Racist pseudoscience keeps creeping back into the culture, and I like the point made in this article by Gavin Evans that one mechanism is by the alliance of the pseudoscience of race with the pseudoscience of heritable intelligence, both “slippery concepts” that allow an amazing amount of sloppiness in which to inject one’s biases. You know you’re dealing with a charlatan when they start making very specific claims about the genetics of intelligence in humans, something that has been extraordinarily difficult to measure and test, in correlations with the genetics of race, a concept that is poorly defined. They’re trying to build a skyscraper when the only materials they have to hand are buckets of watery jello and porridge — it turns out they don’t make steel when combined.
My personal views are that populations have structure, and there are rivers of genes that run through different lineages, but that the structures don’t align well with the exclusionary, constructed concept of race. Those genetic patterns are interesting and important, but their study is ruined by the know-nothing yahoos, like Charles Murray, who keep intruding and trying to warp the data to fit their preconceptions about how the human social order ought to be, which somehow is always conditioned by archaic and crude ideas about the inferiority of the Other. There is no higher or lower, there is only difference.
As for intelligence, the entire point of the human brain is plasticity and sensitivity to experience and novelty. There is no such thing as high intelligence — but there is such a thing as high adaptability. Since intelligence is actually a response to the environment, it’s disappointing and absurd that there are actually scientists arguing for some mysterious hard-wiring of the brain for some difficult to describe ability like “performance on IQ tests”. Don’t they realize that that’s the antithesis of what human intelligence is? You have a property that is all about interacting with complex environmental challenges in diverse ways, and you think you can capture it in a simple, constant parameter, one that doesn’t include the environment? Weird.
Yet people still push this contrary notion. Charles Murray is one; so is Steven Pinker; among the worst and clumsiest promoters of racial IQ science is Sam Harris, whose career has been all about defining boundaries between people, and making evasive suggestions about what ought to be done with the Other. When Harris brought on Murray for an interview, this is how he introduced him:
People don’t want to hear that a person’s intelligence is in large measure due to his or her genes and there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person’s intelligence even in childhood. It’s not that the environment doesn’t matter, but genes appear to be 50 to 80 percent of the story. People don’t want to hear this. And they certainly don’t want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups.
Now, for better or worse, these are all facts. In fact, there is almost nothing in psychological science for which there is more evidence than these claims. About IQ, about the validity of testing for it, about its importance in the real world, about its heritability, and about its differential expression in different populations.
Please, please, please…someone define this curious property that Harris has labeled “intelligence” which doesn’t change and which is hardly at all malleable, even in childhood. Anyone who has had a child knows that their minds grow and change over time — I see it even in the 18 year olds who enter college and then leave 4 years later with often great changes in maturity and outlook. Yet none of that is part of Harris’s understanding of “intelligence”.
We know that living in poverty, suffering trauma, lead exposure, poor schools, social isolation, abuse, and poor nutrition all affect academic performance and people’s roles in society, yet somehow none of these involve the ineffable subject of the term “intelligence”. “Intelligence” is fixed and intrinsic, with perhaps 20% that can be modified by stuff like education and experience. Or is it 50%? I don’t know. I don’t even know how you can peg it to a single number, or what it means for someone to be 20% more or less intelligent than I am.
Also, contrary to Harris’s claim that this assertions are facts unopposed by psychological science, Vox found 3 psychologists specializing in intelligence who, um, opposed his views.
This infuriated Sam Harris.
He went on a tweet rampage — apparently, showing that he is wrong, and that his opinions are not universally shared, is “defamatory”. He is very upset that once again someone has publicly pointed out that his statements sure sound awfully racist, and that what was published against him is “nothing less the total destruction of a person’s reputation for the crime of honestly discussing scientific data”. He made a suggestion that Ezra Klein, editor of Vox, should engage with him in his podcast, and published the emails that bounced back and forth between the two as they negotiated.
It’s a remarkable exchange. You should read it. Also remarkable is that Harris willingly posted it, thinking it would demonstrate the rightness of his position, when all anyone can see is that Klein is patient and friendly, while Harris is increasingly testy and self-righteous. Harris challenges Klein to do a podcast, he accepts, and then there’s this long weird gripe about how he was defamed, yet he doesn’t want to discuss this subject with qualified psychologists (which Klein suggests), but only with Klein — and then he doesn’t want to discuss the claims about race and science he obligingly approved of in his discussion with Murray, because, he says, it would be “boring” to his listeners.
This “boring” dismissal seems to be routine with Harris when he senses the argument isn’t going his way. He did the same thing with Omer Aziz, recording a 4 hour session and then deciding not to air it, because it was “boring”.
He also likes to pull this stunt when he meets someone who dismisses him of posting the email exchanges between them with this strange notion that somehow they redeem him — he did this when Noam Chomsky refused to debate him. It’s a curious phenomenon, because he seems to think his prickly whining makes him look like a good guy, but all it really does is reveal him as a pompous ass. But he might be wise in doing it, because there are always a mob of ardent fanboys who afterwards reinforce Harris’s opinion of himself.
