back to indexRichard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences | Lex Fridman Podcast #302
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Let me ask you to this question,
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whether it's bell curve or any research
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on race differences,
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can that be used to increase the amount of racism
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in the world, can that be used to increase
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the amount of hate in the world?
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My sense is there is such enormous reservoirs
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of hate and racism that have nothing to do
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with scientific knowledge of the data
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that speak against that,
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that no, I don't want to give racist groups
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a veto power over what scientists study.
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The following is a conversation with Richard Heyer
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on the science of human intelligence.
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This is a highly controversial topic,
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but a critically important one
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for understanding the human mind.
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I hope you will join me in not shying away
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from difficult topics like this,
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and instead, let us try to navigate it
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with empathy, rigor, and grace.
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If you're watching this on video now,
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I should mention that I'm recording this introduction
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in an undisclosed location somewhere in the world.
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I'm safe and happy and life is beautiful.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description, and now, dear friends,
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here's Richard Heyer.
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What are the measures of human intelligence,
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and how do we measure it?
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Everybody has an idea of what they mean by intelligence.
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In the vernacular, what I mean by intelligence
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is just being smart, how well you reason,
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how well you figure things out,
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what you do when you don't know what to do.
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Those are just kind of everyday common sense definitions
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of how people use the word intelligence.
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If you wanna do research on intelligence,
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measuring something that you can study scientifically
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is a little trickier, and what almost all researchers
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who study intelligence use is the concept
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called the G factor, general intelligence,
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and that is what is common, that is a mental ability
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that is common to virtually all tests of mental abilities.
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What's the origin of the term G factor,
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by the way, such a funny word
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for such a fundamental human thing?
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The general factor, I really started with Charles Spearman,
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and he noticed, this is like, boy,
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more than 100 years ago, he noticed that
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when you tested people with different tests,
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all the tests were correlated positively,
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and so he was looking at student exams and things,
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and he invented the correlation coefficient, essentially,
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and when he used it to look at student performance
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on various topics, he found all the scores
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were correlated with each other,
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and they were all positive correlations,
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so he inferred from this that there must be
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some common factor that was irrespective
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of the content of the test.
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And positive correlation means if you do well
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on the first test, you're likely to do well
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on the second test, and presumably,
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that holds for tests across even disciplines,
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so not within subject, but across subjects,
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so that's where the general comes in,
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something about general intelligence.
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So when you were talking about measuring intelligence
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and trying to figure out something difficult
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about this world and how to solve the puzzles
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of this world, that means, generally speaking,
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not some specific test, but across all tests.
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Absolutely right, and people get hung up on this
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because they say, well, what about the ability
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to do X, isn't that independent?
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And they said, I know somebody who's very good at this
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but not so good at this, this other thing.
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And so there are a lot of examples like that,
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but it's a general tendency, so exceptions
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really don't disprove, your everyday experience
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is not the same as what the data actually show.
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And your everyday experience, when you say,
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oh, I know someone who's good at X, but not so good at Y,
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that doesn't contradict the statement of about,
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he's not so good, but he's not the opposite.
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He's not, it's not a negative correlation.
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Okay, so we're not, our anecdotal data,
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I know a guy who's really good at solving
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some kind of visual thing, that's not sufficient
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for us to understand actually the depths
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of that person's intelligence.
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So how, this idea of G factor,
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how much evidence is there, how strong,
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you know, given across the decades that this idea
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has been around, how much has it been held up
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that there is a universal sort of horsepower
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of intelligence that's underneath all of it,
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all the different tests we do to try to get to this thing
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in the depths of the human mind that's a universal,
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stable measure of a person's intelligence.
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You used a couple of words in there, stable and.
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We have to be precise with words?
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I was hoping we can get away with being poetic.
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We can, there's a lot about research in general,
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not just intelligence research that is poetic.
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Science has a punetic aspect to it.
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Good scientists are very intuitive.
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They're not just, hey, these are the numbers.
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You have to kind of step back and see the big picture.
