Archive for the ‘IQ’ Category
on determinism and IQ, class, castes and elites
Nehru, of course, belonged to the Brahmin caste
I wrote a post recently on the stupidity of Steven Pinker’s view of determinism, his mocking of ‘the abuse excuse’ and such like, and I noted how people from elite, privileged backgrounds tend to downplay – or desperately avoid mentioning – their advantages while advocating for the ‘common sense’ compatibilism or free will positions of their class.
Something that I didn’t mention though, in that Pinker post, is a recollection that Pinker had written some kind of puff piece about the Ashkenazi Jews (‘The Lessons of the Ashkenazim’ – which I’ve not read as yet)), their high IQs and their over-representation in the fields of elite science, chess grandmastery and such. Pinker, needless to say, is Jewish. Presumably the argument will go that these Ashkenazim have higher IQs for some particular reason, be it genetic, cultural or some synergistic mixture of the two. That’s to say, a deterministic reason.
I’m not Jewish, and I certainly don’t come from an elite background. My father was an unskilled labourer, in a variety of jobs with a variety of gaps between them. My mother was the breadwinner, a nurse who managed to move up the ladder to hospital administration and then nurse education. As migrants to Australia, half the world away from my Scottish birthplace, we were cut off from the wider family, and I didn’t hear much about how any of them made their livings, and, for some reason, I wasn’t particularly curious about them, though I was curious about many other things, or, at least, a few.
Do I have an IQ? The IQ concept has of course been controversial. Is it culturally based? Can it be made less so, or more multicultural, since human culture is pretty well inescapable? Apparently the result can be reduced to a number, and based on that number you can be classed as a genius, an imbecile or anything in between. I myself have never knowingly sat for an IQ test, so I have no number to preen myself on or shake my head over. However, I have taken two tests, one at age twelve, the other at age twenty-nine, which made some difference to my life. The first test was taken at the end of my final primary school year, and had to do with students’ placement in high school the following year. The high school had introduced ‘streaming’, based, apparently on natural smarts – measured by the test I had taken, but perhaps also by other primary school results. There were eight first-year high school classes, divided in two depending on whether you wanted to take French or German as your language choice (there were only two choices, no Tamil or Pitjantjatjara). So the ‘top’ two classes were F1 and G1, going down to F4 and G4. The new students for 1969 gathered together in the grounds of the relatively new Elizabeth West High School for the name-calling. To my surprise, I was the first name called for the F1 class. I was mildly puzzled, but then, some name had to be first. But a week or so later, one of my new classmates – I still remember his name, Blair Farquar – came to me and said excitedly ‘do you know you got the top marks for the class test?’ He’d been asked by our home teacher to retrieve something from her office, and had seen and looked through the test papers, which were numbered in a pile on the desk. I was frankly shocked. I knew I wasn’t stupid, but this news really unnerved me. I felt I’d been handed a burden I didn’t really want. And looking back on it, this test, which wasn’t based on any schoolwork but on reasoning and problem solving, must have been a child of the IQ family. And also looking back, our test results weren’t based on our diligence as students. We didn’t ‘study’ for the test, it was imposed on us without notice. So I couldn’t pat myself on the back for my achievement, I’d succeeded, if that was the word, due to determining factors completely beyond my control.
In any case, I squandered my advantage over the next few years due to increasing tensions at home, and at school, to which I responded with passive resistance and a sense of anti-authoritarianism which has never since left me. As mentioned in a previous post, I dropped out of school at 15. On my last school day, I was smacked across the face by the headmaster, because I was chewing gum while he was questioning me. I’ve no idea why this bothered him so much, but I knew exactly why his behaviour bothered me, and I’d had more than enough of it. I didn’t resume any formal education until I sat for a university-entrance test, as aforementioned, in my 29th year. In the intervening years I worked in various jobs, in factories, in a hospital, and as a general dogsbody in a fancy French restaurant, and became a habitual diary writer and a mover in slightly more intellectual, but small, circles. I developed a self-mocking fantasy of myself as the smartest person without a uni degree in the known universe.
The university test was definitely not an IQ test, as it involved writing a couple of essays on a choice of topics, and as a habitual writer, this was my comfort zone. I received acceptances from the two universities in South Australia at the time, Adelaide and Flinders, which enabled me to obtain a straightforward Arts degree – certainly not a road out of poverty. Eventually, after much faffing about, including the publication of a novel, I managed to obtain enough further qualifications to score some teaching work here and there, by which time I wasn’t far off from retirement age.
I write all this, largely because I’m self-obsessed, but also to illustrate the role of determinism. If I was born to nomadic pastoralists in Somalia, or to a Dalit family in Hindu India, I wouldn’t be writing here, and I wouldn’t have scored the kind of meagre successes I might be credited with in the WEIRD world. On the other hand, had I been born to a successful and supportive Ashkenazi family, my connections and my opportunities would have been unimaginably different from what I’ve experienced. And in all this I’m as typical as most other humans on this planet.
