Ebola expert speaks

 

Ebola is a true intelligence test item, a hard problem to solve with real consequences if you get it wrong. I have posted about Ebola several times in the last few months, but I think I covered the basic point on 5 August in “Solving Ebola” where I mentioned an obvious strategy:

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.

Your can read the whole post (link below) to check that I really said that, and that I did not immediately contradict myself.

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/solving-ebola.html

I again mentioned the advantages of quarantine on 12 August, and made a stronger case for quarantine on 3 October:

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/quarantine-for-ebola.html

The following day, 4 October, Prof Peter Piot, the Antwerp researcher who discovered Ebola in 1976 gave an interview to The Guardian/Observer. I had already mentioned him in previous posts. Most of the interview is the very interesting story, re-told many times in the past few months, about his pioneering work tracking down and understanding the new disease. It is a celebration of field work and laboratory science.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/04/ebola-zaire-peter-piot-outbreak

At the end of the interview there are some intriguing new bits.

What can really be done in a situation when anyone can become infected on the streets and, like in Monrovia, even the taxis are contaminated?

We urgently need to come up with new strategies. Currently, helpers are no longer able to care for all the patients in treatment centres. So caregivers need to teach family members who are providing care to patients how to protect themselves from infection to the extent possible. This on-site educational work is currently the greatest challenge. Sierra Leone experimented with a three-day curfew in an attempt to at least flatten out the infection curve a bit. At first I thought: "That is totally crazy." But now I wonder, "why not?" At least, as long as these measures aren't imposed with military power.

A three-day curfew sounds a bit desperate.

Yes, it is rather medieval. But what can you do? Even in 2014, we hardly have any way to combat this virus.

Do you think we might be facing the beginnings of a pandemic?

There will certainly be Ebola patients from Africa who come to us in the hopes of receiving treatment. And they might even infect a few people here who may then die. But an outbreak in Europe or North America would quickly be brought under control.

(end of extract from interview)

So, I can say, with some pride, that the tentative suggestion I made on 5^th August has received the imprimatur of The Expert on 4 October. Perhaps he reads this blog, or more likely he has just been thinking about it a little: “Yes, it is rather medieval. But what can you do? Even in 2014, we hardly have any way to combat this virus”.

However, in the tradition of the savage scepticism practiced here, I think that Prof Piot still doesn’t understand the situation. Belatedly, he now backs quarantine “as long as these measures aren't imposed with military power.”

How else does this noble bench scientist think that quarantine can be applied effectively? By his supposed education program, given to citizens who still do not accept the contagion model of disease, and who are still denying Ebola? The whole point of quarantine is that it will save the lives of many people, while inconveniencing and even threatening the lives of a smaller number. Some will die in their houses when, without quarantine, they could have rushed to safety outside, and carried the virus with them to infect others. Quarantine is a desperate measure, but dying from Ebola is worse.

Prof Piot is sanguine about African Ebola cases coming to Europe and infecting Europeans, and is sure that an outbreak would quickly be brought under control. As far as I can see, he does not advocate that we put Africa in quarantine as regards travel to Europe. The Spanish experience suggests that Europe is less prepared than we had been assured. As of this morning, 9 October, two Spanish doctors who treated the infected Spanish nurse are now under quarantine.

So, two months late, Prof Piot backs quarantine in Africa so long as it is not compulsory, but he does not want travellers from Africa to be subject to quarantine. Perhaps he does, but he hasn’t said so yet.

The Medieval Ages are much misunderstood.

Spanish Nurse Ebola “should not have happened”

 

Perhaps I have over-estimated the influence of my blog on world governments. In various posts I have tried to point out to West African governments the steps they ought to take to control the Ebola outbreak. Things like distributing rubber gloves, soap, disinfectant, instituting barrier nursing and proper disposal of bodies and contaminated wastes. I simply passed on WHO and CDC advice, and in that spirit, here is the latest from the Centre for Disease Control:

http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/transmission/

As regard the virus itself, Gire et al. have shown that the current outbreak probably arose from those involved in funeral rituals for a traditional healer who had come into contact with an Ebola patient. They suggest that diagnostic tests need to be sensitive to the changing character of the virus so as to detect it with specificity and sensitivity.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6202/1369.abstract

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6200/989.full.pdf

In former posts I also suggested that West Africans do not have very caring governments. They are not very well organised, apt to forget to pay their health workers, and far better at making grandiose pronouncements than carrying out basic health care. I didn’t really think that any West African politician would read my blog, but I hoped that I was part of a general swell of opinion, and that one of my readers might pass on the links to someone else in their health professions, and in an infinitesimal way this might have a positive influence on some part of the Ebola control program. Delusional, I know, but why should delusion be a governmental monopoly?