Ezra Klein has responded by pointing out how Harris pandered to Murray, and rejecting the claim that psychological scientists even have the ability to assess an intrinsic component to IQ.
International evidence suggests oppression, discrimination, and societal resentment lowers group IQs. As the New York University philosopher of neuroscience Ned Block has written, quoting the work of anthropologist John Ogbu, oppression has a clear effect on marginalized groups globally. “Where IQ tests have been given, ‘the children of these caste-like minorities score about 10-15 points … lower than dominant group children,’” he writes.
Block’s point, and this is important, is not that IQ isn’t heritable, or even that it’s impossible to imagine it differing among groups. It’s that it’s impossible to look at the cruel and insane experiment America has run on its black residents and say anything useful about genetic differences in intelligence.
He makes a measured response. It’s a solid article that politely rips Harris’s views strongly. It should win over rational people, which doesn’t include the blinkered goons who love Sam Harris no matter what he says.
But that doesn’t matter. Sam Harris has won over 4chan.
Have any of them given their definition of “race”?
Sam seems to be headed to the same place Dave Rubin is.
Sam has a lot of good things to say, but it is unfortunate to see him cozy up to Murray and Peterson.
Mr. Burns: “Of course you’d say that…you have the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter!”
It feels like the reaction to this Harris shitstorm has been bigger. He’s survived these embarrassments before, so who knows, but it sure seems like a lot people – fans included – are ripping him for this.
The funniest/saddest part (really isn’t a difference these days) is him shouting over and over, “There’s no controversy.”
It’s hard for me to imagine a more controversial topic than IQ + Race. Nothing is settled at any level of the issue:
-Is IQ a good measure of “intelligence”?
-How much of IQ is genetic vs. environmental?
-How much of the genetic component has anything to do with race?
-What is “race” as a biological concept?
There isn’t a single scientifically accepted position for any of that. He has some survey data that he and Murray cherry-pick some survey data (ignoring how it’s changed over the past few generations) and pretend that’s the end of the story.
It is just pathetic.
Sam endlessly frustrates me. When he’s talking about (or interviewing someone about) consciousness, mind/body topics, or even politics I find the conversations thoughtful and provocative despite the fact that I don’t always agree with him or his guests. But his need to pile on the “regressive left” seems like both a massive blind spot and hobby-horse for him. I really don’t think he’s a straight-up racist; the problem I had with his conversation with Murray (which I found appallingly tone-deaf) is that he came into it determined to frame the whole thing around his simplistic presumption that if college liberals hate Murray then he must be right. The Middlebury incident, in which a protest against Murray led to violence and injuries, was deplorable, but that doesn’t magically mean he isn’t completely wrong wrt the genetic basis of intelligence. And Sam’s Trump-like reflex that routinely impels him to double down when challenged isn’t doing him any favors.
People don’t want to hear that a person’s intelligence is in large measure due to his or her genes and there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person’s intelligence even in childhood.
He’s damn right people don’t want to hear it. That’s because it’s bullshit.
If you push hard enough on that “intelligence is due to genes” you’ll get “well, our brains are created using the patterns from our DNA, therefore, genetics!”
As you point out, ‘intelligence’ (whatever that is) appears to be a measure of learning and adaptability, and some brains do that better or worse than others. Now, here’s a fun observation: there appear to be different strategies for learning. I.e.: you can learn to be a better learner. Some people exhibit very highly-refined learning strategies and they can pick up a new skill or absorb an area of knowledge extremely quickly. If the manifestation of ‘intelligence’ is a side-effect of the learning algorithms we individually adopt, then the question of native ‘intelligence’ becomes completely confused – someone we think of as particularly intelligent may have been exposed to better learning strategies at an early age.
This is not an attempt to argue by example, but I hope you’ll bear with me: in one of my collection of Feynman audiotapes he describes the way his father (who was a solid citizen but no great genius) taught him to learn when he was a kid. Feynman was remarkable for his leaps of intuition, that fell back on a tremendous amount of creative energy and a huge body of stored knowledge – but that was a learned behavior. In one of his lectures at Esalen Institute Feynman describes his inner process as creative “piddling around” backed by a lot of knowledge that allowed him to quickly ‘prune’ ideas that didn’t work. I always loved that about Feynman: he thought about everything, and blurted it out – including the algorithms for how to be Feynman. There was another relevant question that I remember Feynman talked about, which was “why are there so many amazing Hungarian Physicists?” – Feyman’s answer was that there were amazing Hungarian Physics tutors who developed a process for creating amazing mathematicians and physicists. It was a process.
People who talk about IQ annoy the living fuck out of me, because they have to ignore the plethora of books that teach you how to do better on IQ tests and the fact that people who take IQ tests repeatedly, do better each time (unless they claw their brains out from sheer annoyance, first) – this is glaring evidence that IQ tests are measuring a learned behavior not an innate attribute of the subject.
