Wednesday 13 August 2014

The Zeitgeist of intelligence

 

At one time intelligence and intelligence testing were seen as agents of social advancement, bringing opportunity to working class children who had been denied their rights in the strictly rationed educational system. Then the zeitgeist changed, and IQ became an instrument of the devil, a cruel trick played on innocents, condemning them to a lifetime of labelling and incarceration in dreadful jobs.

An intelligence test is a “school far” test, and school exams are a “school near” test. School exams are allowed to test what has been taught in a particular school or particular national syllabus. If you don’t know the material you will not do well on the test. (We leave aside the reality that you may get quite a few marks for sitting down and writing some well-meaning banalities). “School near” tests ought to improve with good teaching, good textbooks, and plenty of practice.

A “school far” test avoids the specific knowledge of what might be taught at one school and may have been left untaught at other schools. Instead it seeks to distil out the basics of problem solving which would be required to deal with generic problems found in any school system. These “school far” tests include aspects of very general knowledge, some tests of vocabulary and comprehension of general social rules and practices, for which reason recent arrivals need time to learn about the habits of the host culture before these particular measures can be taken. Five years is a rule of thumb. Most of the “school far” tests comprise very general reasoning, sequences, path finding, pattern matching and simple processing. It looks at pretty basic processes, though it tries to use relatively novel surface forms so that schooling will have very little effect on the results.

Given that school far tests are good predictors of school near tests, and of occupational achievements, of life styles and of health and longevity, why is the spirit of the times so against such a finding?

One reason seems to be a misunderstanding about scores. Of themselves, they do not determine outcomes. Even the best indicators have an error term. IQ is the best predictor, but it achieves that accolade because is the best of a weak bunch of predictors. Predictors are not determiners. A further misunderstanding is that an intelligence score total is the complete description of a person’s ability. Even with the current Wechsler four factorial indexes to give a fuller picture, there is much left out which further and different ability tests can elucidate. Even so, there seems to be an underlying real problem: the score carries an implication that some intellectual feats will probably not be attained. Correct. There is no way round that, though learning about it could be very useful in later career planning.

Then on to an even harder question. Given that there is good data showing that intelligence is heritable, why is the spirit of the times so against such a finding?

Here I think a key misunderstanding is that heritability equals “incapable of being altered in any way”.  Favourable environments will lead to greater achievements, though not, in reality, to endlessly greater achievements. Favourable genetics confer many advantages, but in all cases some effort will be required, often a great deal of effort. Nonetheless, phenylketonuria apart, it is often very hard to have an environmental impact on the outcome of inherited characteristics, given a uniformly reasonable basic conditions. The much desired “level playing field” reveals the very differing skills of the individual players.

Even an interest in genetics seems to require an explanation, a justification of motives, a ritual of purification in which the miscreant promises the audience that genetic questions are only one of their many interests, and certainly not their main subject of enquiry.

All this does not sit well with the enlightenment, and with Trevelyan’s observation: Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.

Odd.

9 comments:

  1. The author surely knows that there would be more discussion of IQ if there were no racial or class differences in IQ -- but there are.

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    1. Agreed. Yet while IQ tests are poor predictors of later success (.40 correlation by some measures I read somewhere), they are much better at predicting average group outcomes. That is the heart of the problem in my estimation -- that and the fact that the possibility of group differences undermines the egalitarian ideal held by many of our policy-making elite.

      I am of the view that if a relatively "good life" were available to all honest, hardworking people on the left side of the Bell Curve this wouldn't a source of so much of a problem But of course it isn't today, no matter your race. http://facingzionwards.blogspot.com/

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  2. Of course it is about class. It is also about the left's purpose in life, fault finding. In the days when there actually was a large untapped pool of working class talent, IQ testing enabled the left to blame working class failure on The System. But soon enough, the pool was drained, the talent promoted and Labour looked up to discover that it had become the party of the thick. Good schools having failed, bad schools became a necessity: bad schools to blame on The System, bad schools to cover up working class mediocrity.

    Fault finding is also a major factor in left wing views on genetics. Richard Lewontin is particularly lucid and radical on the matter in The Doctrine of DNA. Genes for IQ should not be sought lest they legitimate inequality, but it goes deeper than that. A cause must always be an accusation, never an exculpation. The application of genetics to cancer "isolates an alteration in a so-called cancer gene as the cause of cancer, whereas that alteration in the gene may have been caused by ingesting a pollutant, which in turn was produced by an industrial process, which in turn was the inevitable consequence of investing money at 6 per cent." That, it appears to me, is why he opposes the search for truth: it can only result in individual truths of this kind which can only benefit individuals. And perhaps that is why he is a dialectical materialist who holds that stone brought forth the stone age and coal brought forth Adam Smith and Darwin: he is a monist because he is a collectivist.

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    1. @Philip Neal --

      Intriguing quote, indicative of a world-view that will be supportive of a hunt for "wreckers" and "saboteurs" -- and thus in tune with the spirit of our times.

      Google identifies those words as penned by one Finn Bowring, on page 166 of "Science, Seeds, and Cyborgs" (2003) -- not by Lewontin.

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  3. I thought you were making that quote up -- but it turns out you didn't :(

    How could anyone take that guy seriously?

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  4. Recently-minted doctor Scott Alexander mused about this topic at his blog. The title of the 8/11/14 post, Does the Glasgow Coma Scale exist? Do comas? explains his sensible jumping-off point.

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    1. Excellent post, making good points very clearly.

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  5. I take it you mean the quotation from Lewontin. The entire sentence reads: "It isolates an alteration in a so-called cancer gene as the cause of cancer, whereas that alteration in the gene may in turn have been caused by ingesting a pollutant, which in turn was produced by an industrial process, which in turn was the inevitable consequence of investing money at 6 per cent." ("It" refers to a general view of causation which is being criticised at length.)

    The entire sentence is found on p. 51 of The Doctrine of DNA: Biology as Ideology by R.C. Lewontin, Penguin 1993. (This is the title of the British edition which I have in front of me: confusingly, it seems that the the book was originally published in Canada in 1991 under the title Biology as Ideology: the Doctrine of DNA.)

    I got a different result from a Google search but I doubt if any two Google search results are the same these days.
    The entire sentence is found on p. 51 of The Doctrine of DNA: Biology as Ideology by R.C. Lewontin, Penguin 1993. (This is the title of the British edition which I have in front of me: confusingly, it seems that the the book was originally published in Canada in 1991 under the title Biology as Ideology: the Doctrine of DNA.)

    I got a different result from a Google search but I doubt if any two Google search results are the same these days.

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  6. Oops, apologies for the repeated sentences - my bad editing.

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