I also had another theme, which was to link the poor performance of these nations when facing a practical threat with their poor performance on simpler tests of problem solving. I have been drawing a parallel between the low measured ability of sub-Saharan Africans and the low ability of their politicians to gather their own resources to protect their citizens.

Pursuing that aim, I would like to broaden my canvas, and try to estimate the intelligence of Western governments, by which I mean the Governments of Europe and the USA. So far, I have been touting them as brighter and better organised governments, able to do simple, basic things like providing rubber gloves, disinfectant, relevant information in general, and barrier nursing in particular.

Now that I look more closely at these governments, I have to confess my mistake. Western African governments are hopeless, but Western European/American governments are less brilliant than expected. They are certainly not one or two standard deviations better than their poorer West African colleagues. These Western workers are well resourced, well paid, and presumably well trained professionals, working in mild climates, with democracy and proper drains. However, the authorities appear to be over-confident about their strategy: screening at airports does not work, they say; quarantine should not even be considered; and the outbreak can be dealt with by prompt tracing of contacts and good treatment for all infected persons.

In Texas a man who flew in from Liberia for what appears to have been a courting visit went to hospital feeling unwell and was sent home, where he then most probably infected his host family and a number of other persons before he was admitted again and diagnosed with Ebola. Now the hunt is on for his “contacts” at which point it becomes apparent that many contacts do not know they have that status. The problem of the Liberian (who had reportedly arrived with documents asserting that he was healthy) has been multiplied perhaps 100 times, though the infected number may be much lower, but this is unknown at this stage. Say it is 1 person, consistent with the minimal estimate of 1 in 100 contacts being missed by the health services. This would double the number of Ebola cases in Texas.

In Spain a nurse at a leading Madrid hospital has managed to catch Ebola from one of the two returned infected Spanish priest she treated. She is said to have entered the Ebola treatment room only twice, once to remove soiled diapers and once to get the dead patient’s belongings, each time in full protective clothing. The hospital is carrying out an enquiry, and in the meantime, yes you guessed it, contacts are being traced. That includes her husband and a number of people she met on her annual holiday, or at least the end part of it when she was symptomatic and infectious, plus the 21 members of staff that attended her on admission before her Ebola status was confirmed. The hospital has said it followed the correct protocols.  Photos show rather primitive makeshift barriers in corridors, and wastes were taken downstairs in the public lift. I think what they actually mean is that they think their staff followed what they imagine were the correct protocols, but now they know that either the procedures or the protocols were wrong, perhaps both. The Press is talking about the training to use the protection suits being perfunctory, and the suits not being suitable, with too much permeability. If that is so, then it may explain why Ebola is spreading so rapidly among far less well protected West African health workers, and that it is easier to catch than formerly stated.

Nature (link below) and others stress the received wisdom, which is that the key lies in treating the disease at source. Effectively, this means colonialism by Western health services sending in trained teams with physical resources to West Africa. These facilities are being built from scratch, and will concentrate on treating the staff who have been sent out (who may catch Ebola), expatriates who have caught Ebola, and local health workers who have caught Ebola. The latter category includes 382 health staff, of whom 216 have already died. These death rates are similar to the bayonet charges in the early part of the First World War.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/10/spanish-ebola-case-highlights-risks-to-healthcare-workers.html

It’s important to remember that people with Ebola don’t become infectious until they start showing symptoms, so monitoring of contacts of an Ebola-infected patient for fever is usually considered sufficient, with them being isolated only at the first hint of illness — although some authorities may choose to quarantine high-risk contacts. Such early isolation is crucial to limit the number of people they could come into contact with.

Monitoring “for fever is usually considered sufficient, with the contact being isolated only at the first hint of illness” does not reassure me. Somehow this lacks the necessary sense of urgency commensurate with the lethality of the disease.

The “tracing of contacts” procedure is beginning to look a bit cumbersome. Of course, one has to do that, but it should not be the first line of defence. It is quickly becoming untenable that every Ebola case should effectively be given the chance to infect others, and given leave to test the tracing and treatment hypothesis to destruction. The Spanish doctors group had expressed doubt about their facilities being up to the best standards, and they have been shown to have been right in their fears.