One more point, then I’ll shut up. Back to algorithms for learning. Anyone who has studied any test-taking will also learn there are algorithms for test-taking. If you know those algorithms, you will typically score 20-30% higher on multiple-choice tests (like IQ tests!) than someone who does not know those algorithms. I am referring to techniques like skimming the test and quickly shooting down the questions you know you can answer accurately and easily, then going back and answering all the questions by category, so your brain doesn’t have to shift between solving different kinds of problems, and lastly by hitting the questions you have trouble with, and eliminating (by guess-work if you have to) answers that seem unlikely – going for the luck of the dice on those questions. So, if you can learn a few test-taking algorithms and score much better on an IQ test, it appears that the IQ test measures nothing innate about you – as PZ says, it’s measuring your ability to adapt and learn.
Marcus #6 wrote:
Absolutely! In preparation for my university finals (in the UK sense, the final set of exams at the end of undergraduate study), review of the past papers on a subject revealed that there were 3 main topics explored in the exams. One topic was notable by its absence in the end of term exam, so it was obviously going to come up in the finals.
I don’t think I was the only one who noticed this. Two of us were so well prepared that we queried the invigilator about the typo in the formula that we were supposed to derive.
I don’t understand how the Flynn Effect doesn’t drastically undermine the notion that IQ is primarily genetic, or that group differences are due to genetics instead of environment. If IQ is so plastic that it can increase substantially in a population over a short period, isn’t that enough to undercut the claim of genetic primacy for IQ?
To quote the late great Richard Pryor: “Let’s see how you do in Zaire, motherfucker!”
@chigau, 1: Unaccountably, all but the most dim-witted “race realists” seem very reluctant to commit to a specific set of “races”, or even a testable definition (the dim-witted ones tend to be Americans projecting their weird caste system onto all human societies and all of history). Almost like they don’t want to be nailed down on their claims.
Murray and his ilk reject this. Murray always plays the role of disinterested scientist who is following “the data”. Others claim that they, too, are talking about difference. They even go on to humbly acknowledge that they are bad at sports. See, it is all about the amazing human biodiversity! Oh, and they totally admit that they don’t like the “results”. Again, what can these poor souls in search of scientific truth do? Maybe go on Sam Harris’ podcast and mourn the death of free speech?
This has been one of the most frustrating points since I laid my eyes on the first “IQ science” article. They don’t define intelligence and they are totally OK with that! If they are pushed they will shamelessly utter the glaringly circular definition: intelligence is what people believe intelligence is.
All of this aside, I think this false and misleading notion of intelligence has something to do with how computers work and thinking of brain as a computing device. That metaphor has its own uses (genetic algorithms!) Nevertheless, it has its own serious flaws and shortcomings when it comes to explaining how human brain works.
Given the dark history of IQ tests, I just don’t see that how this is anything more than another pernicious pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. It is beyond me how these skeptics even begin to take this stuff seriously.
As Amanda Marcotte points out often, race as an indicator of intelligence was revealed to be absolute bullshit the moment the Irish became White.
Genes probably determine more than 50-80 percent of a person’s intelligence. No matter the environment, most mammals will just never achieve the same level of problem solving, even if ones like elephants come close. Things like upbringing are of relatively small influence, only determining little bits like the hard-to-define differences between people. ;)
As for hating to hear those little and hard-to-define differences are genetic, though, there sure are a lot of cheers for anyone who says it. It’s like the claim that everyone hates Justin Bieber, but with extra centuries. At what level of popularity do you have to admit that obviously someone really wants it to be true?
Harris knows very well how to sell his product, and sell he does.
His fanbois are too dumb to see the glaring fallacies.
People like Harris are poison to rationality.
that both of these quotes are true illustrates why I can not engage with anyone who thinks there are differences that genes defined by race explain in any way at all. They have not as far as I can see even asked the question what is intelligence. They are highly invested in there is a difference because they are a positive expression of that difference.
It is pure conceit, and often the discussion ends in bluster and threats.
uncle frogy
All this crap that Harris, Murray, Pinker, and co. spew about how people don’t want to hear what they’re saying and how they’re dispassionately stating “facts” is profoundly dishonest. It’s true that people of color don’t like being told that they’re genetically inferior, mainly because white people have used that as an excuse to enslave, exterminate, or marginalize them. On the other hand, a lot of white people are absolutely elated to hear what racist pseudoscientists have to say. They like believing that they’re superior to other people just by being white. Belief in racial superiority is entirely self-serving. It’s idiotic to claim that we’re the ones who aren’t looking at the evidence honestly.
PZ writes:
<3
This needs way more exposure; not lead itself, but knowledge about the dangerous of lead poisoning, esp leaded paint and leaded gasoline.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/
I think the things that convinced me that “race” as it is commonly used has almost nothing to do with any sort of proper scientific categorization of gene populations was
1- Irish people were considered to be not white just few hundred years ago in America (this is mentioned above), and
2- The 1-drop rule is a thing that is used to define race-membership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule
I think PZ put it perfectly in the OP, and I have nothing more to add beyond this.
We know that IQ tests measure intelligence, because intelligence is measured by IQ tests.
Reminds me of the god/babble circle theists use. One has to break the circle to obtain real truth.
