single hearing, Stephen Wiltshire sketched the whole of Red Square from memory after a brief visit. But, so far as we know, Mozart had no special gift of visual memory, and Stephen Wiltshire is no musical genius. Others do more or less brilliantly remembering faces, voices, poetry, the numbers of pi, conversational tittle tattle, etc., but as far as is known, no one able to remember the first ten thousand places of pi, has composed  a decent symphony or a popular opera.

So in only the matter of data acquisition, we see that intelligence is multiple not unitary. But much more complex to analyse than the capacity for information acquisition is the capacity for the use if information. In fact, perhaps, that is an impossibly difficult challenge. But it is a challenge that must be faced by anyone who claims to measure intelligence in a scientific and quantitative way.

As for the innateness of intelligence, something about which IQ-ists are most emphatic, it is axiomatic that the potentiality is entirely innate. Moreover, we know that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of genes that direct brain development, plus probably many thousands of hereditary controlling elements, most yet to be identified, that shape the development of the brain and hence intelligence.

But the function of the brain is to record both sensory inputs, i.e., experience, and the internal workings of the brain, i.e., the development of our ideas, both of which shape the way we use information. So it is beyond question that environmental factors, through their effect on the contents of mind, have a huge impact on the degree to which the innate intellectual potential is expressed. Thus focusing on the genetic basis of intelligence to the exclusion of environmental factors, such as education and culture, cannot result in a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon.

What do IQ Tests Test?

If you think IQ tests test intelligence, you might ask yourself: How do you know?

What is intelligence?

Give us your definition.

Or by intelligence do you just mean IQ, in which case your understanding of intelligence is tautological: intelligence is performance on an IQ test, which is measured by performance on an IQ test.

IQ and wealth at low scale (outside the tail).
Mostly Noise and no strikingly visible effect
above $40K, but huge noise. Psychologists
responding to this piece do not realize that
statistics is about not interpreting noise.
From Zagorsky (2007) via Nassim Taleb.

Fact is, the IQ testers never have defined intelligence. Instead, they came up with a set of puzzlers and declared your score on this test is the measure of your intelligence.

Trouble is, the IQ-ists have never attempted to show how IQ test results relate to what is understood by the term intelligence as manifest by, say, the creative work of a poet, a painter, a composer, an architect, or a scientist, or the more mundane endeavors of a politician, a policeman, a prostitute or a peddler of illicit drugs. Their strongest claim is that IQ tests predict "career success", except as anyone who looks into the matter will find, the correlation is trivial.

The best that IQ tests can do is provide an indication of academic aptitude, but even in that case they don't work well, not even as well as traditional academic exams, which is why Harvard and other such places use a SAT test with a mathematical component and a verbal component, the results of which are by no means closely correlated

Better still, obviously, would be to break things down further, e.g., SAT Physics, SAT Biology, SAT English, SAT music, etc. Except that would be giving up, since it would be an acknowledgement that the whole idea of intelligence as unitary feature of mind measurable on a single linear scale is nonsense.

Related:
Nassim Taleb: The psychologists' construct, general intelligence, is based on a statistical error.

Are You a Mispronunciation Moron?

Over at the Unz Review, a strange concoction of anti-Semitism, Hitler apologetics, racism and IQ-ist fake science, the latest in the promotion of IQ bollocks is the claim that the way you pronounce a few dozen English words pretty well defines you intellectually.

The idea seems more bonkers than most of what Ron Unz publishes since, in Britain at least, pronunciation is chiefly a matter of social class and regional affiliation.

Thus, if you are very high class indeed, you will quite likely pronounce girl as gel.

If you're a graduate of Oxford University, you will pronounce Oxford as Awksfud, off as awf, and Magdalen College as Maudlin College (It's as though they're constantly sucking in their cheeks.).

 If you are from Glasgow, you may pronounce football, as fitbah.

If you are from the English Midlands, you will pronounce the city of Leicester, Lester, and the town of Bicester, Bister.

If you are from one of the more prosperous parts of London, you will pronounce Cardigan Gardens as Caduggan Gardens.