To my mind the Spanish nurse case is the most disturbing news about Ebola so far. Either Ebola is more infectious than admitted, or the safe nursing protocol is so demanding that not even a well-trained nurse in a Western hospital can follow it safely.

Humans make errors. Some even invite errors. In one notorious case of stab injuries leading to HIV there was a footnote in the research paper saying that this patient “had managed to inject himself with infected blood”. So, far from being an accidental stab injury with a sharp, this was a case of deliberate self-contamination. Humans are a funny lot.

We are now being faced by a difficult intelligence test: we need to work out whether, all things considered, the recommended strategy: “wait until people are ill and then trace the contacts” is better than quarantine. Once a case has happened it is not too reassuring to be told “it should not have happened”. The experts are quite clear that screening airline passengers “does not work”. I presume the detection rate is low and the false positives too high, by some calculation, but I don’t know why they are so dismissive about this defensive step.

The Official story is that Western health systems have been through all this before, with AIDS and SARS and so on, and that Ebola will be contained. The rise of Ebola cases in the West may indeed turn out to be easily controlled. HIV was not, but SARS was.

I may be naïve, but I assume that at some level of Ebola infection Western governments have a Plan B in a drawer somewhere. They must have such a plan, must they not?

Reaction time researcher reacts quickly

 

Showing the quick reactions which one would expect of a reaction time researcher, Scott Parker has jumped to his own defence, casting aside the diffidence of which I had accused him. He writes:

You remark on your blog that,  "What Parker avers is that the snappiest reaction times were probably due to the extremely bright and noisy lamps used by Victorians, as opposed to duller and quieter bulbs in more recent times. "  But I don't aver that. All I wanted to point out is that without lots of info about the stimuli in the various studies that Woodley et al. rely on, it's not reasonable to attribute the long-term changes in reported reaction times to changes in the intelligences of the people who did the reacting. The last sentence of the Abstract in my comment says that the reasons for the changes are "underdetermined". That's the point of the "Maybe, maybe not" subtitle. It's not merely due to my getting poor grades in my assertiveness-training classes in graduate school.

But I can come out clearly against your paragraph that begins, "I have had enough of this."  There is a large literature studying the dependence of reaction time on a considerable variety of features of the visual stimuli; I mentioned a bit of it as did Dodonova & Dodonov. People interested in, say, the dependence of reaction time on IQ scores can study that by testing all their subjects with some fixed set of stimulus parameters and response apparatuses, thereby getting rid of variation that depends on those things (doing numerous such studies with a variety of stimulus parameters and response gizmos can reveal any important interactions). No single study can do an exhaustive inventory of all such possible combinations.  The particular studies that Woodley et al. referenced are not ones that did those sorts of things carefully, but that's not a sign that no such studies exist. People interested in visual reaction time, an interesting phenomenon in its own right (with or without connection to IQ score) have done a lot of very good work. Woodley et al. used none of those, perhaps because the purpose of those studies is to show the dependence of reaction time on experimental features far removed from the subjects' IQs.

In that same paragraph of yours, you wrote, "When I went to psychological conferences I imagined these experimentalists were real scientists who used proper techniques..."  In large measure, I think your imagination was quite right. I'm an experimentalist and I think of myself as one among many real scientists who use proper techniques who even find things out. And more power to us.

All that said, I'm pleased that my little comment gets some notice and delighted to wake up famous. In addition, my Canadian friends will be pleased to learn that I'm becoming more like them and less like the brash American they first met.  But readers with literary sensibility will surely notice that I ain't no Lytton Strachey. 

Thanks for the notice.

Longitudinal statistics seminar

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZU2ZmaTlVckdnSTA/view?usp=sharing

The link above leads to the poster for this seminar on Friday 24th October.

The very successful longitudinal data analysis course will run on Friday 24th October from 9.30-4.30pm led by CCACE statistician Dr Mike Allerhand and will take place in S1, Department of Psychology, 7 George Square, Edinburgh.

The course is £100 for external applicants. Payment is due by Friday 10th October.
Places are limited - please register by emailing Anna Sim on ccace@ed.ac.uk.
If you have any questions, please email caroline.brett@ed.ac.uk.

