The intelligent pursuit of happiness

Happiness is what many people say they want, and it certainly ranked high in the minds of the authors of the American constitution, which may be a recommendation, or a warning. Centuries later psychologists have joined in the pursuit, swimming into the waters formerly infested by philosophers to make their helpful suggestions: count your blessings, set your expectations low, love your neighbour unless they are married to someone else, take each day as it comes, live for the moment, and never let a fatuous banality remain unrepeated.

As you may detect, from time to time I have tried to take a positive view of life, but felt too gloomy to carry out all the uplifting exercises with the required conscientiousness. Perhaps, other than having a tragic sentiment towards life as Miguel de Unamuno so aptly decribed it, I was aware from Lykken’s work that happiness levels have a homeostatic quality, and tend to oscillate around a personal mean in the long term, the absolute level of which has a genetic component.

It was with gloomy interest that I came across a paper which has tracked happiness estimates long term, and linked them with other personal characteristics such as personality and intelligence.

In “Why is intelligence associated with stability of happiness” British Journal of Psychology (2014) 105, 316-337 Satoshi Kanazawa looked at life course variability in happiness in the National Child Development Study over 18 years.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/doi/10.1111/bjop.12039/abstract

In the National Child Development Study, life-course variability in happiness over 18 years was significantly negatively associated with its mean level (happier individuals were more stable in their happiness, and it was not due to the ceiling effect), as well as childhood general intelligence and all Big Five personality factors (except for Agreeableness). In a multiple regression analysis, childhood general intelligence was the strongest predictor of life-course variability in life satisfaction, stronger than all Big Five personality factors, including Emotional stability. More intelligent individuals were significantly more stable in their happiness, and it was not entirely because: (1) they were more educated and wealthier (even though they were); (2) they were healthier (even though they were); (3) they were more stable in their marital status (even though they were); (4) they were happier (even though they were); (5) they were better able to assess their own happiness accurately (even though they were); or (6) they were better able to recall their previous responses more accurately or they were more honest in their survey responses (even though they were both). While I could exclude all of these alternative explanations, it ultimately remained unclear why more intelligent individuals were more stable in their happiness.

Kanazawa reviews the literature, and sets out some expectations: Childhood general intelligence is significantly positively associated with education and earnings; more intelligent individuals on average achieve greater education and earn more money. Intelligence [low] also predicts negative life events, such as accidents, injuries, and unemployment. If more intelligent individuals exercise greater control over their life circumstances, because their resources protect them from unexpected external shocks in their environment, then we would expect more intelligent, more educated and wealthier individuals to experience less variability in their subjective well-being over time. Studies in positive psychology generally show that individuals return to their baseline ‘happiness set point’ after major life events, both positive and negative. So, if less intelligent, and thus less educated and wealthy, individuals experience more negative life events, which temporarily lower their subjective well-being before they return to their baseline ‘happiness set points’, then they are expected to have greater life-course variability in happiness.

Intelligence is associated with health and longevity, and more intelligent children on average tend to live longer and healthier lives than less intelligent children, although it is not known why. Health is significantly associated with psychological well-being. So, it is possible that more intelligent individuals are more stable in their happiness over time because they are more likely to remain constantly healthy than less intelligent individuals.

The National Child Development Study (NCDS) is a large-scale prospectively longitudinal study, which has followed British respondents since birth for more than half a century. Look on this work, ye mighty, and weep. If you want a monument to these island people, look no further. For no other purpose than wanting to know how to give children good lives, all babies (n = 17,419) born in Great Britain (England, Wales, and Scotland) during 03–09 March 1958 were tested, re-interviewed in 1965 (n = 15,496), in 1969 (n = 18,285), in 1974 (n = 14,469), in 1981 (n = 12,537), in 1991 (n = 11,469), in 1999–2000 (n = 11,419), in 2004–2005 (n = 9,534), and in 2008–2009 by which time they were age 50–51 (n = 9,790). If you want this level of intellectual curiosity and altruistic concern for others, avoid caliphates.

The NCDS has one of the strongest measures of childhood general intelligence of all large-scale surveys. The respondents took multiple intelligence tests at Ages 7, 11, and 16. At 7, they took four cognitive tests (Copying Designs, Draw-a-Man, Southgate Group Reading, and Problem Arithmetic). At 11, they took five cognitive tests (Verbal General Ability, Nonverbal General Ability, Reading Comprehension, Mathematical, and Copying Designs). At 16, they took two cognitive tests (Reading Comprehension and Mathematical Comprehension).

Kanazawa did a factor analysis at each age to compute their general intelligence. All cognitive test scores at each age loaded only on one latent factor, with reasonably high factor loadings (Age 7: Copying Designs = .67, Draw-a-Man = .70, Southgate Group Reading = .78, and Problem Arithmetic = .76; Age 11: Verbal General Ability = .92, Nonverbal General Ability = .89, Reading Comprehension = .86, Mathematical = .90, and Copying Designs = .49; Age 16: Reading Comprehension = .91, and Mathematics Comprehension = .91). The latent general intelligence scores at each age were converted into the standard IQ metric, with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Then, he performed a second-order factor analysis with the IQ scores at three different ages to compute the overall childhood general intelligence score. The three IQ scores loaded only on one latent factor with very high factor loadings (Age 7 = .87; Age 11 = .95; Age 16 = .92). He used the childhood general intelligence score in the standard IQ metric as the main independent variable in his analyses of the life-course variability in subjective well-being.