And if you are from certain parts of East London, you will pronounce Heathrow Airport as Eefro Airpor!.

And if your friend is named Mainwaring, he most likely pronounces it Mannering, whereas, if his name is Meagher he probably introduces himself as Marr. However, there can be some flexibility in the pronunciation of names. Thus, when the First World War era politician and crook, Horatio Bottomly, called upon Lord Cholmondley, the conversation with the butler who answered the door went as follows:

Bottomly: My name's Bottomly, I've come to see Lord Chol-mond-ly
Butler: Do you mean Lord Chumley
Bottomly: Yes, tell Lord Chumley it's Mr. Bumley.

But I suppose there is something to be said forUnz promoting this IQ-ist this nonsense. It helps expose the absurdity of the idea that non-entities with a bachelor's degree in Psych. are qualified to assess the intelligence of their mental superiors from Isaac Newton and J.S. Bach to Alan Turing and Richard Feynman: a claim that seems particularly absurd, as these self-proclaimed experts haven't even a decent theory of what intelligence is. All they have, beside the word pronunciation test and other wacky schemes to pigeon-hole you, are a few simple tests of reasoning, verbal, numerical, and diagrammatic, results of which naturally enough correlate moderately well with academic performance, although not quite as well, according to IQ specialist Richard Lynn, as traditional subject-based exams. And, happily for those like Winston Churchill, Prime Minister, victorious war leader, Nobel Laureate in Literature, who languished at the bottom of the class during his school days, neither IQ tests nor exams, let alone pronunciation predict future academic achievement, income, or career success to any useful degree. What such tests may show, is if you are a complete moron, which was the sole purpose of the original intelligence test, that devised by Alfred Binet.

China Is Overtaking America in the Technology Race. Does It Matter?

Over at the Unz Review, Fred Reed writes of the astonishing technological rise of China from primitive, war-torn disaster area of forty years ago to the World's largest and most dynamic economy. 

Typically, Unz Review commenters attribute the speed with which China has eclipsed the US in so many ways to: (a) bad American Jews, (b) superior Chinese IQ, and (c) China's racial homogeneity. 

But such explanations may be entirely misconceived. All presuppose that America must do better. But the question that needs to be asked is: do those with the power to make the necessary changes care?

If the American elites are for global governance, why would they be concerned about shit on the streets of San Francisco, American intellectual degeneration, or the progressive replacement of America’s founding European population by people of alien race, religion and culture?

Once a global system of control is established, the citizens of the US and every other country will no longer be of any account except insofar as they are needed as the technically expert Morlocks to serve a tiny population of New World Order Eloi. What we are witnessing, surely, is a prelude to the end of the age of the proletariat. Indeed, the end of the proletariat. 

What we have is a globalist elite that views the mass of mankind as non-productive, wealth-destroying, environment-damaging vermin to be eliminated either through state-managed reproductive failure — already underway throughout the developed parts of the world, or a more rapid means, for example through the release of a virus engineered for lethality and uncontrollable spread, the vaccine against which will be available only to certain persons.

Fixing the Mental Decline of the Western Nations

The IQ's of the people of the Western nations are falling, and have been for some time. Why exactly that is so remains to be determined. It is a fact, however, that those of low income and thus, in general, of lower intelligence, have more children than those of high income, which suggests that dysgenic breeding has played an important role in the dimming of the Western mind. If, therefore, a reversal in the trend in Western intelligence is to be achieved, many of the necessary means are apparent.

For example, every child should be DNA-typed at birth and matched to the father who will be required either to provide financial support for the child or make a choice between sterilization or debtors’ jail. To induce compliance, women failing to identify the father should be denied all welfare benefits.

Equally tough measures can be envisaged and would have to be employed to restrain the fertility of indigent women.

At the opposite end of the social spectrum, tax measures could be used to raise fertility. Massive child-related tax rebates on incomes of both parents — delivered in cash to the mother, would provide, in part, the financial security that women with the ability to pursue a successful career need if they are to devote more time to child raising, in a world of no-fault divorce.