Charles Murray’s speaking fee is $20,000 – $30,000 U.S. The poor oppressed man.
raaak@11:
And they love to point out that Murray’s work shows Asians as having higher IQs than whites. “See, I can’t be racist! I’m only claiming to be from the second-most intelligent race!”
Interestingly, though, while Murray et al never hesitate to draw policy implications from the supposed “fact” that blacks have lower IQs, they never seem to draw any policy implications from the “Asians have the highest IQs” part, other than that this is yet another reason in their eyes to ban affirmative action, because it means that not enough Asian-Americans are getting into good schools.
But I never hear these “race realists” demanding that companies take action to address the “bamboo ceiling” that leaves Asian-Americans underrepresented at the top levels of companies. Strange, because if you believe that they have the highest IQs, and IQ is correlated with ability, then you should expect Asian-Americans to be disproportionately present in leadership positions. Why, you’d almost have to contemplate the possibility that (1) the race->IQ–>ability link isn’t so sound after all; or (2) that racial discrimination is a powerful force that can override the supposed differences in ability.
I did read their email exchange, and it was rather indicative of both character and acumen.
He overestimates himself and underestimates his readers.
John Morales, I don’t think he underestimates his readers at all.
screechymonkey — that’s an excellent point. Why don’t the Murrayites rail against the obvious discrimination against the superior Asian-Americans who should by now be dominating leadership positions throughout the nation? Currently they make up about 20% of the US population, so by Murray’s own argument, if the country really was a meritocracy, you’d expect Asians to hold >20% of all senior positions in business, administration, politics, science, etc. The reality?
chrislawson, fair enough. I intended to refer to readers of that piece (I being one by dint of having read it), not just to “his” readers of that piece. :)
@ 8 tulse
If IQ is so plastic that it can increase substantially in a population over a short period, isn’t that enough to undercut the claim of genetic primacy for IQ?
Not to a true believer.
I have only read Flynn’s book, and that was some time ago, but if the distribution of IQ scores remains the same and only the mean of the distribution changes it does not invalidate the argument for a genetic component in intelligence if we accept that an IQ score maps onto intelligence in some reasonable fashion.
My reading of Flynn—I think he comes out and flatly states it—is that the rising level of IQ scores is caused by environmental factors. This does not mean a rise in “intelligence” but more a familiarity with the type or style of thinking and better exposure to the dominant language.
While I generally disagree with Marcus in this area, some of his rant is very valid here. But one does not have to even practice for an IQ test; our culture increasing rewards the style of thinking that, as a side effect, results in higher IQ scores.
We value certain thinking patterns and this is reflected in an IQ test. It is quite possible our ways of thinking could be very counterproductive if we were living in a hunter-gather tribe in the Amazon jungle. A hunter-gather IQ test might have left Eisenstein or Bohr looking like a complete moron (to use the old technical term).
The Richard Pryor quote @ 9 anbheal is very relevant here. Thanks anbheal.
There is some very interesting research being done on the effects of poverty on decision-making “Why do the poor make such poor decisions? The Correspondent https://thecorrespondent.com/4664/why-do-the-poor-make-such-poor-decisions/179307480-39a74caf which seems to tie into the IQ debate. Poverty, or I’d say a high state of anxiety and feeling of lack of control, seems to impair cognitive functioning.
My guess is that most of the American IQ and race debate is only sustainable because most blacks, and I assume other non-white groups are a lot poorer and more insecure than the mainstream white population. In a country where you lack a visible minority underclass you’d have to invent another rationale for the poor performance on IQ tests by the poverty stricken.
@ScreechyMonkey:
Well, in many senses this is a rebuttal to the idea that Murray is being “silenced”, but Harris says that at Middlebury the car in which he was fleeing the event was hit by a signpost being wielded deliberately by a protestor who had lifted it after that protestor or others had broken it free of the earth. If you’re getting physically assaulted for your ideas, it doesn’t matter to me if they’re racist bullshit or even worse. Regardless of your income, being physically assaulted for speaking is a form of oppression that I’ll oppose.
So, yeah, I’d stand between Murray and someone looking to attack him with a signpost. On the other hand, I’d happily stand between Murray and an administrator who wanted to hand him a $25,000 check. So take from that what you will.
@jrkrideau:
Well, sure. But it also means that if intelligence is not changing but IQ scores are, then IQ scores are measuring a whole lot of stuff that isn’t intelligence (not intelligence per se if you understand me).
If IQ is measuring intelligence and a bunch of stuff that is not intelligence, then is the difference in IQ showing us a difference in intelligence, or is it showing us a difference in that other stuff, or both?
And if the possible differences in those other things at least potentially account for more than the gap between racial mean IQs (and it can), then that leaves us not actually knowing if any difference in the intelligence between racial groups is positive or negative. Given what we both agree Flynn has shown (or reasonably and persuasively argued), we literally do not know whether US Blacks or US whites have the higher intelligence as you are using the term.
Given that, arguing over the meaning of those differences and especially the meaning of the genetic component of those differences is drastically premature.
I have a suspicion that all of the changing/refining/tweaking of IQ Tests is being done by people who made high scores on the previous versions.