Incidentally, it is a general rule that all cognitive tests load on a common factor. They do not have to do so. It’s just the way the results come out. The Big Five Personality Factors were only measured at age 51. Psychologists hadn’t got themselves sufficiently together on the factor analysis of personality 50 years ago when the surveys started. Anyway, personality doesn’t change all that much over the life course.

Questionnaire reports about life satisfaction can be unreliable, but the long term survey has an internal check: respondent had been asked how satisfied with life they expected to be in 10 years time, and that estimate could be compared with their actual reports a decade later. Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals appeared to be slightly better able to predict their future level of happiness than less intelligent individuals. He used the prediction inaccuracies at ages 33 and 42 as proxy measures of the respondent's ability to assess their own current level of subjective well-being accurately. Interestingly, more intelligent NCDS respondents were simultaneously more accurate in their recall and more honest in their responses, assessed by looking at another question about how tall they were, their accuracy and honesty calculated when their heights were actually measured in a later sweep of the survey.

Now to the results. The first point to make, cautiously, is that since this is an excellent, totally representative, large population sample, even small effects will be detected. The figure below shows the effect of intelligence in reducing happiness variability, and that is dramatic enough. The two extreme categories of childhood general intelligence – those with IQs below 75 and those with IQs above 125 – were separated by nearly one full standard deviation in the life-course variability in life satisfaction. However, many of the overall correlations are relatively small.

 

 

Although childhood intelligence is the best predictor of happiness, Kanazawa says he does not know why. This is true in terms of the data set, and represents the restraint expected of a researcher. However, as  a mere commentator I am allowed to speculate. Given the angry criticism some people have shown Nicholas Wade for speculating about the role of genetics in the development of different societies, this may seem a very hazardous enterprise. Nonetheless, here is my speculation. Intelligence is a resource, and intelligent people know it. They may feel they will be able to overcome problems, or at the very least work round them because of their higher level of ability. This gives them the equivalent of money in the bank, available to deal with a rainy day. So, every reverse can be seen for what it is: a nuisance, not a tragedy. The less able have less in the bank. They cannot dampen down the oscillations in mood brought about by adversity. They meet the big waves in a smaller boat, and have a rougher passage.

Can this speculation be tested? It would predict that all life reverses would be overcome more quickly by intelligent persons, with the possible exception of losing a intellectually demanding job, which would damage their sense of intellectual capital. It should predict a lower rate of suicide, which is against the current findings. I may need to work on this speculation a little further.

Note: Marty Seligman was not harmed in the writing of this post.

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.

A distant mirror of Ebola

The current outbreak of Ebola reminds me of Barbara Tuchman’s account of the 14th Century great pestilence in “A Distant Mirror” (MacMillan 1979). Like Ebola it was highly lethal, untreatable and transmitted by bodily fluids. Although it was not realized at the time, bubonic plague was initially transmitted by rats and fleas, and later it infected the lungs of human victims and spread even faster by respiratory infection, and so became almost impossible to contain in centres of population: an aerosol turbo-charged Ebola, in fact.

Here is Tuchman’s description (page 108) of how some Medieval European towns responded to the plague, which had death rates of approaching 70% in urban centres, and an overall death rate estimated at about 30% in Europe as a whole.

Stern measures of quarantine were ordered by many cities. As soon as Pisa and Lucca were afflicted, their neighbour Pistoia forbade any of its citizens who might be visiting or doing business in the stricken cities to return home, and likewise forbade the importation of wool and linen. The Doge and Council of Venice ordered the burial on the islands to a depth of at least five feet and organised a barge service to transport the corpses. Poland established a quarantine at its frontiers which succeeded in giving it relative immunity. Draconian measures were adopted by the despot of Milan, Archbishop Giovanni Visconti, head of the most uninhibited ruling family of the 14th century. He ordered that the first three houses in which the plague was discovered were to be walled up with their inhabitants inside, enclosing the well, the sick, and the dead in a common tomb. Whether or not owing to his promptitude, Milan escaped lightly in the roll of the dead.

Frankly, given that in 1347 Europeans had no idea how any disease was transmitted, let alone bubonic plague, prompt disposal of corpses and quarantine worked pretty well. Some Medieval Europeans worked out the basics of the pestilence from sharp observation, and then implemented the necessary preventive steps without hesitation or deviation. The towns that did so survived better.

We need to be careful in our comparisons: Europe as a whole suffered greatly, and could have done much better if the vectors of the plague had been understood. From our perspective, they lacked enlightenment. What is most significant is that even in relative ignorance and in the midst of “the end of the world” when all were dying around them, some Medieval Europeans were able to organise themselves to outwit a profound threat they had never encountered before. Clever move. It was not their expert culture, since officialdom had concluded that the cause lay in an unfavourable conjunction of planets. No help there. Rather, it was about making reasonable real world inferences, having a clear plan and then putting it into action.

Surely anyone ought to be able to do that, faced with a less transmissible plague and having far greater knowledge in 2014 ?