Then, of course, there’s the moron culture, political correctness, and crap schools which damage the brains of everyone. How to fix those problems, goodness knows. But perhaps if we can first up the intelligence of the whole population by adopting an intelligent breeding strategy, we’ll be able to figure out a solution for the culture too.

Jordan Peterson's hysterical rant about people of low IQ

Jordan Peterson is the University of Toronto psychology professor rightly applauded for his opposition to Canada's recently enacted law "to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code" (Bill C16) in such ways as to compel, among other things, the use of self-selected pronouns demanded by transgender and other minorities from the mundane Zie and Zim to such loony extremes as His Majesty and It's Serene Highness.

 Less well known are Peterson's ideas about intelligence. In the short video below, Peterson reveals his thinking on this topic as he describes what he calls a "horrifying thing", namely what he says is the finding of US Army psychologists who were "motivated to find an accurate predictor [of the competence of recruits], so they used IQ."

One of the most terrifying statistics I ever came across [related to] the rationale of the US armed forces for not inducting anyone with an IQ of less than 83. Lets just take that apart, because it's a horrifying thing. After 100 years, essentially, of careful statistical anaylsis, the armed forces concluded that if you had an IQ of 83 or less there wasn't anything you could be trained to do in the military at any level of the organization that wasn't positively counterproductive. OK, so what, 83, OK, yeah, one in ten, one in ten, that's one in ten people, and what that really means, as far as I can tell, if you imagine that the military is approximately as complex as the broader society, then there is no place in our cognitively complex society for one in ten people. So what are we going to do about that? The answer is, no one knows. It's a vicious problem. At that point, the interviewer interjects: It's hard to train people to become creative, adaptive, problem solvers. To which Peterson responds: It's impossible. You can't do it. It doesn't work. Sorry, it doesn't work.

So here is expressed a basic mistake underlying the IQ-ist creed: it is to assume what has to be demonstrated. Specifically, that IQ test scores are an accurate predictor of competence in the military or, as Peterson clearly implies, every other sphere of human activity.

But cursory examination reveals that everything Peterson is saying is obvious bunk. If, for example, ten percent of the US population is totally incompetent, then one should expect a floor to the unemployment rate of no less than 10%, whereas in fact, US unemployment is currently under four percent, while the unemployment rate for African Americans with an average IQ of 85, or barely above Peterson's threshold for total uselessness, is under 6%.

As for the claim that there is no place in "our cognitively complex society for one in ten people," what exactly is he suggesting? The thinking of those prewar Hitler admirers in the Anglo-American eugenics movement come to mind. That Peterson concludes that the existence of so many incompetent people is a "vicious problem," certainly suggests a willingness to consider extreme solutions.

But in any case, what did he mean by "our cognitively complex society"? Can a society even have cognitive features? Perhaps what he meant was our cognitively demanding society. But is it really? Is it harder to stay alive in a world of 24/7 shopping, homeless shelters, and food stamps than in prehistoric times? And even for those productively employed, how many have cognitively challenging jobs — store clerks? coffee-shop employees? gas station attendants? hospital orderlies? Or the lower ranks of academia, say 90% of college professors?

And what about the Africans? With a mean IQ 84, half the Nigerian population is close to, or below Peterson's competence threshold, yet Nigeria's population is booming. So who's gonna win the evolutionary race: IQ 98 Americans with their below replacement fertility, or Nigerians doubling their population every 30 years? Then there's the Mozambiquans, with a mean IQ of 64 despite a significant Euro-African population component and, like Nigerians, a fertility two and half times the replacement rate.

And, conclusively refuting Peterson's claim that men with an IQ of less than 83 are useless to the US military for anything whatever is the fact that a large proportion of the troops, 354,000 of them, that were sent by the US to fight in Vietnam had IQ's of around 70. To learn more search the Web for Project 100, and MacNamara's Morons.

Posts From the Past: About Intelligence

2020:

Why IQ Tests Don't Measure Intelligence

2019:

The IQ-ist Creed

What Is Intelligence?