If IQ measured something real or innate even if we could not quite grasp what that is, one would expect its use would increase as a metric for hiring professionals in all fields. To the contrary, tech companies are using those tests less and less. It is not because companies are afraid of liberal elite or beholden to some vague idea of diversity. If there was money to be saved by using IQ tests for hiring, they would have gone for it. Instead they are doing the sane and unfortunately politically correct thing : if the position requires an engineer, they try to measure engineering knowledge of the candidate not their ability to solve cryptographic pattern recognition puzzles!
This flies right in the face of the claim that new or modern IQ tests, unlike the traditional tests are reliable despite the fact all the new and old tests verify the same old racial dogmas.
“The lower classes have inferior genes.” (Or “bad breeding”, to use the more traditional terminology.)
raaak@30–
True. People used compasses for navigation about 800 years before anyone knew anything about the science of magnetism.
JMorales@25–
I guessed that’s what you meant, but I’d hate to be called one of Hitler’s “readers” just because I’ve read some of his writings. :-)
When I was taught about IQ test in the early 80s I was taught they measured a particular type of intelligence, not all round intelligence. The lecturer compared the usefulness of IQ intelligence with the intelligence giving you the ability to look at a selection of foods and be able to accurately estimate how long it would feed your family for; the one helps you pass tests, the other helps keep your family alive in circumstances where you can’t just run to the shop for more as there is no shop. The latter would have been of far more importance for all humans during most of our existence as a species and probably before that, the former is a modern fad which will pass as our societal needs change.
Why do pseudo-intellectuals insist on having scholarly debates in public forums, with an audience that largely does not have the technical background to understand the entirety of the relevant empirical research? Real scholars have debates and arguments in print, where the audience is restricted to the approximately 12 other people on the planet who have the requisite background and interest to follow the respective lines of reasoning, where everyone is given sufficient time to write what they mean as clearly as they are able to, where everyone is given sufficient time to respond to their detractors, and where everyone has time to lookup the sources cited by others.
“come on my podcast and debate me, bro”
Sam needs to bugger off for that request alone. Ugh, even though Klein agreed to it (and brave, brave Sir Robin, bravely ran away), it’s still a very entitled request. “Take time out of your life to meet me when it’s convenient for me” is such an obnoxious request.
Reliability is a technical property of a test. All it says is that the test results are relatively stable; one way of thinking about it is that if you could administer the test to the same subject an infinite amount of times under the same conditions, the results would always be within a narrow range (assuming no learning effects). The implication is that the test is measuring something real, but reliability says nothing about what that something is, nor does it imply that the something that it’s measuring can’t change over time, or under different conditions.
What you’re getting at is questions of validity: does the test measure what it claims to measure? Does it predict other desirable traits or outcomes? Are results comparable across different groups? Are the decisions made on the basis of test results defensible? And so on….
I’m not familiar with the literature around IQ testing (my day job is in language proficiency testing), but if the field is saying the test is reliable, then I’d take their word at it. But reliability is just a necessary condition for test validity (or, in my field at least, the validity of test use); it’s far from sufficient.
Chigau,
I read several of the links and can’t remember where this came from but the idea is to distinguish “race” from “ancestry”.
The author says that “race” as opposed to “ancestry” is a social construct. In the USA there are essentially four “races”: White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian. These are real categories in the sense that people will self-identify as White, Black, Hispanic or Asian, and do so on census forms.
On the other hand “ancestry” is a genetic construct. When geneticists look at your genome, they can determine your “ancestry”. For example, those who self-identify as Asian can be divided genetically into South-Asian, East-Asian, and Sout-East Asian. And those who self-identify as European have various percentages of Mediterranian, Alpine, and Nordic ancestry. In fact, it’s always a percentage game. Those who self identify as English are of 90% Nordic ancestry. And those who self-identity as Italian are of 70% Mediteranean ancestry. I can’t remember the percentages of the other two in each case,
In summary, “race” is real as a social construct, but has no good genetic basis, but your genome can identify your “ancestry”, usually stated in percentages with only spurious correlations with your self-identified “race”.
This made a lot of sense to me.
I hope it does to you a well :)
This is my take, but correct me if I’m wrong:
Intelligence is hard to define, but it is a real entity. Historically, IQ tests have been fraught with problems. However, modern intelligence tests are reliable and valid to a sufficient degree to make them a useful scientific tool, if used appropriately. Modern intelligence tests consist of a number of subtests which measure things like mathematical ability, reading ability, and abstract thought and, therefore, are more comprehensive than historical IQ tests.
Based on modern intelligence tests, here is esentially no disagreement that there is a difference in intelligence between Whites and Blacks in the USA in the past and continuing to the present day. The disagreement centers on the relative contributions of genetics and environment to this difference. Investigations over the past forty years have largely failed to throw light on that question. This is because genes and environment interact in such extremely complex ways that the relative contributions of each are almost impossible to tease apart. This is likely to continue to be the case in the future.