Longitudinal data enables researchers to understand how cognitive and physical function changes over time and disentangle individual and environmental influences on that change. However, analysis of longitudinal data can be difficult and daunting.
This 1-day course aims to explain the complexities of longitudinal data analysis in simple statistical terms. It will describe methods  and models for exploring and analysing longitudinal data and their assumptions, strengths, and weaknesses, equipping participants with sufficient knowledge  to make appropriate modelling choices and interpret results.

The course does not require skills with any particular program. The course is not about programming, and is not a demonstration of analyses that can be done using these programs. There should be something for users of most statistics programs.
Models described will include:

Fixed effects regression models
Multi-level (mixed effects) models
Latent growth curve models
Autoregressive and latent change score models
Cross-lagged joint models of bivariate longitudinal data The Methods described will include:
Time-varying and time-invariant covariates
Centering
Parametric and non-parametric curve fitting
Semi-parametric generalized additive models
Segmented models
FIML and REML parameter estimation"

 

If you attend, let me have your comments on what promises to be a very useful seminar. If you cannot attend, demand that that course be written up as a booklet, (with a copy sent to me).

Streaming: paper on ability grouping effects

 

At my request, Sue Hallam has chosen the paper below to illustrate the effect of streaming once controlled for child ability, which should be added to her remarks.

Ireson, J., Hallam, S. & Hurley, C. (2005) What are the effects of ability grouping on GCSE attainment? British Educational Research Journal, 31(4), 443-458..

Streaming in schools: author replies

 

On September 26 I wrote a post about streaming by ability in schools, based on a paper written by Samantha Parsons & Sue Hallam. The link is given below.

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/should-educationalists-be-streamed.html

I followed my normal practice of sending the link to the authors and inviting comments, and Prof Susan Hallam of the Institute of Education, University of London has kindly replied:

I have been working in this field for over 20 years now and it is clear that there are no simple practical solutions for schools.

All we try to do is present evidence which will help schools make decisions based on their aims and the intake that they have.

What the evidence suggests from a range of research in the UK and elsewhere is that the gaps in attainment widen when children are placed in highly structured groups.

Once placed in a particular group it is very hard for children to move to a higher group because of the ways that schools operate. Movement between groups is negligible. This then has an impact on long term educational outcomes, for instance, the level of GCSE entry, etc. We also know that children who have the same scores on tests but are placed in different groups because of class size issues also show a divergence in outcomes - those in the higher group do better.

While we appreciate your comments on our paper we feel that it needs to be considered within this wider context.

Luminant Victorians: The Battle of the Bulbs

 

You will remember young Woodley, who used the fact that reaction times have slowed up since Victorian times to argue that the quality of the species is going downhill, and that British seed is deteriorating, a fact currently obscured by the liberal application of fertiliser, but dysgenics will be the end of us in the end.

Up pops Scott Parker with a counter argument, though couched with scholarly diffidence and understatement “Were the Victorian clever than us? Maybe, maybe not”. I do not know Scott, but he seems to need the assertiveness training which I thought was guaranteed to all US citizens by the Constitution, so that he can come out as a firm “Maybe not” enthusiast.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZS1BqZHpHMGNHVU0/view?usp=sharing

What Parker avers is that the snappiest reaction times were probably due to the extremely bright and noisy lamps used by Victorians, as opposed to duller and quieter bulbs in more recent times. His  paper launches a luminescence skirmish, the Battle of the Bulbs.

the observations that are crucial to the Woodley et al. (2013) finding are the earliest ones—those from Galton (as reported in Johnson et al., 1985) and Thompson (1903).
Both of those data sets report very short reaction times and contribute greatly to the correlation between RT and year of report. Do those short reaction times betoken a high level of intelligence among the Victorians? In one of those cases, another factor may have contributed. Thompson (1903) generated her stimuli, flashes of purple light, using a Geissler tube—an ancestor of the fluorescent tube (Hick, 1952). But Dunlap and Wells (1910) chose to use a different light stimulus generator, explaining (p.320) that, “A Geissler tube could not be used, on account of the noise accompanying its flash.” Auditory RTs, like visual RTs, grow faster with increasing stimulus intensity (Luce, 1986). We would need to know both the auditory and visual intensities of the Geissler tube to know if Dunlap and Wells's concern was well-founded. But we cannot rule out the possibility that Thompson's subjects were reacting to a noise functionally more intense than the flash she intended as the stimulus, thereby resulting in shorter RTs than her light stimulus alone might have produced. The magnitude of any such shift cannot be estimated.