Ebola and the morality of governments

 

Medecins sans Frontieres are working in Liberia, and have given an interview today to the BBC saying that Liberia’s official figures were "under-representing the reality", and that the health system was "falling apart".

The MSF co-ordinator for Liberia, Lindis Hurum, told the BBC: "Our capacity is stretched beyond anything that we ever done before in regards to ebola response." She said five of the biggest hospitals in the capital Monrovia had closed for more than a week. "Some of them have now started to re-open but there are other hospitals in other counties that are just abandoned by the staff. We are definitely seeing the whole health care system that is falling apart."

The BBC story picture shows a sidewalk notice board showing Ebola related news, including a scoreboard with “Ebola 7 Govt 1” which shows that at least one chalkboard blogger is maintaining the dry humour of an independent mind. Less reassuring is the news that a Govt Minister has had to explain that the local nut-based cola, Bitter Kola, is not a cure for the disease.

Liberia was colonized by African Americans in 1820. The Wikipedia entry estimated life expectancy to be 57.4 years in 2012, a fertility rate of 5.9 births per woman, maternal mortality at 990 per 100,000 births in 2010. Communicable diseases are widespread, including tuberculosis, diarrheal diseases and malaria. Liberia imports 90% of its rice, a staple food, and is extremely vulnerable to food shortages. In 2007, 20.4% of children under the age of 5 were malnourished. In 2008, only 17% of the population had access to adequate sanitation facilities.

To put it mildly, Liberia is not a poster child of governance. This leads to a dilemma: if a country cannot protect its citizens from a disease which requires soap, disinfectant and body bags, do we send in extra support for international health agencies to do the job that Liberians cannot do, and then do the same across West Africa, or do we send them instructions and exhortations and hope for the best?

Ebola unsolved: WHO spells out the basics

The first time I took part in a World Health Organisation Working Party I was taken downstairs after the morning meeting for lunch in the luxurious canteen, where the food was much better and the view more alluring than in the medical school staff dining room back in London.

As we went back to start the afternoon session my host pointed pointed to a very large, two storey high convoluted and paint be-splattered painting by Jackson Pollock (or by a close cousin of that esteemed artist) which adorned the central lobby. I looked at it with little relish, at a loss as to what to say. “By common consent” my host remarked “this is the clearest depiction of the WHO organisational structure”.

The World Health Organisation, for only the third time in recent years, has issued a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) warning. I have my doubts about any committee process, but I have picked out the main points from the statement. The extraordinary thing is that it has been written almost as if it were a training manual for aspiring public health workers.

The current EVD outbreak began in Guinea in December 2013. This outbreak now involves transmission in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. As of 4 August 2014, countries have reported 1 711 cases (1 070 confirmed, 436 probable, 205 suspect), including 932 deaths. This is currently the largest EVD outbreak ever recorded. In response to the outbreak, a number of unaffected countries have made a range of travel related advice or recommendations.

Several challenges were noted for the affected countries:

• their health systems are fragile with significant deficits in human, financial and material resources, resulting in compromised ability to mount an adequate Ebola outbreak control response;
• inexperience in dealing with Ebola outbreaks; misperceptions of the disease, including how the disease is transmitted, are common and continue to be a major challenge in some communities;
• high mobility of populations and several instances of cross-border movement of travellers with infection;
• several generations of transmission have occurred in the three capital cities of Conakry (Guinea); Monrovia (Liberia); and Freetown (Sierra Leone); and
• a high number of infections have been identified among health-care workers, highlighting inadequate infection control practices in many facilities.

The statement then goes on to give States with Ebola transmission some practical advice, including that they should:

provide immediate access to emergency financing to initiate and sustain response operations; and ensure all necessary measures are taken to mobilize and remunerate (my emphasis) the necessary health care workforce; meet regularly with affected communities and to make site visits to treatment centres; establish an emergency operation centre to coordinate support across all partners, and across the information, security, finance and other relevant sectors, to ensure efficient and effective implementation and monitoring of comprehensive Ebola control measures. These measures must include infection prevention and control, community awareness, surveillance, accurate laboratory diagnostic testing, contact tracing and monitoring, case management, and communication of timely and accurate information among countries. For all infected and high risks areas, similar mechanisms should be established at the state/province and local levels to ensure close coordination across all levels.

States should ensure that there is a large-scale and sustained effort to fully engage the community – through local, religious and traditional leaders and healers – so communities play a central role in case identification, contact tracing and risk education; the population should be made fully aware of the benefits of early treatment.

It is essential that a strong supply pipeline be established to ensure that sufficient medical commodities, especially personal protective equipment, are available to those who appropriately need them, including health care workers, laboratory technicians, cleaning staff, burial personnel and others that may come in contact with infected persons or contaminated materials.

In areas of intense transmission (e.g. the cross border area of Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia), the provision of quality clinical care, and material and psychosocial support for the affected populations should be used as the primary basis for reducing the movement of people, but extraordinary supplemental measures such as quarantine should be used as considered necessary.

