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. 

Death of the West: Autism and Atheism

Vox Popoli postulates a correlation between autism and atheism.

I first postulated my hypothesis concerning a link between the autism spectrum and atheism back in 2007 in response to a post by PZ Myers at Pharyngula in which he and other atheists were bragging about their relatively high Asperger's Quotient scores. I wrote: "Obviously, more comprehensive and scientific tests would be advised before any definite conclusion can be reached, but these initial observations do appear to indicate a possibility that atheism could be nothing more than a minor mental disorder."

 In that connection it may be noted that alleles for autism are reported to overlap broadly with alleles for high intelligence.

This correlation supports the notion that atheism is a consequence of rational thought. Certainly, there's little rational basis for theism, other than the fact that a society without a religion is doomed to self-destruction as is evident in the West today.

Unfortunately, it requires more than a couple of extra IQ points to recognize the necessity of irrational faith. It takes a civilization and an proper education system, both of which the Western nations have now jettisoned. 

What is an IQ-ist?

Having Followed a debate about the massive reported differences in mean IQ among nations over at Ron Unz's singular blog, I conclude that an IQ-ist true believer is a person who knows that:

(1) If you are smart enough to come up with the theory of relativity, then you are smart enough to have (a) written Hamlet; (b) composed Fuer Elise, Einer Kleine Nachtmusic, and the Blue Danube Waltz; (c) Painted the Mona Lisa; and (d) fried an egg while balancing on a wire over Niagara Falls.

(2) That a kid raised on the streets of what IQ-ists seem invariably to call a “shithole country” (e.g., USA, or at least parts thereof) is generally less adept in the manipulation of words and numbers than a graduate of Exeter and Harvard or Eton and Oxford solely because of an inferior genetic potential.

(3) The best way to deal with critics of the IQ-ist thesis is by: (a) unsubstantiated assertion; (b) unsubstantiated negation; or (c) argumentum ad vericundiam, ignoratium, nauseam, or hominem.

Such beliefs and modes of debate are characteristic of the unscientific mind. The mind of the individual unaware of the logic of scientific discovery, and in particular, the dependence of scientific advance on testable hypotheses and the rejection of hypotheses inconsistent with empirical evidence.

They are, in fact, the modes of thought of what may be a majority of psychologists, adherents of a “discipline” that brought to the world the deeply strange construct of Freudian psychiatry, the equally bizarre behaviorist’s denial of the existence of mind, and, today, IQ-ism, so dear to the hearts of race supremacists and those committed to a fascistic social order under which each person will bear a definitive mark of intellectual rank, thereby establishing a rigid hierarchy of status and authority.

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.

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.

Trikileaks: Assange The Serial Disappointer, Disappoints Again

Assange: I Will Bring Hillary Down Before The Debate Stage On September 26th.

Didn't happen did it.

Then there was: 

"October Surprise" Is Back - Wikileaks' Assange Confirms Tuesday Video Appearance

But Tuesday came and no surprise. 

No surprise.

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