IQ-ism, a Fake Science Serving the Fascist New World Order

2018:

Jordan Peterson's hysterical rant about people of low IQ

2017:

Dumb Intelligence Tests: Or Why IQ Testers Need to Improve Their Understanding of Intelligence

IQ-ism, Or Psychologists Pedaling Bunk 

Nation-Destroying Stupidity In the Age of Universal Higher Education

2016:

The stupidity of IQ Testing

2015:

Down With IQ-ism

2013:

IQism, Racism and the Decay of the Great American University

IQism: Or Psychologists Pedaling Bunk

For the general public, the trouble with psychology is that it appropriates common concepts and redefines them in accordance with what it can measure.  The result is that the public is taken for a dangerous ride.

Thus, when University of Toronto psychology professor, Jordan Peterson, tells his students that if they "don't buy IQ research" they might as well throw out the rest of psychology because IQ research is the best thing psychology has to offer, he is (a) bullying his students, warning them, in effect, that there is no place for them in psychology unless they buckle under and accept the psychologist's definition of intelligence, and (b) redefining intelligence as what psychological research says it is.

The stupidity of IQ Testing

We all know that people differ mentally in a great many ways: some are reflective, others impulsive; some are sympathetic, others are sociopathic; some are creative, others seem never to have a witty or imaginative thought; some are sensible, others are flighty, fanatical, or prone to panic; and some are smart, whereas others cannot do a simple arithmetical calculation in their head or solve an elementary logical puzzle.

So how do we measure the human intellect? Among educators and psychologists, the most common procedure is to conduct a test of reasoning ability that yields a result called an intelligence quotient, or IQ.

Homo sapiens: the Ape With Nukes. Or Are We Really the Smartest Animals Alive?

In his excellent book Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? Frans de Waal tells of the chimp Ayumu who could memorize a random layout of the digits one through nine when shown them for a mere one fifth of a second, a task impossible for most if not all humans. So we aren't very smart at some of the tasks that might feature in an inter-specific IQ test.

It might be argued that visual memory is hardly a measure of smart. But animals do all sorts of other things that humans can do barely or not at all. Hunt moths by echolocation like a bat, for example. What's more, animals do pretty well at solving problems: the New Caledonian crow, for example, being better at solving a variety of puzzles than the average seven-year-old human.

But whatever one may say about the intelligence of animals, none have been smart enough to build the bomb, or describe the motion of the planets. So what makes us effectively smarter than the animals, even if our IQ is not nearly so much higher than that of other animals as most people think?

Evolution? Image source

The answer is language. That humans have somewhat larger brains, though not by that much, than other apes is an evolutionary development almost certainly related to, and driven by the benefits of, language acquisition.

As I have previously discussed, the gift of language grants humanity a power almost equal to that of telepathy. For direct mind-to-mind communication, there is no need for everyone to have a chip in their head as some have supposed. All that's required is the ability to think in symbols, and to express those symbols by verbal utterance or other means. Then, to create the same thought in your head as in mine, I have simply to think out loud. Thus, if I say, "elephants never forget," what you'll hear is "elephants never forget," which is my thought exactly.

Language thus creates a group mind. Experience of one becomes the knowledge of all. Knowledge passes between the generations, and beyond the bounds of the tribe. Your solution to the problem of extracting honey from the bees' nest without being stung can become my solution too, without my ever seeing you perform the trick. With that one step, a dim-witted ape became master of a wealth of knowledge far beyond the experience of a single individual or a single generation.

The verbal sharing of knowledge meant improved human survival, larger populations, the development of urban civilization, the complexity of which gave rise to a need for record keeping, which led naturally to the invention of writing.

Writing provided the means to the next big step in the evolution of human "smartness." It led to the transmission of experience and ideas over both time and space. Knowledge now passed easily down the generations and between tribes, cities and nations. With the accumulation and dispersal of literary, historical and technical writings, the intelligence of a person of any accomplishment ceased to be a product chiefly of that individual's own experience and cerebration, but of the civilization in which that individual was raised.