States should ensure health care workers receive: adequate security measures for their safety and protection; timely payment of salaries and, as appropriate, hazard pay; and appropriate education and training

States should ensure that: treatment centres and reliable diagnostic laboratories are situated as closely as possible to areas of transmission; that these facilities have adequate numbers of trained staff, and sufficient equipment and supplies relative to the caseload; that sufficient security is provided to ensure both the safety of staff and to minimize the risk of premature removal of patients from treatment centres; and that staff are regularly reminded and monitored to ensure compliance with Infection Prevention and Control.

States should conduct exit screening of all persons at international airports, seaports and major land crossings, for unexplained febrile illness consistent with potential Ebola infection. The exit screening should consist of, at a minimum, a questionnaire, a temperature measurement and, if there is a fever, an assessment of the risk that the fever is caused by EVD. Any person with an illness consistent with EVD should not be allowed to travel unless the travel is part of an appropriate medical evacuation.

There should be no international travel of Ebola contacts or cases, unless the travel is part of an appropriate medical evacuation. To minimize the risk of international spread of EVD:

• Confirmed cases should immediately be isolated and treated in an Ebola Treatment Centre with no national or international travel until 2 Ebola-specific diagnostic tests conducted at least 48 hours apart are negative;
• Contacts (which do not include properly protected health workers and laboratory staff who have had no unprotected exposure) should be monitored daily, with restricted national travel and no international travel until 21 days after exposure;
• Probable and suspect cases should immediately be isolated and their travel should be restricted in accordance with their classification as either a confirmed case or contact.

• States should ensure funerals and burials are conducted by well-trained personnel, with provision made for the presence of the family and cultural practices, and in accordance with national health regulations, to reduce the risk of Ebola infection.

 

There is even more detail in the document, but I think you get the drift of it. The World Health Organisation has to be polite and helpful, because that is part of their consensus building remit, but any halfway competent Parish Council in a remote European backwater would be offended to receive such a document, because it makes it clear that the afflicted countries have not been able to organise themselves to give their citizens basic health protection, nor have they managed to get through to them the elementary processes of disease control.

Coincidentally, I have just been reading the draft of an upcoming paper by Heiner Ridermann on the testing of Piaget’s stage of formal operations among a small sample of Germans and Nigerians. Despite the Nigerians being well educated there are very significant gaps of understanding on their part about practical health matters, and a very much higher belief in the efficacy of prayer. Replicating this result on a much larger and more representative sample will be interesting.

Press reports suggest that the official case numbers are a gross underestimate, that many health workers have abandoned their posts, that no attempts have been made to trace the contacts of confirmed cases, and that the bodies of Ebola victims are frequently left unburied. Currently, the Ebola virus seems to be doing very well, all 7 genes of it.

Another way to fiddle exam marks

 

Years ago I was appointed External Examiner in Psychology at another medical school. I looked at all the papers of students with grades discrepancies between the two internal examiners, and gave my opinion as to what their final marks should be. I also looked at another 20% of the papers to compare those with the list of students with disputed marks, just to calibrate the marking, then looked at the top marked students in detail to agree the prize winners, and looked at the bottom scorers in even more detail to see who should spend the summer re-sitting the Behavioural Science exam. Then I looked at the distribution of the marks, which was fairly tightly distributed round the magic 55% figure, which ensured that most people passed, and thus did not spoil the teacher’s summer by requiring extra teaching to pass the re-sit exam. I think I did a plot of the scores, and planned to discuss widening the range of scores with the internal examiners in Psychology.

All pretty straightforward, but time consuming. Examining is not a well paid occupation, more of a chore than an honour, with some aspects of religious ritual. I felt I had completed my task competently. It was a medical school at which I had taught part of a psychology course for many years. I knew the teachers to be dedicated and enthusiastic. I knew I would have to attend an Examiner’s meeting at which I would make a few suggestions for improvements, commend the course, but would then quickly get back to work at my own medical school.

At this point, having announced that I had completed my task, my colleagues warned me that they and their Psychology course were under attack from other departments, because the Psychology failure rate was seen as unacceptably high. The other traditional courses had failed fewer students, and the occasional severe failure to meet the Psychology standard might lead to the loss of a student who had passed Anatomy and Physiology. By way of background, Psychology and Sociology had been forced on Medical Schools by a Government enquiry, the Todd Report, which sought to ensure that doctors were more patient-focussed, and more aware of psychological issues. This was resented by the older traditional subjects, who hated having lost teaching time to these upstart and probably Marxist intruders. Yes, dear reader, I was part of a revolutionary cadre, overturning the ancient cultures of conceit: the Che Guevara of communicating with patients.

Now look at my first paragraph, and spot my most significant omission. As External Examiner I knew the Psychology syllabus at most medical schools. They were all independent, but all covered the same sorts of key issues, with some slight differences: patient communication, psychology of pain, the placebo response, anxiety, depression etc. I knew at a glance that the exam questions (which I had moderated before they were set) were a fair representation of the course as taught. I knew that the questions were a sub-sample of all the possible questions that could have been set. It was necessary to revise much of the course in order to be sure of getting questions you could answer. Still wonder what’s missing before I can judge the Psychology scores against the other subjects? Look at the sequence in a logical order: assume the Todd Report correctly defined the national standard for Behavioural Science, of which Psychology was part; assume that the Syllabus was fair representation of the national standard; assume that the Exam was a fair representation of the course as taught (not every subject taught will be examined on any particular year); and then assume that the Exam had been properly marked, with two internal examiners working independently, then consulting each other afterwards with their marks, then turning to the External Examiner to resolve differences. Perfect?