Parker then somewhat goes against this speculation, by showing two more recent studies where the reaction times are not faster with the brighter lamp. Undaunted, he says this might be due to the greater size of the stimulus showing the faster reaction time.

we can see some indication of the power of other factors by looking again at some details of the data reported by Minucci and Connors (1964) and Cardello (1979). One of Minucci and Connors's stimuli was about double the luminance of one of Cardello's. Nonetheless, comparing the results across the studies at those two stimulus intensity levels, Minucci and Connors's subjects' mean RT was 235 ms whereas Cardello's subjects' mean RT was only 207 ms. Minucci and Connors's
stimuli subtended a visual angle of 1° whereas Cardello's stimuli subtended a visual angle of 6°; Teichner and Krebs (1972) indicate that larger stimuli produce shorter RTs, so perhaps that contributed to the faster RTs reported by Cardello. Of the studies inventoried in Woodley et al. (2013) only Reed, Vernon, and Johnson (2004) specify the size of their stimuli. All their stimuli were smaller than 1°, and their mean reported RT was not notably long.

He echoes the Dodonova and Dodonov conclusion that: many details of experimental procedure influence the size of visual RT, and that makes it very difficult to draw firm conclusions about the source of differences in RT found by studies that differ in procedural details as well as year of data collection.

His conclusion: The Victorians may well have been cleverer than us, but the visual
RT data do not suffice to prove the point.

I have had enough of this. Why haven’t these reaction time people ever standardised their research instruments? When I went to psychological conferences I imagined these experimentalists were real scientists who used proper techniques, unlike us arty clinical psychologists, who measured humanity in the round, with paper and pencil tests, and a bleary clinical eye. I trusted experimentalists their black boxes (both conceptual and electronic) their flashing lights, and their results precise to three decimal places. If their actual results were so sensitive to lamps, timers, response keys and software as to be incapable of comparison from one decade to the next, and one experimentalist to the next, then late in the day I find that my idols have clay feet. They are in almost as much of a mess as psychometricians, who can show good predictability of results one cohort at a time, but have more difficulty calibrating the achievements of one generation against the next.

Lytton Stachey’s  (1918) “Eminent Victorians” was championed in my school days as the apotheosis of wry commentary over hagiography, a sharp and irreverent hatchet job on the brightly illuminated heroes and heroines of Victorian times. He is judged to have destroyed for ever the Victorian age’s pretensions to moral superiority. Of course, since Victoria had died in 1901, Strachey is only partly Victorian, having lived only the first 21 but most impressionable years under her reign. I think you can judge from which era his prose style derived by looking at the first paragraph of his Preface:

THE history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.

Forget reaction times: the Prose has it. The Victorians were (probably, and only some of them) cleverer than us.

Quarantine for Ebola

 

Greg Cochran argues that quarantine is the most effective strategy when dealing with serious infectious diseases. It works first time and every time.

http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/disaster-in-the-south-pacific/

So, why don’t the health authorities implement quarantine? I think the key issue is the management of blame.

If the authorities stop some-one coming directly from an infected area to an uninfected area without a period of observation in quarantine, they will be held responsible for having inconvenienced a large number of uninfected travelers. Identifying a few infected persons will seem almost redundant because the authorities assume that, being responsible and truthful citizens, infected persons would have handed themselves in to the health authorities the moment they started having symptoms. Hence, no need for quarantine.

The authorities also assume that people tell the truth on travel forms, and will tell the truth when interviewed at borders, and are bright enough to work out whether they are a possible vector.

So, the powers-that-be have a fall-back position: they assume that people are honest and, if not, they imagine can deal with the problem later. For example, the  US authorities do not want to be seen treating an African from Milan the same as an African from Liberia, because that would prove they had identified the person as an African and were applying a blanket racial precaution. Of course, if the US authorities prevent a Liberian from flying direct to the US, then they need a procedure to prevent him flying in from a stop-over somewhere else. It would be almost as bad as profiling Chinese people for SARS.

The US health authorities also assume that tracing 100 possibly infected persons in the USA is less onerous than applying quarantine restrictions in the first place. However, if their failure to trace and contain possibly infected persons is only 1 in a 100, they will have doubled the Ebola risk for US citizens. They will be dealing with their US Patient Zero and an unknown US Patient One.

Perhaps, without being explicit about it, the authorities believe that once the virus takes a good hold then the outbreak will not be anyone's fault, because it will be seen as a fact of nature. They would have been blamed for having restricted tourists from Africa, but they cannot be blamed for an Act of God.