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When it comes to intelligence research,
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you asked how well has this general concept held up?
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And I think I can say without fear
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of being empirically contradicted,
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that it is the most replicated finding in all of psychology.
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Now, some cynics may say, well, big deal,
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psychology, we all know there's a replication crisis
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in psychology and a lot of this stuff doesn't replicate.
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There is no replication crisis when it comes to studying
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the existence of this general factor.
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Let me tell you some things about it.
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It looks like it's universal
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that you find it in all cultures.
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The way you find it, step back one step,
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the way you find it is to give a battery of mental tests.
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Take a battery of any mental tests you want,
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give it to a large number of diverse people,
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and you will be able to extract statistically
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the commonality among all those tests.
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It's done by a technique called factor analysis.
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People think that this may be a statistical artifact
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of some kind, it is not a statistical artifact.
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What is factor analysis?
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Factor analysis is a way of looking at a big set of data
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and look at the correlation among the different test scores
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and then find empirically the clusters of scores
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And there are different factors.
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So if you have a bunch of mental tests,
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there may be a verbal factor,
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there may be a numerical factor,
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there may be a visual spatial factor,
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but those factors have variance in common with each other.
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And that is the common,
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that's what's common among all the tests
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and that's what gets labeled the G factor.
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So if you give a diverse battery of mental tests
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and you extract a G factor from it,
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that factor usually accounts for around half of the variance.
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It's the single biggest factor, but it's not the only factor,
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but it is the most reliable, it is the most stable,
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and it seems to be very much influenced by genetics.
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It's very hard to change the G factor with training
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or drugs or anything else.
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You don't know how to increase the G factor.
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Okay, you said a lot of really interesting things there.
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So first, I mean, just to get people used to it
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in case they're not familiar with this idea,
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G factor is what we mean.
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So often there's this term used IQ,
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which is the way IQ is used,
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they really mean G factor in regular conversation.
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Because what we mean by IQ, we mean intelligence
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and what we mean by intelligence,
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we mean general intelligence and general intelligence
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in the human mind from a psychology,
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from a serious rigorous scientific perspective
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actually means G factor.
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So G factor equals intelligence,
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just in this conversation to define terms.
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Okay, so there's this stable thing called G factor.
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You said, now factor, you said factor many times,
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means a measure that potentially could be reduced
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to a single number across the different factors
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And what you said, it accounts for half, halfish.
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Accounts for halfish of what?
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Of variance across the different set of tests.
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Set of tests, so if you do for some reason
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well on some set of tests, what does that mean?
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So that means there's some unique capabilities
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outside of the G factor that might account for that.
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And what are those?
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What else is there besides the raw horsepower,
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the engine inside your mind that generates intelligence?
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There are test taking skills.
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There are specific abilities.
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Someone might be particularly good at mathematical things,
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mathematical concepts, even simple arithmetic.
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Some people are much better than others.
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You might know people who can memorize,
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and short term memory is another component of this.
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Short term memory is one of the cognitive processes
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that's most highly correlated with the G factor.
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So all those things like memory,
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test taking skills account for variability
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across the test performances.
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But so you can run, but you can't hide
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from the thing that God gave you.
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The genetics, so that G factor,
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science says that G factor's there.
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Each one of us have.
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Each one of us has a G factor.
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Some have more than others.
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I'm getting uncomfortable already.
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Well, IQ is a score, and IQ, an IQ score
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is a very good estimate of the G factor.
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You can't measure G directly, there's no direct measure.
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You estimate it from these statistical techniques.
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But an IQ score is a good estimate, why?
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Because a standard IQ test is a battery
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of different mental abilities.
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You combined it into one score,
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and that score is highly correlated with the G factor,
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even if you get better scores on some subtests than others.
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Because again, it's what's common
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to all these mental abilities.
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So a good IQ test, and I'll ask you about that,
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but a good IQ test tries to compress down that battery
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of tests, like tries to get a nice battery,
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the nice selection of variable tests into one test.
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And so in that way, it sneaks up to this G factor.