If you present experts with a fault tree they tend to believe that it has covered all possible problems (even if about a third of it is missing). Since experts are rational people, and mostly good natured, they tend to have difficulty believing that some people will do stupid, dishonest and malevolent acts.

My Psychology colleagues explained to me that the reason the Physiology exam never had failures, or very very few failures, is that they always did a “revision” teaching session at the end of term, always very well attended, at which they discussed the sorts of topics “which might come up in the exam”. Even the dullest rugger bugger medic could pick up the clues. Passes all round.

Psychology did not do this, either out of honesty or plain innocence, imagining that exams ought to be a test of what students actually knew.

The official Examiner’s meeting was chaired by the Dean of the Medical School. This being London he was already dressed in his legal robes as a Queen’s Council, since he was about to go off to the High Court on another, presumably far more important, matter. As predicted, the Physiologists made their attack: “Psychology, a new subject, is being far too harsh, and is failing students whom we know to be perfectly good future medics, who have done well in our Physiology exam”.

The Dean turned to me slowly, raised an eyebrow, and with infinite politeness said: “Dr Thompson?” I smiled in a manner which I hope could be described as understanding and even sweet, and replied that the overall results on examinations often depended largely on the extent to which the questions could be predicted by students, and that perhaps, just possibly, the Physiology questions were habitually more predictable than the Psychology questions.

The Dean accepted our marks without further discussion, and some students had a summer in which they learned some Psychology. Whether they became better doctors is hard to say.

Do universities award honest grades?

 

National scholastic exam results should be honest, firstly because honesty is the best policy in a moral sense; secondly because honest results transmit the most information; thirdly because honest results lead to the best candidates getting the best jobs, which is the best for society; and fourthly because honest results allow scholastic institutions to be evaluated and improved.

None of this is the case for the most important scholastic results: university grades. Each university teaches their own version of each discipline and examines it in their own way. Sure, there are external examiners, and they can sometimes guide an errant institution towards best practice, but it is an uphill struggle.

So, universities have to make up the final degree results. Getting a ranking of the students is the easy bit, particularly because with sufficient observation one can probably work out which are the strongest students in the first term. Then the tricky bit heaves into view. Do we want to be honest about what the students actually know, or do we find it expedient to make them, and the university, look good? Difficult question isn’t it? The answer takes about 5 seconds. The university does not want to admit that they have let in a bunch of dullards, that the teachers are incompetent, the courses misconceived, the exams too easy and the whole institution a refuge for inebriated idiots. However true, it is best not to disclose this to students, parents and grant-giving bodies, let alone to the locals who are wearily familiar with the institution’s many shortcomings. Therefore each department decides upon the level of mendacity required to make them look good as teachers, and to keep their students happy. They set an average grade which makes most students appear good enough, and a substantial minority to appear to be very good indeed. No-one does very badly. All must have prizes.

Students are now consumers. They have consumed industrial quantities of stupifying substances, have avoided most forms of academic enlightenment and effort, yet are entrusted with providing the data on which university teachers will be rewarded and promoted, by giving their hazy recollections about which teachers made them laugh earlier in the term.

For hard pressed university teachers, exam marking is simplified by this artful procedure. In advance they decide on the average grade which will fulfil the above mentioned market requirements. Some better students will be chosen to get marks somewhat above that Platonic average, and a few will get marks a little below it, in a simulacrum of academic judgment. Standard deviations narrow, distributions are skewed toward respectably higher marks, and nasty scenes and confrontations are avoided.

Into this maelstrom of deceit swim Butcher, McEwan and Weerapana, economists from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, to report on what happens when the sloppy inflationist running dog departments at that institution (Spanish, Women’s Studies, Italian, Chinese, Anthropology, Africana Studies, English) are brought into line with the cool and restrained marking of their more honest colleagues (Astronomy, Physics, Mathematics, Geology, Economics, Quantitative Reasoning, Biological Sciences, Chemistry).

The Effects of an Anti-Grade-Inflation Policy at Wellesley College. Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 28, Number 3—Summer 2014—Pages 189–204

http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.28.3.189

This paper evaluates an anti-grade-inflation policy that capped most course averages at a B+. The cap was biding for high-grading departments (in the humanities and social sciences) and was not binding for low-grading departments (in economics and sciences), facilitating a difference-in-differences analysis. Professors complied with the policy by reducing compression at the top of the grade distribution. It had little effect on receipt of top honors, but affected receipt of magna cum laude. In departments affected by the cap, the policy expanded racial gaps in grades, reduced enrollments and majors, and lowered student ratings of professors.

The estimated drop in grades in treated departments is smaller for Latina students but much larger than average for black students (including African-Americans and foreign students who self-identify as black), those with low SAT verbal scores, and those with low Quantitative Reasoning scores.

In brief, the accuracy and honesty of the grades improve, though in the long run these departments drift towards their old habits of debasing the currency. Some racial difference increase, but overall the grades become more honest and more informative.