However, the contribution by genetics is certainly not 100% and could very likely be 0%. And the contribution by environment is certainly not 0% and could very likely be 100%. If the difference in intelligence between Blacks and Whites is 100% environmental, then the gap can be eliminated by appropriate social programs. And partially eliminated if less than 100% and more than 0%. If the difference in intelligence between Blacks and Whites is 100% genetic, as Charles Murray claims, then any and all social programs are a waste of time. This is the political dimension of the disagreement.
That’s the impirical argument.
However, there is a powerful theoretical argument that the difference is lilely to be 100%, or nearly 100%, environmental, and it goes like this:
That part of intelligence that has a genetic basis involves the interactions between vast numbers of genes and genetic networks and that, therefore, the evolution of any differences between Whites and Blacks would take in the order of a hundred thousand years (unlike single gene mutations that underlie characteristics such as the skin pigmentation of Blacks, and Gauchers Disease and Tay-Sachs disease which effect Ashkenazi Jews which spread quickly through the population). The common ancestor of all people alive today (Mitochondrial Eve) existed 200,000 years ago. So, if there are any genetic differences between races, it is likely to be very small.
What a Maroon
Somebody once smartly explained the difference between reliability and validity such: when you use a well calibrated thermometer to measure a kid’s hight, you get pretty reliable results, but the validity is lacking.
__
In school, “intelligence” as measured by tests only accounts for about 25% of success, despite teachers loving to claim “this kid is just too stupid”.
The sensible question to ask is therefore “how does a child behave intelligently?”
Thanks, Giliell. I might steal that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid#Coloured_classification
Modern intelligence tests suffer from the same validation problems as the old tests. There is no test in the world that you don’t get better in with practice or repetition. So it is really hard to determine what exactly they measure.
But all of this does not matter because the idea of recognizing or creating a social order based on some math or verbal aptitude test is preposterous in itself. There are machine learning algorithms that can score higher than any human on verbal reasoning tests. I am sure software that can score very high on visual and pattern recognition tests are either being developed or are already there. What does this say about IQ tests? It is just another mental sport in the lines of chess and checkers (in which computers have already dominated humans). Being good at it is nice and fun (and may have some valid clinical usage), but is not particularly important and certainly cannot be a basis for a social order.
Many commenters here have suggested that IQ tests are not useful. Certainly they have problems but that does not mean that they are not useful
In his post, PZ Myers linked to an article written by three psychologist in response to the opinions expressed by Charles Murray in the interview with Sam Harris. They have this to say on IQ tests:
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech
Here are their qualifications.
In his post, PZ Myers also links to an article by Ezra Klein. In that article he has this to say about Sam Harris:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/15695060/sam-harris-charles-murray-race-iq-forbidden-knowledge-podcast-bell-curve
This is a more nuanced view of Sam Harris than we are exposed to on this blog. But I agree with him that Sam Harris stuffed up his interview with Charles Murray. He didn’t do his homework to see what the consensus was about these issues and what the arguments were against Charles Murray’s views. And, therefore, he was unable to challenge what he said and didn’t do so. As the title of his interview implies, he seems to be driven by what he perceives as forbidden knowledge by the authoritarian or regressive left.
@billyjoe:
Why don’t you name names and quote the language that
Right now your wording is a generalized smear instead of a specific criticism of specific errors.
Leaving aside the reliability of IQ as a proxy for putative g*, cognitive ability for particular classes of abstract thinking, visualisation, memory and linguistic facility is a poor measure of a person. Personally, I think that ability to cope with stress, temperament and attitude, and facility for social interaction (off the top of my head) are at least as significant in terms of success at life.
Can’t hide the context of the conversation either.
—
* cf. Marcus @6
BJ:
<snicker>
Relax, there’s always someone in a Harris thread who exposes such nuance — the nuance being that they are fans of Harris though they admit he’s often wrong, as in the person you quoted.
(or: you’ve expressed something here which claims that what is expressed here is not expressed here)
And exactly because of those qualifications, they acknowledge the limits of their field of study. Unlike Murray and other racists or racialists, serious researchers do not pretend IQ is a theory of every (social) thing”.
Note that by practicing between administrations, you are changing the conditions of the test. (Of course the scenario I posited is impossible, but a possible scenario is to administer two equated forms of a test to the same sample; in such a case you should find the results to be similar if the test is reliable.)
But it’s good to see that you’re discussing this in terms of validity rather than reliability.
Crip,
I said “many commenters here have suggested that IQ tests are not useful”. Your interpretation of that as a “general smear” is just that. I would say, based on the quote I gave from those three psychologists, that that is a “general misunderstanding”. Of course, there could be plenty of psychologists, as eminent as these three, who disagree. I was just pointing out that the psychologists linked to in the post believe IQ tests have sufficient validity to be reliable.
The relevant comments are, arguably: 4,5,11,19,26,28,29,30,39
If I have have mis-represented anyone as to their view on the usefulness of IQ, I apologise, but there does seem to be a general view, contrary to that of these three psychologists, that IQ tests are not useful.
John,
No problems. I do not listen to Sam Harris’ podcasts or read his blog unless discussions elsewhere leads me there. However, in one of his articles, Sam Harris does say that he has had a lot of push back from regular listeners and readers about some of his views. I don’t know if he has a fan base who takes every word he utters as gospel, but I guess it is possible.