Those against quarantine for infectious diseases should recall the IRA's warning when they blew up the Brighton conference hotel where Mrs Thatcher and her Cabinet were sleeping but failed to assassinate her: "Today we were unlucky, but remember, we have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always."

Are lefties clever, or just grasping?

In my life, based on personal observation, the brightest people always seemed to incline to the political left, which in the UK meant the Labour Party. I did not conduct any proper sampling, and merely deduced opinions from the nature of their conversation, since outright enquiry about politics was considered unseemly in a university setting. Despite the very weak methodology, this was my general, anecdotal impression.

I believed all this because it was true to my experience. Kahneman and Tversky had yet to sail into my consciousness. I failed to notice that I had not sampled business leaders, lawyers, engineers and City of London entrepreneurs and investors, simply because I did not know many. The availability heuristic was alive and well, and distorted my perceptions.

Later life experiences suggested that, after graduating, bright leftists turned left into education and public service, bright rightists turned right into the professions and business. I turned left with the former, and assumed they represented most of the world. I noticed much later that the Right had thinkers as well as the Left.

More recent work has shown that social scientists are generally of leftist persuasion, whichever way that is labelled in each nation. Can we say whether, as a general rule, the brightest tend towards the Left?

Idan Solon  How intelligence mediates liberalism and pro-sociality. Intelligence 47 (2014) 44–53

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZRzduVkxqdGpzOGs/edit?usp=sharing

Solon has looked at this question largely in the US context, in which the Left are Liberals (Democrats) and the Right are Conservatives (Republicans). Solon does include data from the Netherlands 2004, South Africa 1990, Brazil 2012, Germany 2012, so the phenomenon is not restricted to the USA. His analysis is that the relationship between intelligence and leftism is U shaped: both the brightest and the dullest are Leftists, the middling intellects Rightist. If so, it seems I had noticed only that the brightest were indeed Left, but ignored the fact that the least clever were also Left. That is, if the finding generalises widely.

Individuals of most or least intelligence consistently orient further left politically than those of middle intelligence, producing a U-shaped curve.  The lower intelligence group orients toward the left because it is populated disproportionately by leftist beneficiaries (e.g., economic and racial minorities). The leftists vote leftist strictly on issues on which they are beneficiaries. Unlike the lower intelligence extreme, the higher intelligence extreme is broadly leftist, self-identifies as liberal, and is strongly pro-social overall.

Solon describes leftists as: characterized by a tendency to demonstrate consideration toward the less represented, whether the less represented comprise minority demographic segments (e.g., homosexuals on gay marriage, pregnant women on abortion, convicted criminals on capital punishment, the poor on fiscal policies and health care, immigrants on immigration, citizens of other countries on foreign policy issues) or less represented alternatives to religious, governmental, or cultural orthodoxy.

In the United States, Democrats draw support partly from the well educated and affluent liberals, who orient consistently toward the left across all issues, and partly from “conservative and disadvantaged Democrats,” who are disproportionately populated by racial and economic minorities, are characterized by high religiosity and low education, and orient toward economic liberalism (i.e., in support of government interventions to assist the poor) but social conservatism (Pew Research Center, 2005). These latter Democrats vote for a leftist party (and are therefore considered leftists) but tend not to identify as liberals, who, by contrast, are broadly leftist.

The U-shaped curve explored below relates intelligence and leftism, with the lower intelligence extreme predominately leftist but not liberal, and the higher intelligence extreme predominately liberal (i.e., consistently leftist across a range of issues). An analogous U-shaped curve appears to characterize public opinion in numerous countries, though the names denoting leftist parties and ideologies are variable.

Openness/Intellect is the only Big Five personality trait that correlates consistently with general intelligence (DeYoung, 2011) and is also the trait that correlates most strongly, by far, with both social and economic liberalism (Gerber, Huber, Doherty, Dowling, & Ha, 2010).

Liberalism in academia: College professors have a very high average IQ (Dutton & Lynn, 2014) and orient toward the left across a range of academic disciplines. Left–right ratios of roughly 4 to 1 have been documented for professors overall, with those in the humanities consistently the most liberal and those in economics and business consistently the least liberal (Dutton & Lynn, 2014; Gross, 2013; Rothman & Lichter, 2009). In comprehensive inquiries into professors' liberalism, Gross (2013) and Gross and Fosse (2012) considered six commonly advanced hypotheses, including the argument that those who exhibit intellectualism lean toward the left, before offering one of their own: jobs in academia have become politically typed, thus discouraging conservatives from applying for them. They acknowledged offering no direct empirical support for their hypothesis.