The downside is that Wellesley College students now look bad compared to others from more sloppy institutions. A Wellesley student who gets the controlled and restrained grade average score of 3.3 is inconvenienced in a market place where higher fake scores are the norm. Recruiting departments in desirable companies cannot hope to keep up with precise calculations as to how each university marks their exams. For ease of selection it would make sense for them to rank candidates by grade point average, and then glance at the awarding institutions afterwards.

Of course, if there were an agreed ranking of institutions (based on the SAT grade score averages of the entrants) it would be possible, assuming employers have the interest and the ability to apply the corrections, to create a new national ranking system. Possible, but difficult and time consuming. The authors make a final lament:

Any institution that attempts to deal with grade inflation on its own must consider the possibility of adverse consequences of this unilateral disarmament. At Wellesley College, for example, prospective students, current students, and recent alums all worry that systematically lower grades may disadvantage them relative to students at other institutions when they present their grades to those outside the college. They point to examples of web-based job application systems that will not let them proceed if their GPA is below at 3.5. The economist’s answer that firms relying on poor information to hire are likely to fare poorly and to be poor employers in the long run proves remarkably uncomforting to undergraduates. These concerns lead to pressure to reverse the grade policy. If grade inflation is a systemic problem leading to inefficient allocation of resources, then colleges and universities may wish to consider acting together in response.

It is the tragedy of the commons all over again. Debased institutions confer mendacious advantage to their students and garner resources whilst honest institutions hamper their students in the market place of life. You and I know what the procedure should be: standardise the scores on a national basis, taking into consideration student grade point totals on key subjects prior to university entrance as a way of grading the institutions and correcting for institution heterogeneity. The current system is measuring students with a rubber ruler, not with a platinum meter in a vault (or more precisely the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second). Someone from on high has to force change and bring the degree counterfeiters into line. Some modern day Newton, as Master of the Mint of Graduates.

Until then, university grades are primarily a moral issue.

CCACE 7th Annual Research Day

 

Edinburgh is the city that Athens could have been if only it had a constant supply of drizzle. Faced with an inclement Northern climate, the disputative people on this rocky outcrop by the North Sea have thrown cantankerous thunderbolts at all and sundry, though mostly South. This little conference put together by the Deary gang may be your last chance to see Edinburgh before it casts off the surly bonds of English sovereignty and sails into glorious independence, penury and clan warfare, bewildered upon a peak in Darien. (It was their last disastrous venture in Central America which cast the bankrupted Scots into the hands of their ancient enemies).

Here is the pre-Independence bill of fare:

Wednesday 27^th August 2014

Room F21, Department of Psychology

7 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ

Draft Programme

12.00 noon Lunch and poster session (lower concourse)

1.00pm Welcome from CCACE Director, Professor Ian Deary

1.15pm Keynote presentation

Title: “The ENIGMA Project: Investigating Brain Diseases with Imaging and Genetics in 29,000 People”

Professor Paul Thompson, Brain Research Institute, UCLA

2.15pm “La Nouvelle Vague”: Some recent large research programmes

European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia Consortium, Craig Ritchie

“STratifying Resilience and Depression Longitudinally (STRADL) – Wellcome Trust strategic award”, Andrew McIntosh

"Development of a software application for detection and monitoring of attentional deficits in delirium" (MRC Developmental Pathway Funding Scheme), Zoe Tieges

2.45pm CCACE PhD student talk

“Life after CCACE: What was my PhD about, what did it give me, and what did I do with it?”, Donald Lyall

3.00pm Tea/coffee break (lower concourse)

CCACE’s Research Groups

3.15pm Premier of Anne Milne’s “The Living Brain”, a Lothian Birth Cohort film

3.30pm Cognitive epidemiology

“Psychological distress as a risk factor for death from a variety of causes”, Tom Russ

3.45pm Human cognitive ageing: Individual differences

“Is the world too fast when we’re slowing down?”, Stuart Ritchie

4.00pm Human cognitive ageing: Human cognitive neuroscience

Three short talks from current PhD students

4.00-4-04 - “The effect of funding sources on donepezil randomised controlled trials”, Lewis Killin

4.04-4.08 - “Cognitive advantage in bilingualism: an example of publication bias”, Angela de Bruin

4.08-4.12 - "Autobiographical thinking interferes with episodic memory consolidation", Michael Craig

4.12-4.15 - Discussion on HCN presentations

4.15pm Mechanisms of cognitive ageing

“Delirium and cognitive decline: What is the pathological basis?”, Daniel Davis

4.30pm Genetics and statistics of brain ageing

“DNA methylation and aging in the Lothian Birth Cohorts”, Riccardo Marioni

4.45pm Human and animal brain imaging

“From birth to old age: New imaging of brain ageing”, David Dickie

5.00pm Closing remarks and invitation to drinks reception, Professor Ian Deary

5.10pm Drinks reception (lower concourse)

 

Contact:  caroline.brett@ed.ac.uk

Solving Ebola

The press have been discussing the current outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. They stress that it is an awful way to die, that there is no cure, and that health workers are dying despite apparently taking all necessary precautions. More learned writers have been explaining that Ebola is quite hard to catch unless you come into direct contact with contaminated bodily fluids, and that simple precautions should be enough to contain it. Yet other commentators are pointing out that the death rate is very low compared to other well known diseases, and that we need to keep the threat in perspective. So, we have an intelligence test item to solve.

