IQ is Real, and it Matters [Part II]
By Daniel Miessler on October 22nd, 2008: Tagged as Intelligence | Society
I wrote about this before, but that was from personal experience and analysis. I knew of this piece when I wrote this (I had read about it before) but I couldn’t locate it. Well, here it is. But first some background.
In 1994 “The Bell Curve” came out and made a number of extraordinary claims about intelligence. They basically said it was the end-all/be-all of attributes, and that it defined whether or not you would succeed in life or fail–statistically, anyway.
The hot topics were race and poverty. They said that certain races were smarter, on average, than others, and that this was the main reason for their respective achievements as groups.
So, the media jumped all over it. Tons of “experts” came out and refuted the book, saying it was 100% crap. As it turns out, however, much of it was quite accurate (yet some of the research methods were shown to be flawed). What follows is the official academic response to the book, i.e. a public-oriented statement from the foremost academics in the field of intelligence regarding what was accepted as true by science.
Here are the basic findings (my summary):
- I.Q. is real, and I.Q. tests are good at testing it.
- It reliably predicts “success” and “failure” across large numbers of people, i.e. not necessarily for individuals.
- I.Q. tests are not generally culturally biased.
- The main races do have significantly different I.Q.s. Whites are the “average”, with 100, Blacks average 85, and Hispanics score about halfway in between. Asians and Jews score a bit higher than Whites. The reason for this, according to the consensus, is: “The reasons that blacks differ among themselves in intelligence appear to be basically the same as those for why whites (or Asians or Hispanics) differ among themselves. Both environment and genetic heredity are involved.”
- Although science knows I.Q. and intelligence is real (as shown by the data on various life metrics), they don’t really know how or why. Understanding of the brain was still an admitted weakness, in other words.
- Genetics is considered to be more important than environment for intelligence, but the degree to which this is true is still debated. Environment is still considered to be a major factor.
- And most importantly: “The research findings neither dictate nor preclude any particular social policy, because they can never determine our goals. They can, however, help us estimate the likely success and side-effects of pursuing those goals via different means.”
This is a critical paper. I believe people completely underestimate the importance of intelligence, and that their doing so causes great harm to society. Most do so because they feel the whole concept of intelligence is baseless or weak as a scientific truth.
It’s not.
Check out the list of people who signed that statement. It’s astounding. And that’s not a random list of people; it’s the result of the academic community responding as a group to the Bell Curve. It’s a formal statement of “truth”, as agreed upon by known science at the time. My guess is that this has not changed much at all in the intervening time, and even that it’s been solidified even more.
But we live in a different time now. There’s very little chance of this many academics putting their names on a document like this right now. Not with all this talk of race in it–and in an arguably negative light no less.
Anyway, the point here isn’t race. The only reason that was so heavy in the document is because it was a response to the Bell Curve book, which received most of its scrutiny due to that issue. My point here is that intelligence is real, and that it’s measurable, and that it is crucial to a modern, healthy and happy society.
I think far more emphasis should be placed on studying intelligence in order to engineer methods of increasing it. I think increasing intelligence, more than any other measurable human attribute, will help improve the quality of decisions made throughout the world, and that this should be a major focus of modern educational systems.:
[ Edit: By the way, if any of you know of any modern version of this type of consensus, whether it agrees or disagrees with this one, I'd very much like to see it. ]
Links
[ Mainstream Science on Intelligence | psychpage.com ]