@billyjoe:
If you had said that many commenters have suggested that the way IQ tests are used is problematic, I wouldn’t take issue.
But you’ve asserted that others are saying IQ tests are not useful. Reading doubtthat and FiveString again, I see comments that assert IQ testing and its results are used/have been used in problematic ways and that important questions are not scientifically settled.
This is vastly different from saying that IQ tests are “not useful” – a statement that, at least on a straightforward reading – admits of literally no uses at all. Nothing in those comments states that IQ testing has literally no use.
In fact, doubtthat is quite specific about what is being criticized:
doubtthat is arguably wrong about the first question – “Is IQ a good measure of ‘intelligence’?” But that depends on having an uncontested definition of “a good measure”. Since we know that IQ tests indirectly measure such things as arousal, attention, language education, and familiarity with the dialect of the test and the test’s administrator, I’m not willing to say doubtthat is wrong. IQ tests certainly do test intelligence, but the results are nonetheless affected by a number of other confounds. Whether they constitute of good measure of general intelligence is probably a matter of opinion.
As for the other questions doubtthat raises, it is perfectly accurate to say that those questions are as yet unsettled.
Note that NOWHERE does doubtthat say that IQ testing cannot be useful in, say, screening for beginning-stage dementia or determining suitability for specific jobs. Doubtthat simply does make any statement that could reasonably be construed as “IQ testing has no (legitimate?) uses.”
You comment on FiveString is likewise oddly off-base. The only place in FiveString’s comment that intelligence or IQ testing is directly addressed is in this statement:
There is no statement here that IQ or IQ testing is never useful. It’s merely a banal statement of fact that merely because someone was the victim of a violent assault doesn’t make their ideas automatically correct (or incorrect). The entire rest of the comment is about FiveString’s impressions of Sam Harris.
Also, I find it useful to note that even if IQ tests are completely useless for determining the proportion of a person’s intelligence which is due to genetics generally or racially distinct genetic factors specifically, that still doesn’t mean that IQ tests and the concept of general intelligence are not useful.
I asked originally because I suspected that you were reading into comments things that simply aren’t there. I’m glad I did, because your first two examples fell completely flat. You may be accurate about any or all of the other examples, I haven’t reviewed them in light of these comments, but you thought my other comments were too long anyway, so I’ll just say that your credibility is not good on this issue when your first two examples cannot possibly be reasonably said to even arguably assert that IQ testing is not useful.
Maybe the authors think that, maybe they don’t. But those comments sure as hell don’t say anything like that.
billyjoe:
Every from your enumeration of admittedly arguable instances that case I’ve looked at has been a stretch, at the very best. They are a bit more, um… nuanced than you insinuate.
A better adumbration is that they’re not considered fit for purpose (that being social policy).
[way, way to garble! — bad, bad editing! Anyway. :| ]
BJ:
Oh, come on, don’t be so agnostic. Leaving aside many examples in this very blog of people who are indistinguishable from such, it is a near-certainty statistically, given how many followers he has.
Me, I like his atheism, I sneer at his spiritualism, and am amused by his moral musings.
@billyjoe,
Well, in 11, I complained about how sloppy some people (meaning racists and racialists) are in defining intelligence which is supposedly the main point of contention! I also linked to an article that casts some doubt over the metaphor psychological research has been using since it was put forth, namely John Von Neumann’s brain-as-a-computing machine. If that metaphor is bunk (and there are strong indications that it is), a large amount of IQ research will go down with it. This is not wholesale rejection of psychological research into intelligence. This is to point out that raci(al)ist pundits have used IQ to reach to much stronger claims than its theoretical foundation can ever support.
30 is also another way say that IQ test results are much more dubious for adults. If IQ was this sweeping and innate property that people cannot escape from and if it was this very good predictor of success, we would expect that its use become an inseparable part of hiring process. Not only that is not happening, even the academia is doing away with standardized tests as an admission criteria. None of this is because political correctness. The reason in my opinion is because as we know more, and as our computational power increases, many older notions of intelligence the way IQ test measures them are now becoming virtually useless for an employee or a student.
Regarding IQ tests:
All I can conclude is that there seems to be a difference of opinion about the meaning of some words and phrases. For me, “not useful” does not mean “totally useless”. And obviously it depends on context. It may be close to useless in one context and somewhat useful in others, and very useful in other contexts. However, I think it is fair to say that the opinion of those three psychologists in support of intelligence tests was more positive than any opinion given in this comment section.
Mine most certainly did not. At the risk of compounding my banality: I tried hard to avoid expressing any opinion at all about the value of intelligence tests in my original #5. I have no expertise in the subject and was simply trying to point out why I considered Harris’s conversation w/Murray to be a failure (likewise his engagement with Klein). Contrary to the rhetoric I often see here on the topic of Harris, there are, in fact, thoughtful people who can actually find middle ground between being a “fanboy” and dismissing him as a racist. I’m too cynical to be anybody’s fanboy.