And now there is the Internet, which makes civilizational distinctions obsolete. All human knowledge is available to everyone, everywhere at virtually no cost. Even a poorly financed terrorist organization has the potential to deploy weapons of mass destruction. The world is at the threshold of an era during which all kinds of freaks and crazies will be able to wreak havoc upon the world. In Washington, Moscow or Beijing, one of them may already have their finger on the button marked Armageddon. All that power in the hands of an animal with a mind comparable to that of a crow and in some ways inferior to the brain of a chimp.

Related: 

Frans de Waal: Moral Behavior in Animals

Is a College Education Worth Less Than Nothing?

Writing in the Wall St. Journal, Richard Vedder and Christopher Denhard discuss the value of a university degree.

A key measure of the benefits of a degree is the college graduate’s earning potential—and on this score, their advantage over high-school graduates is deteriorating. Since 2006, the gap between what the median college graduate earned compared with the median high-school graduate has narrowed by $1,387 for men over 25 working full time, a 5% fall. Women in the same category have fared worse, losing 7% of their income advantage ($1,496).

A college degree’s declining value is even more pronounced for younger Americans. According to data collected by the College Board, for those in the 25-34 age range the differential between college graduate and high school graduate earnings fell 11% for men, to $18,303 from $20,623. The decline for women was an extraordinary 19.7%, to $14,868 from $18,525.

But a moment’s reflection will confirm that the method these authors use to value a college degree is absurd. For a start, a college degree requires a certain, if rather low, scholastic aptitude. By definition, all college graduates meet this requirement, but many of those without a college degree do not. Which means that, intellectually, the college graduates are not directly comparable with non-graduates.

Specifically, notwithstanding a leavening by people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the class of non-graduates will likely be less smart in ways both academic and otherwise than the class of graduates.

To put some crude if fairly meaningless numbers on that difference, graduates will mostly have an average or above average IQ, whereas the class of non-graduates will be intellectually more heterogeneous, but will include the majority of those of a less than average IQ.

And the effect of a college degree on earnings is confounded by factors other than the intellectual. University education is marker of social class, which is sought more keenly by those of middle and elite class than those of lower socio-economic rank. Moreover, socio-economic background is likely itself a powerful determinant of income, affecting aspiration, socialization, connections, and the quality of K to 12 education.

It seems, therefore, that we really have no useful information on the economic value of a college degree, although it seems that in the case of those well paid professions, medicine, the law, rocket science, etc., which require specific higher educational qualifications, college education pay dividends. But even this is not certain for at least a few of those individuals of high ability who are channeled through higher education into the professions might otherwise have ended up as billionaire real estate  developers or Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

But in any case those with degrees leading to professional careers account for only a small proportion of all college graduates. Thus, exclusion of those with professional qualifications would greatly diminish the apparent effect of a college degree on earnings.

And, if anything, for the majority of students, the impact on life-time earnings of a college degree may be negative. Not only does it cost four to six or more years potential earnings, but it imposes a substantial cost for tuition. Net of these factors, many of America’s 18-year-olds of average ability will earn more in their lifetime by launching their career at Starbucks or MacDonalds immediately, rather than incurring the cost of a degree in linguistics or womens’ studies.

But economics are not everything. To the true lovers of knowledge, the rewards of learning are great.

First posted at Canspeccy.wordpress.com January 10, 2014.

Why Western Elites Are Destroying Their Own People By Mass Immigration and Multiculturalism

The Saker has an article over at the Unz Review in which he argues that the ongoing racial and cultural genocide of the European peoples by mass immigration and multiculturalism is unstoppable, first, because of the decadence of the European people, and second, because of the malign manipulation of the Anglo-Zionist money power. 

This is a plausible but entirely mistaken analysis of what is happening to the European people both in Europe and in North America.

The elite are destroying their own people because the have no respect for them, or sense of kinship with them, and because it pays. This goes back to the beginning of the industrial revolution, when an urban proletariat, with no family connection to the landowning and capitalist class that dominated Parliament,* rapidly expanded and became a perpetual threat to the security of the state. Hence Disraeli’s recognition of the existence of “Two Nations” between whom, as a character in his novel "Sybil" (1945) remarked:

there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.

The Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, London in 1848
by William Edward Kilburn. Chartism was a movement for workers rights
and political representation.

In Disraeli’s time, free trade with input factor mobility, i.e., the import of cheap labor, or the export of capital and technology to cheap-labor areas whence products could be imported to the home market, was rarely if ever an option for the owners of capital, which meant that the industrial proletariat, though considered by the elite to be both dangerous and disgusting, had to be tolerated.

But input factor mobility is not only possible today, but the underlying reason for globalization. Thus there is a massive flow of cheap Third-World labor to the high-wage West, a flow of products of sweat-shop labor in the same direction, and a flow of capital and technology in the opposite direction, all of which negatively impacts wages in the West. Multiculturalism is the inevitable, and from the elite point of view, desirable consequence of the Third-World migrant flow. Desirable, that is, because a culturally divided proletariat is much less of a threat to the elite than a united nation.

But the Saker is right about two things. First that mass migration means the complete cultural and racial extinction of the European peoples. Second, that mass immigration will continue inexorable for the foreseeable future, the reason being that, for every worker in, say, England (pop. 53 million), there will certainly be many better qualified people (higher IQ, more energy, more ambition, little if any commitment to workers’ rights, etc.) in the Third World (pop. 5 billion plus), who are paid a fraction of what an English worker is paid. And among these potential migrants,  rickshaw drivers earning a dollar or two a day, for example, there will always be some ready, if they are permitted, to migrate to London to earn twenty or thirty dollars an hour driving a bus? And naturally, the elite welcomes such people. If the newcomers hassle the local girls, squeeze the natives out of decent housing, build mosques, etc., so what? What can the natives do about it? Nothing, as it now is clear. And if it means ever rising taxes to pay for new maternity hospitals, roads, schools, etc., that's very satisfactory: it keeps the construction industry prosperous and it allows a growing bureaucracy to soak up the educated middle class who might otherwise begin to think seriously about what is going on. And if the net result is that the native working class becomes an underclass — i.e., white trash despised by all and sundry, again, so what? There’s not a damn thing they can do about it: the supposedly left-wing workers parties being funded by the same plutocratic donors as the so-called conservative parties.

As for the Saker's assertion that the genocide of the Western nations is an Anglo-Zionist Money Power plot, that is just thoughtless conspiracy theory. One might as absurdly impute the Rothschild's or the Illuminati. Many members of the elite are Jews, for sure, but many are Anglos, and many more are Asians, Middle-Easterners or Africans. The issue is that genocide by immigration and multiculturalism pays. The ethnicity of the genocidal elite is irrelevant.

———
* An understanding of the change in relationship between the landowning classes in Britain, i.e., the elite, and the common folk that occurred with the industrial revolution was provided by Adam Smith in his treatise on economics. There he explained that, before the industrial revolution, there was close kinship between the upper and lower classes due to differential mortality between the rich and the poor. Overall, the population remained relatively constant, but because of high child mortality, the poor failed to fully reproduce themselves and the resulting population deficit was made up by the excess fertility of the rich. Thus, the rich were permanently downward mobile with two results. First, most of the rich had poor relatives for whom they had a personal sympathy, second the poor, many not so long descended from the rich, tended to adhere to the conservative values of their better off relatives. These factors made for a united nation. This unity fractured with the rise of the urban working class, which though living in seeming squalor and bestial ignorance, achieved well above replacement reproductive rates and which, as it swelled in number, adopted socialistic ideas. Thus, in purely hereditary terms, the industrial proletariat became much more distant from the elites than had been the rural poor of the pre-industrial era. In addition the political ambitions of the proletariat came to threaten the security of the elite, as they do to this day.