The World Health Organization, in partnership with the Ministries of Health in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria announced a cumulative total of 1440 suspect and confirmed cases of Ebola virus disease (EVD) and 826 deaths, as of July 30, 2014. Of the 1440 clinical cases, 953 cases have been laboratory confirmed for Ebola virus infection. Previous outbreaks have been more often in the Congo, Gabon and Uganda.

Infectious disease dynamics can be modelled, and controlling this outbreak should be pretty easy, at least from a conceptual point of view. This disease is a short-incubation period (about three weeks), relatively low transmissibility, high lethality infection. Whereas a sneeze can transmit pathogens with great efficiency, hence the easy airborne spread of influenza, avoiding fluids is easier. Soap, water, disinfectants, protective clothing for nurses, body bags for victims, quick burial in chlorine covered graves or better still cremation, quarantine for all contacts, and the same procedures for those quarantined victims if they die: all of these should be sufficient. In terms of disease control it should be noted that men who have recovered from the disease can still transmit the virus through their semen for up to 7 weeks after recovery from illness. Severely ill patients require intensive supportive care. Patients are frequently dehydrated and require oral rehydration with solutions containing electrolytes or intravenous fluids. No specific treatment is available. New drug therapies are being evaluated. Barrier nursing is required to protect health staff, but the standards of protection required are very high, and hard to observe when health workers are subject to high ambient temperatures. If treatment is really unlikely to help victims, then in a big outbreak it might best to avoid attempts at close contact nursing, and rely on quarantine and subsequent disinfection as the best way to save more lives. Perhaps hydration packs distributed to homes under quarantine would be best, but that is for public health specialists to judge.

Why isn’t all this happening? Many of the locals either do not understand the transmission method (from forest animals like bats), or chose to disbelieve it, and are not changing their behaviours regarding funereal procedures, which involve bathing and kissing the corpse, all of which are part of altruistic respect for the dead person. The locals are also prey to false correlation: they see people who are mildly ill going into hospital, and then taken out dead soon afterward by space-suited Western health workers. In terms of Kahneman’s Type 1 fast and sloppy thinking, this is understandable. Ebola hospitals are dangerous places. Westerners in space suits are unusual and disturbing, and in fact even the notion of a hospital may be the wrong strategy in these outbreaks. However, if a populace suspect that health workers spraying disinfectant may be malevolently spreading bottled Ebola, then there is a massive health education challenge to be faced.

Western doctors very much want to help, but getting to the outbreak locations they quickly find that local facilities are inadequate, that barrier nursing is very difficult to achieve to a high standard and, although this is less often conceded, that nursing might be of little real help. However, early treatment improves outcomes, and about 40%  are pulling through at the moment.  Hence the wish to provide treatment, and some groups like Medecins sans Frontieres have not lost doctors to Ebola. Wanting to help others is humanity at its best. These missionary doctors write heart-wrenching diaries about families being wiped out, and about their lack of resources, about the stigma with which the afflicted are treated and about their guilt at seeing ill patients dying without comforters next to them. They don’t publically question why the countries in which they operate are in such a mess. The conventional answer is that they are poor and wracked by conflict.

Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria, the countries in the front line of this particular outbreak, share West African environments. Sierra Leone and Liberia have a particular history, in that they were formed and settled to take repatriated American slaves. From some points of view, they should be models of governance. That has not been the case. If all these countries had been governed well even remote country hospitals would have had basic resources, and there would have been widespread knowledge of basic hygiene and disease control. Quarantine would have been explained, established and monitored.

Can we deduce anything from the failure to deal with the epidemic? The governments of these countries may have regarded their poorer citizens as being of little interest to them, living as they do in poverty in remote villages near tropical forests. Government officials tend to be snooty, and African governments have often disregarded the needs of their citizens. They say that they have given plenty of public health warnings, but the disease keeps spreading. Disasters test the morality of the organising structure, and those structures have often been found wanting.

Could it be that these countries simply don’t understand the threat and don’t understand how to deal with it, or that they don’t do so in sufficient numbers to provide an effective response?

Little is known with certainty about intelligence levels in these countries. Those governments do not measure cognitive ability, nor do they participate in the PISA and other international scholastic studies. If one gathers together various published papers on intelligence test results, then the IQ figures for the Congo are in the 64 to 73 range; for Guinea 70; for Ghana 60-80; for Nigeria 64-70; and Sierra Leone 64. Some of the samples are of reasonable size, one and a half thousand, so it is not all a patchwork of tiny studies, though there is plenty of room for improvement. The figures are so low by Western standards that they are hard to believe, but when educational elites in South Africa are tested they are often in the IQ 100 range, consistent with being the top 2% of a population which has an actual mean of IQ 70.

Botswana is an exceptional African country in many ways, has put a lot of money into education, and has participated in Trends in International Mathematics and Science 2011, and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study 2o11. Botswana is a test case, an exemplar of the current achievement of an African country which takes education seriously. If you look at their scholastic achievement and compare it with the achievements of countries with well established IQ measures, then Botswana comes out at an estimated IQ of 70. Sub-Sarahan African intelligence test results have been much debated by intelligence researchers, and the estimates range from about IQ 70 from Richard Lynn to IQ 80 from Jelte Wicherts. The key argument is about the representativeness of samples. The tests seem to be OK, much to popular surprise. Humans in all continents appear to solve basic problems in the same way. Africans have the same cognitive operating system as other continental groups. There are power differences, but not operating system incompatibilities.