@FiveString:
I have a lot of respect for your contribution, FiveString. By “banal” I here meant “uncontroversial and obviously true, therefore requiring no argument or excitement”. I decidedly did not mean “useless” or anything of the sort.
@billyjoe:
Well, beyond the fact that multiple statements in your list made absolutely ZERO assertions about utility so that you’d be wrong in any context, I should think that this statement by you would be accompanied by a bit of embarrassment.
Reread your original statement. Nowhere in there does it provide any context for determining what “not useful” means. Without context, “not useful” does in fact mean totally useless.
Everyone in this discussion already knew that IQ testing is “not useful” for determining whose turn it is to take down the recycling. “Not useful” is a phrase that can only be used in relationship to purposes. When you don’t provide a specific purpose for which something is “not useful” then you’re asserting that something is generally not useful. In other words, you’re asserting that it doesn’t have any use for any purpose at all.
If you’d like to make a comment that is actually accurate as well as useful to the discussion, then you have to say what the targets of your criticism believe IQ testing and the concept of general intelligence are not useful for.
This is basic English language communication. And your failures to use it in this thread would be entirely inoffensive and not met with much pushback if they weren’t also combined with what comes across as a lack of humility. You never admit error. You never take even one half of the responsibility for a failure to communicate – and in this case asserting things such as that doubtthat and FiveString commented at all on the usefulness of IQ was entirely on you, not a mutual miscommunication at all.
In short, you simply don’t show any of the basic skills of skepticism which require questioning yourself and having some idea about the limits of your own ability and knowledge. You give every appearance of thinking yourself and your viewpoint superior to that of others while at the same time utterly failing to even understand the others whom you critique.
That you think it’s a defense to assert now that “not useful” is a phrase that only makes sense in relationship to specific purposes, despite the fact that you are the one who failed to list such purposes in your comment, is just one more example from an ever growing set of situations in which you appear to take the side of reasonableness without ever noticing the unreasonable failures of your own communication.
You can be as polite as you like, but if you’re making up viewpoints to ascribe to others for the purpose of critiquing them, you are by definition unreasonable.
@billyjoe,
The issue here is Sam Harris’s free fall into the racialist position on IQ. Harris has accepted that position without -as you say- doing his homework and without being skeptical about the positions he now calls “mainstream” (how can he know what is mainstream and what is not btw?)
This post and comments are about why Harris has is wrong and to show how he has failed to apply critical thinking.
Given IQ tests’ dark history, it is actually better to err on the side of caution and say they are totally useless (although that position is also extreme) rather than falling for racialist arguments designed to take people’s rights away.
IQ tests appear to be evolving faster than people.
Vox posted the “debate” between Klein and Harris today… https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17210248/sam-harris-ezra-klein-charles-murray-transcript-podcast
I’m disappointed that Klein didn’t challenge Harris assertion that Murray’s work is “empirical.” To me this is the weakest position held by Harris and his ilk; that somehow the race/IQ research is irrefutable. It is staggering that Harris, a person who claims to be a critical thinker, could so readily trust such dodgy research. As so many others have pointed out, the concept of IQ and race are each so squishy that it is profoundly irresponsible to make and grand proclamations based on existing and historical data. In this vein Klein’s points are good, focusing on how profoundly American history has so negatively affected the African American experience, but he never really drives home how societal factors can so distort the research, both the subject and the researcher. Unfortunately, he dances around the point without laying the KO punch .
I think that Harris has found himself on the wrong side of another hot-topic because it seems to fit his “liberals be crazy” narrative, but the facts just aren’t on his side, and his ego/public persona won’t allow him to back down. In the debate, Klein makes it explicit how blind Harris is to his own biases, and Harris seems incapable of self-reflection on that score.
It’s frightening to me that so many people find Harris and Peterson compelling, despite their freshman-level, pseudo-intellectual thought. Any of my philosophy, sociology, or anthropology professors from my college days could run fucking circles around these bozos- and some of those were just adjuncts!
One fascinating element of the conversation was Sam Harris’s point that, if Ezra’s positions are guided by his anti-racism, then for Sam to be equally biased, he must be equally as racist as Ezra is anti-racist. It was so characteristic of Sam’s brand of rationalism which makes some amount of sense in the abstract but totally ignores context and, well, reality. As in, there are a lot of reasons to be biased towards believing in intrinsic racial differences without being a straight up Klan member. (For instance if you’re paid by right-wing think tanks whose goals are to decimate the social safety net, like Charles Murray!)
@mrquotidian
I was also frustrated that Ezra didn’t really challenge Sam on the validity of the research, but I kind of saw that coming because he’s a political journalist and not an expert on human intelligence. He was clearly doing his best to counter Sam’s nonsense, but after Sam refused to debate actual academics on this issue, Ezra shouldn’t have gone on this podcast. It was obvious that Sam didn’t want an argument about Murray’s work, which he could have lost. He obviously wanted to argue about whether or not he’d been slandered and misrepresented (::sigh::), whether his critics were good faith actors and so on, an argument that IMO no one wins. That’s what I found the most frustrating about listening to the thing, the fact that he deliberately set up a conversation that would go nowhere.