Related: 

CanSpeccy: The Ongoing Destruction of the European Nations Is No Mistake

Down With IQ-ism

An amazing story in the news today of a child born without a brain, who nevertheless, at the age of two, said "Mummy," which prompts the question: is a brain really necessary? Indeed the question "Is Your Brain Really Necessary?" was the title of an article published some decades ago in Science Magazine, in which was given an account of someone who, at birth, was afflicted with hydrocephaly, a condition in which there is excessive pressure of the cerebrospinal fluid in the ventricles of the brain, causing the cerebral hemispheres to be crushed and the cranium to be more or less enlarged. In this particular case, the cerebral hemispheres were crushed to a layer about one millimeter thick, the bulk of the cranial cavity being filled with fluid. But despite this apparent near total destruction of the higher brain centers, the individual was socially normal, had an IQ of 126, and a first class honors degree in mathematics.

Image source

But if there is reason to question the necessity of the supposed organ of intelligence, namely the brain, one has to wonder how scientific is the business of measuring intelligence, the manifestation of the supposed function of the brain. True, the ability to apply the mind to this or that task does vary greatly among individuals. Moreover, although the degree of individual versatility varies, there appears to some relationship between being smart at one thing and being smart at another, and it is this notion of general smartness, whatever it's organic basis, that the shrinks have latched onto as a basis for grading the intelligence of all humanity on a linear scale from super-genius to thick as a plank.

General belief in their ability to so grade people places considerable power in the hands of the psych doctors, which surely explains in large part their commitment to the notion that human intelligence can be measured with the same precision as height or weight. At the same time, the existence of such self-serving motivation provides reason for skepticism in judging the intelligence-measuring claims of the psychology profession.

My own skepticism on the subject of IQ testing was evoked more than four decades ago on reading a book by Arthur Sinton Otis, inventor or the Otis Intelligence Test, variants of which were used by the US army to evaluate 1.7 million recruits during the First World War. The book, which is concerned with physics, not psychology, is entitled: Light Velocity and Relativity: The Problem of Light Velocity, Disproof of the Einstein Postulate, and argues against the theory of the constant velocity of light on the basis that a beam of light, like a bullet from a gun, will travel faster relative to the ground if emitted by a forward-facing flashlight mounted on a moving train, than if emitted by a flashlight that is stationary relative to the ground, i.e., the frame of reference in which the speed of the light beam is measured. The argument seems compelling except that what it concludes should be observed is not what has actually been observed in countless experiments beginning with the famous Michelson–Morley experiment for which Albert Michelson won the 1907 Nobel Prize in physics. The failure to acknowledge the primacy of the observed result over a common sense assumption seemed to me, well, not very intelligent, which in turn made me wonder how well qualified Arthur Otis and other experts in mental measurement really are to evaluate the intelligence of their fellow creatures.

But other reasons for skepticism about IQ testing abound. My own academic performance being a case in point. Had I been raised in America at the start of the 21st Century, I would undoubtedly have been labelled ADHD and drugged into submission. As it was, discipline in the English schools I attended during the 1950's was administered with the rod, for which I had a healthy respect. But while I was verbally and kinetically submissive to authority in the class-room, my mind was as free as the air with the result that my academic grades corresponded almost perfectly with the degree of my respect or antipathy for my teachers. Generally, I liked female teachers and was around the top of the class during the first several  years of my schooling under the tutelage of women. But in subsequent years, under instruction exclusively by males, my academic performance varied almost exactly in proportion to the charisma of my mentors. At times, I was top of my class in most if not all subjects but Latin, at other times I was near the bottom the class, although, it must be admitted, there was always some wretch more academically obtuse than myself to deny me the present pleasure of claiming to have been absolutely bottom of my class. At university, I was taught by several very competent female scholars and, perhaps not coincidentally, I graduated with the faculty prize. So in my youth, was I intelligent, or was I not? In response to such a question, the psych doctors may say academic achievement has little to do with brains, but in so doing they undermine the entire IQ-testing business, for if it fails to predict something as significant as academic achievement, what's the point of it? Does it predict business success, or acting success, or military success, or musical success any better? Probably not, and in which case, there seems no point in it at all. Ah, but the shrinks will say, it measures potential achievement. There you are then: if your kid has a mediocre IQ, not much point in encouraging them in academics: better to take them every day to 4 AM hockey practice, or encourage them to study something really dumb like, say, psychology.