Here is a scary table, the only one in the paper. Some famous, highly prized US academics have made public donations to political parties, and these donations are tabulated according to where the recipients fall on the Left-Right political dimension.

The Right gets barely a penny, the exclusive Left the overwhelming majority of the donations. Prized minds incline leftwards. (The MacArthur grant might be run by a Soviet of socialists, but surely it cannot be the case that all of these august bodies are covert fellow-travellers of Marxism-Leninism? Are not even Scrabble and Bridge sacrosanct?)

However, the Solon paper is a bit thin on actual intelligence measures. Ability is calculated on the basis of achievement in terms of academic prizes like Nobels (a good measure) years of education (a reasonable but imprecise measure) and social and occupational status (fairly reasonable but more imprecise). For example, the Benbow and Lubinski papers on mathematically precocious youth would be a prospective sample worth studying, though I cannot find anything on political orientation at the moment. David Lubinski might be able to supply something, in which case I will add it in.

So, this thesis proposes that bright people are leftist by conviction and dull people leftist by expediency. Eysenck argued as much in 1954, saying that the working class were torn between: the material advantages of Leftism in the shape of the Labour Party; and the ideological advantages of tough minded Rightism in the shape of the hang-them-and-flog-them Conservatives, to which they naturally inclined. Women, being more anxious and conservative usually swung the vote for the Conservatives.

A key point: if most of social science is produced by Leftists then, although it should not distort the truths revealed by nature, it might do so in precisely in the same way same some enthusiastic Leftists level accusations against their opponents: telling them that their innermost Rightist preferences reveal them to be biased.

In Prof Tony Flew’s (1975) “Thinking about thinking” he describes (4.21) these arguments as “You would believe that, because you are a Christian or Marxist or Conservative….” That may be true as a general observation about a cluster of opinions, but it is not a refutation of a particular argument. A Marxist might believe that particular socialised farming practices would benefit humanity. They might be right or wrong, but the proposition cannot be refuted because of their political inclinations.  Stephen Jay Gould was not proved wrong because he was a Marxist, but because his insinuations about faked cranial volumes were shown to be false.

So, all of social science could be Leftist but right. That would depend on all arguments being tested to destruction. As Socrates observed, we must follow the argument where ever it leads.

Epistemic rationality in Nigeria

 

Since my readers are a refined lot, I do not expect that you blinked at the title. For Piaget, epistemic rationality represented the highest stage of cognitive development, leaving behind cognitive egocentrism and its corollary animistic-magical thinking. At its highest stage (“formal-operational”), thinking distinguishes between mind and world, subject and object and theory and reality. In contrast, at a lower level, infantile world views are based on animistic and magical thinking. Animistic thinking means assuming that physical things and phenomena (e.g., the sun) have a soul, intentions and a will like humans have. In magical thinking the person believes that s/he can influence physical things and phenomena by means of causally unrelated “techniques” (e.g., sacrifices, prayers, and spiritual cleanings).

I never totally settled down with Piaget, even though my stumbling, second-year essay on his work was given a cherished A. I did not doubt that he was an observant person with interesting ideas. It was simply that, as I worked through the various presumed stages of child development, it was clear that there must be an underlying process, which was only dimly observed by the stage theory observations. The fourth stage (formal-operational stage, from age 11/12) was the final stage, and that was the one, presumably, in which my tutors (and possibly myself) were operating during my undergraduate education. If Piaget was to be believed, by age 12 children became potentially scientific in their world outlook, and from then on the world was, if not their oyster, at the very least a series of tasty molluscs.

However, if persons of reportedly low intelligence can actually achieve formal operations then the predictive value of intelligence tests is severely questioned. If the IQ results for sub-Saharan Africa are to be believed, Africans should not be capable of scientific thinking, or not many of them, at the very least. Do the IQ results mean that rationality in Nigeria will be limited, and that many of these citizens will be stuck in the stage of concrete operations (7 to 11 years), apt to believe that magic is everywhere round them? Piaget (1974, p. 309) himself assumed that “In particular it is quite possible […] that in numerous cultures adult thinking does not proceed beyond the level of concrete operations [stage 3], and does not reach that of propositional operations [stage 4].”