So this is important. When you come to reflect on the free will/determinism issue, don’t be taken in by the sorts of claims I once read, I think it was on a Stanford University website, that this is a fun topic to cut your philosophical teeth on. No, it isn’t a fun topic, it cuts to the heart of who we are and what we can become. And of course it’s complex. People from impoverished backgrounds can become Nobel Prize winners, and children of the Ashkenazim can become hopeless drug addicts or career criminals. To understand why that may have happened would mean to look in detail at the determining factors, insofar as they can be uncovered. And when and if you read some of the philosophical arguments on the topic, it’s essential to note the backgrounds of the writers, insofar as they can be ascertained. It will definitely hold the key to their position on the subject – such is my determination.
References
https://newrepublic.com/article/77727/groups-and-genes
Stewart Henderson, In Elizabeth, 1997
three things: IQ and longevity, the Taliban and Americans, the real World Cup
Nerissa: …. superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer
The Merchant of Venice, Act 1 , scene 2
Thing one
I don’t know what my IQ is, having never knowingly sat a test, but I assume it’s a number just short of infinity. So it was interesting to read, in Carl Zimmer’s book on genetics, She has her mother’s laugh, that IQ is highly correlated to longevity. Not that there’s a genetic link, at least not directly, but it stands to reason. The higher your IQ, the quicker it takes for you to ‘get’ things. This was more or less confirmed by a simple, ingenious brain processing test. Subjects were shown simple shapes flashing very briefly on a computer screen – two vertical lines spaced apart with a horizontal line sitting on top. The participants had to guess which of the two vertical lines was the longest each time. Researchers had worked out that if the images were flashed too briefly, the participants just resorted to guesswork. It required approximately 0.1 seconds for people, on average, to perceive the shape correctly. The key, though, lay in the variation of that perception. It ranged from 0.02 seconds to 0.136 seconds, and researchers found a pretty reliable correlation between accurate perception time and intelligence (presumably measured by IQ – Zimmer doesn’t say). Unfortunately it’s not quite reliable enough, apparently, for us to do away with those pesky, long-winded IQ tests and replace them snappy shape tests, but as mentioned, it does seem to confirm the intuition that intelligence has to do with sharpness and quick-wittedness. Which brings me back to longevity. Some work done in Scotland, which has turned out to be accidentally longitudinal, provides interesting evidence. In 1932 the Scottish government conducted a massive testing program of nearly 90,000 eleven-year-old students – just about the whole of the country’s kids of that age. They were all given a 71-question exam involving decoding, analogising and arithmetic among other things. Over time this ‘experiment’, or what you will, was forgotten, but the records were unearthed in 1997, and then researchers tried to get in touch, some 65 years later, with the ‘kids’ who’d been tested. They managed to gather together 101 elderly citizens in an Aberdeen hall to resit the gruelling test. They found that the score on the original test was a pretty good indicator – 73% – of the score second time around. But there was another interesting finding – the percentage of the test-takers who had scored well and were still alive in 1997 was considerably higher than those who’d scored poorly. Some 70% of the women in the top quarter of scores were still alive, compared to 45% in the bottom quarter:
Children who scored higher, in other words, tended to live longer. Each extra 15 IQ points, researchers have since found, translates into a 24% drop in the risk of death.
Carl Zimmer, She has her mother’s laugh, p296
Why is this so? Smarter people generally know what to do, and are quicker to learn what to do, to live longer, to make more, financially and otherwise, of the circumstances they find themselves in, to be safer, healthier and the like. Stands to reason.
Thing two
A huge fuss is being made of allegations, probably true, of Putin offering and paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. My first reaction to this news was – surely the fervently anti-American and anti-western Taliban were already hell-bent on killing infidel foreigners, and many of the purest ideologues among them would be insulted by the offer of bribes to do so? Then again, many of them would’ve been laughing up their ample sleeves at the thought of being paid by the Russkies, whom they likely consider only slightly less odious and infidelious than the Yanks, to do what they were already heaven-bent on doing. For this reason, it would surely be impossible to prove that any deaths of Americans, or their coalition partners – including Australians – at the hands of the Taliban, could be sheeted home to Putin and his fellow thugs. Even if money traced to Russia appeared in Taliban bank accounts after some atrocity or other, this doesn’t exclude the possibility that the atrocity would’ve occurred in any case. Win-win for the Taliban.
Thing 3
The announcement that the real World Cup will take place in Australia and New Zealand in 2023 makes life a little more bearable, though it’s three years away and I’m not getting any younger. This competition combines two of the most life-affirming enities in life, for me at least – women and soccer. Hopefully we’ll have learned many lessons from Covid-19 by then haha, and at least some of today’s thuggish political leaders will have been placed where they can do no more harm, and we can get on with the more exciting stuff of life, like having fun.