Fortunately, many great achievers, all in fact prior to the invention of the intelligence test, were spared being told the supposed limits to their potential. Mozart, for instance — almost certainly a case of ADHD, — was good at stringing notes together, but on an IQ test how sure can we be that he would not have bombed? And there are certainly many others renowned for great intellectual achievement who clearly lacked all-round general intelligence. Einstein, for example, the most famous physicist of the 20th Century, seems to have been pretty ignorant when it came to philosophy and politics, or at least that was the view of George Kennan, architect of US foreign policy following WWII and Einstein's colleague at the Institute for Advanced Research. Of Einstein's subject, Kennan said, "I knew nothing ... and knew it" but of my subject, Kennan said, "Einstein knew nothing ... and didn't know it."*

And then there's Richard Feynman, another physicist of genius, who was reputed to have an IQ of 123, which is pretty decent, but not as smart, according to the IQ-ists, as about 20 million present day Americans. LOL.

So my advice is, if there's some big challenge you're really keen about, go for it, whatever your supposed IQ. As for my IQ? I haven't a clue. I was tested once or twice but never told the result — thank God.

* Source: John Lewis. Gaddis. 2012. George F. Kennan: An American Life.

Related: 

CanSpeccy: IQism, Racism and the Decay of the Great American University
CanSpeccy: Intelligence, the G-Factor, Linus Pauling and Glutamate

IQism, Racism and the Decay of the Great American University

To many psychologists, genius is simply a number that falls a certain number of standard deviations to the right of the mean on a bell curve. One of the longest running experiments on intelligence, however, suggests that true giftedness may depend as much on other factors like creativity and motivation. Since 1921, psychologists have studied a group of approximately 1500 children with an average IQ score of about 150 that were originally selected by Lewis Terman. The members of this group, known as the Termites, all grew up to be highly successful and productive, but not one of them achieved genius-level contributions. Genius seems to elude the best efforts of psychologists to capture its essence in a standardized test.
A Case Study of Genius, Ryan McPherson

The joy of racism is the sense it provides of innate superiority and, like being born into the aristocracy or inheriting a fortune, it provides an elevated status requiring no effort to maintain.

But being white no longer provides that advantage. If you're black or Jewish, OK, enjoy the psychic benefits of racism if you wish, but today white is rubbish and targeted for elimination as the dominant group within a generation, not only in America as proclaimed to applause by US President Bill Clinton during his 1998 commencement address at Portland State University, but across Europe.

So what is the alternative for those of idle disposition in need of a prop to their self-esteem? The answer, today, is IQism. By definition, half of us can beat an average score, and with a bit of test sophistication almost anyone can be above average. And if test preparation is not enough, a spoonful of glutamate before the test may give you an extra five to 25 points.

The American school system has done much to promote IQism. If SAT scores are all that really matters, a teacher's life is greatly simplified: preparing a class of restive adolescents for an IQ test is easier than inspiring them to high attainment in Greek or analytical algebra. What's more, the tests are scored by machine, which sure beats reading a stack of hand-written essays.

With the rise of IQism in America, top universities now select applicants for admission chiefly not on what they know, or on how effectively they apply what they know, but on a machine-scored test of facility in certain mental operations that measures neither judgment, nor passion, nor imagination.

But who cares if students, all of them fully adult, entering America's elite institutions of higher learning know virtually nothing: they're all really, really bright. No wonder so many students at Harvard cheat. Why bother with the books? If you're too poor to follow Ted Kennedy's example and pay someone else to sit the exam, by all means cheat in any other way you can. As a person of high IQ, your superiority is assured: the sweat of hard work, intellectual or otherwise, is for the lower grades of mankind.

Bizarrely, the SAT test was promoted by James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University, to reduce the number of rich kids privileged by attendance at expensive private prep schools from being privileged by attendance at Harvard, an expensive private school. But as Charles Murray relates here the SAT test fails to predict academic performance of university entrants from poor schools any better than traditional subject-based entrance tests and thus is an expensive waste of time.