Rindermann, H., Falkenhayn, L. & Baumeister, A. E. E. (2014). Cognitive ability and epistemic rationality: A study in Nigeria and Germany.  Intelligence, 47, 23-33.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZRHpubHhfVTZ6TFk/edit?usp=sharing

Usually, the correlation between IQ (measured by Raven Matrices) and Piagetian tasks is around r=.60 (Jensen, 1980, p. 674) but this has not been tested on African subjects. Does it hold true, and what does it mean for actual specific beliefs?

Rindermann and colleagues have put together a test of rationality. Positively defined, epistemic rationality is the application of logic, the logical and critical use of empirical data and the use of arguments. It is the application of consistency (no contradictoriness), uniformity (the same is treated equally), coherence (statements are connected), simplicity (parsimony, following William of Ockham), and efficiency. It is the unprejudiced and unbiased observation of the world, of nature and people and their products. Conclusions are drawn in a logical, critical and well-founded manner. 

Sample items: A man can get rid of HIV if he has sexual intercourse with a virgin; If a person wants to get rid of HIV, that person should go to a healer (not conventional medicine); If god strongly believes in the age of a person, this person is able to become over 140 years old; A reason why a person gets sick (e.g., measles) could be that the person has not prayed enough; There is no need to read more books than the Holy Bible; An innocent person cannot be killed even by a high dosage of poison.

The samples were small, and relatively elite for their native populations, in that both samples were about 1 standard deviation above their native means. This should be seen as a pilot indication, very much worth while extending to a larger population sample.  Rindermann et al. used a short form of the Advanced Progressive Matrices to test the intelligence of their subjects. By way of comparison, here are the estimates of Nigerian IQ from Lynn’s database, so you can see the sample sizes and the variation in the estimates. All these results always need updating, so if you have more recent work, let me know. Nonetheless, the background is that intellectual levels are low.

                        Age          N          test          IQ Reference 

Nigeria	26	30	DAM	67	Haward & Roland, 1954
Nigeria	Children	480	Leone	70	Ferron, 1966
Nigeria	Adults	86	SPM	64	Wober, 1969
Nigeria	6–13	375	CPM/PMA	69	Fahrmeier, 1975
Nigeria	5–7	150	SPM	87	Okunrotifa, 1976
Nigeria	9-10	88	SPM	83	Nwuga, 1977
Nigeria	41556	165	SPM	80	Nwuga, 1977
Nigeria	41619	120	SPM	72	Maqsud, 1980a
Nigeria	12	98	WISC-R	73	Ani et al., 1998
Nigeria	11	402	SPM	69	Ijarotimi & Ijadunola,2007
Nigeria: median				71

The results of this study are shown below:

Table 3: Epistemic rationality scale means (range 1 to 7)

Scale	Nigerian Sample (N=38)	German Sample (N=65)
Traffic	5.41 (1.16)	6.17 (0.84)
HIV and AIDS	5.53 (0.75)	6.26 (0.53)
Health	5.83 (0.75)	6.38 (0.59)
God and gods	3.02 (1.21)	6.12 (1.19)
Religion	4.70 (0.97)	6.30 (0.73)
Evolution and nature	3.93 (1.17)	6.33 (0.90)
Guilt	6.42 (0.82)	6.77 (0.55)
(Education)	5.35 (0.75)	5.93 (0.57)
Epistemic rationality (mean)	5.02 (0.50)	6.29 (0.55)

Mean, IQ (SD)

89.13 (14.01)

111.33 (11.99)

Clearly, the Germans are brighter, which did not need proving, but it is also clear that IQ makes a difference when it comes to beliefs. The Germans “get” the scientific viewpoint; the Nigerians, despite more years of formal education, are less likely to do so, though these well educated Nigerians are probably the most science oriented of their compatriots. In particular they attribute more influence to gods and religion, don’t accept evolution, and tend to be more somewhat more casual about road safety.

Of course, there are many differences between the people of Germany and the people of Nigeria. For a start, the birth rates are five times as high in Nigeria. 42 Nigerians per thousand are born every year, against only 8 Germans per thousand. Nigerians live for only 52 years, Germans 81 years.

There are two main ways of explaining these differences: that the people are the same but the geography and history differs, which impacts their current behaviour but that could be changed quickly; or that the people differ (because they have adapted to different geographies over very many generations) and that they will change slowly.

Whatever line you take on explaining national differences, the bottom line is that this paper suggests that IQ results have practical implications for thinking about the real world.  Further work on the rationality test in different and larger samples would be a good idea.