Are the behaviours of the average citizens in these countries consistent with these estimates? Western critics of international intelligence testing regard these estimates with considerable scepticism, particularly considering that IQ 70 is seen as too low to lead an independent life and earn a living in Western economies. However, that is the way the results come out, and the match with achievements is reasonably close, certainly when scholastic achievements are measured. Although all countries have the equivalent of witchdoctors, in the West these are usually a homeopathic side-line and less dominant in public health, but in African countries they still sway many people on important health matters. Seen from afar, the response to Ebola has not been intelligent. Equally, the response to HIV has often been weak and contradictory.

Finally, should we be less alarmed about Ebola, and be more scared of measles, malaria and car accidents? Those who would ask us to bear in mind these comparative statistics misunderstand human nature. New threats demand great fear, which is the prudent reaction till the true nature of the predator is known. We humans are also concerned about how we die. Bleeding to death from a galloping haemorrhagic fever is far more scary than our favoured exit, to breathe our last as peacefully as possible, expiring gently, entirely unblemished, while lying in clean sheets in our own house with our loving family in attendance. Furthermore, as even the dullest actuary must know, the statistics on Ebola are comforting only at the moment. If this outbreak continues to be mismanaged, the numbers could look very different in a few year’s time. Then we would have to say that we had failed a simple test in public health.

Hope not.

How to achieve your potential, and use less of your brain

 

I have never achieved my potential. Potential is indeterminate, though not infinite; achievements are limited by ability, inclination and lifespan.

Personally, although I am sad when thinking about all the things I could have achieved, my greatest sadness is for that smallest subset: those things which were in the believable category. I have given up, only slightly reluctantly, the thought that I might have solved the problems of the Middle East, but remain troubled that my few publications were restricted to reporting findings, not proposing useful theories. So, like all regretful ruminations, my focus is selective: I concentrate on the perceived difference between my immense talents and my humdrum achievements, but I do not dwell on the possibility that I was promoted above my true ability level, and that I should count myself lucky to have used my meagre talents to disproportionately good effect.

The seduction of the word “potential” is that it is immensely flattering: it is the “panoply of talents” trope with which teachers seek to encourage their run of the mill students, a category which encompasses most of us. No-one can deny potential, or so the contemporary mores demand, but it leads people to forget that errors of prediction go both ways.

In education we have to deal with over and under achievement. Typically we give students a test of ability and another test of scholastic achievement. Relative to the predictions derived from the ability test, some students under-perform and some over-perform. Putting it in dramatic terms, some students fail to achieve their potential (but some exceed it). Educationalists rush to give special lessons to the under-achievers and (less frequently) to interview the over-achievers so as to pick up useful tips about how they did so well. Of course, even a good test of ability will not correlate perfectly with Reading or Maths so in the multiple regression equation there will be errors of prediction. By improving on the ability measures (giving two or three different ability measures  over several months and extracting a g factor) and by improving on the scholastic measures (by giving two or three different scholastic exams and extracting a S for scholarship factor) we can bump up the correlation, but there will still be errors of prediction, or residuals, as they are known. They are errors: the under achievers have not been cheated by their educators (though some attempt to sue the school systems) and the apparent over achievers have not got secrets to impart. So, no-one will exceed their potential, though some will apparently exceed their ability and some will under-perform against that standard.

Now a short word about what percentage of your brain you are using, and whether you would do better in life if you found a way of using a higher percentage of your brain. Currently, we do not have agreed measures of how much of our brains we are using. We can estimate blood flows and, subject to a whole number of assumptions, estimate the levels and areas of the brain which are active as far as our much improved, but hardly perfect, imaging systems can report to us. Question is: would using more of our brain improve our performance?

By way of analogy, consider the relationship between horsepower and the speed of a car. Cars with large engines and more horsepower accelerate faster, but relatively little horsepower (about 25 hp) is used at speed in normal cruising. With a good gearbox relatively little horsepower is required even at somewhat higher speeds, where the main load is pushing air out of the way of the car body. Although learning a new task requires concentration, repetition and practice, bright people use little of their brain power once they have mastered a task. Brighter brains can concentrate, learn and then idle at speed.

Many people have a residual and touching faith in psychological witchcraft, and would like to press a secret button (the navel, perhaps) to give a boost to their central processor when a difficult problem heaves into view. If the history of scientific discovery teaches anything, it is that valuable insights depend on learning the fundamental steps in scientific knowledge and then worrying away at big problems from many angles, all of which is time consuming. Then, once the best solution is shown to fit, the problem becomes much simpler.

So, educate yourself, but do not imagine that education of itself will lead to great new discoveries. Education is a gearbox, but it relies on the engine, and cognitive engines vary 7 fold. Do not spend even one second on trying to “use more of your brain”. You will waste more of your time, and given you fell for that nonsense, you have little time to waste.

This note was written on a laptop running at 4% of CPU capacity. At one stage it reached a maximum of 55% capacity. How very stupid of it.