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And that's another interesting thing about G factor.
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Now you give, first of all, you have a great book
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on the neuroscience of intelligence.
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You have a great course, which is when I first learned,
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you're a great teacher, let me just say.
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Your course at the teaching company,
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I hope I'm saying that correctly.
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The Intelligent Brain.
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The Intelligent Brain is when I first heard
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about this G factor, this mysterious thing
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that lurks in the darkness that we cannot quite shine
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a light on, we're trying to sneak up on.
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So the fact that there's this measure,
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a stable measure of intelligence, we can't measure directly.
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But we can come up with a battery test
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or one test that includes a battery
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of variable type of questions that can reliably
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or attempt to estimate in a stable way that G factor.
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That's a fascinating idea.
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So for me as an AI person, it's fascinating.
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It's fascinating there's something stable like that
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about the human mind, especially if it's grounded in genetics.
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It's both fascinating that as a researcher
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of the human mind and all the human psychological,
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sociological, ethical questions that start arising,
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it makes me uncomfortable.
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But truth can be uncomfortable.
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I get that a lot about being uncomfortable
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talking about this.
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Let me go back and just say one more empirical thing.
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It doesn't matter which battery of tests you use.
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So there are countless tests.
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You can take any 12 of them at random,
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extract a G factor and another 12 at random
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and extract a G factor and those G factors
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will be highly correlated like over 0.9 with each other.
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That's very, so it is a ubiquitous.
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It doesn't depend on the content of the test
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is what I'm trying to say.
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It is general among all those tests of mental ability.
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And tests of mental, mental abilities include things like,
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geez, playing poker.
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Your skill at poker is not unrelated to G.
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Your skill at anything that requires reasoning
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and thinking, anything, spelling, arithmetic,
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more complex things, this concept is ubiquitous.
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And when you do batteries of tests in different cultures,
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you get the same thing.
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So this says something interesting about the human mind
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that as a computer is designed to be general.
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So that means you can, so it's not easily made specialized.
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Meaning if you're going to be good at one thing,
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Miyamoto Musashi has this quote, he's an ancient warrior,
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famous for the Book of Five Rings in the martial arts world.
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And the quote goes, if you know the way broadly,
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you will see it in everything.
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Meaning if you do one thing is going to generalize
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And that's an interesting quote.
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And that's an interesting thing about the human mind.
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So that's what the G factor reveals.
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Okay, so what's the difference,
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if you can elaborate a little bit further
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between IQ and G factor?
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Just because it's a source of confusion for people.
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And IQ is a score.
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People use the word IQ to mean intelligence.
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But IQ has a more technical meaning
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for people who work in the field.
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And it's an IQ score, a score on a test
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that estimates the G factor.
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And the G factor is what's common
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among all these tests of mental ability.
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So if you think about, it's not a Venn diagram,
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but I guess you could make a Venn diagram out of it,
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but the G factor would be really at the core,
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what's common to everything.
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And what IQ scores do is they allow a rank order
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of people on the score.
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And this is what makes people uncomfortable.
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This is where there's a lot of controversy
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about whether IQ tests are biased
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toward any one group or another.
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And a lot of the answers to these questions are very clear,
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but they also have a technical aspect of it
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that's not so easy to explain.
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Well, we'll talk about the fascinating
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and the difficult things about all of this.
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So by the way, when you say rank order,
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that means you get a number and that means one person,
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you can now compare.
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Like you could say that this other person
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is more intelligent than me.
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Well, what you can say is IQ scores
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are interpreted really as percentiles.
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So that if you have an IQ of 140
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and somebody else has 70,
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the metric is such that you cannot say
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the person with an IQ of 140 is twice as smart
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as a person with an IQ of 70.
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That would require a ratio scale with an absolute zero.
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Now you may think you know people with zero intelligence,
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but in fact, there is no absolute zero on an IQ scale.
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It's relative to other people.
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So relative to other people,
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somebody with an IQ score of 140
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is in the upper less than 1%,
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whereas somebody with an IQ of 70
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is two standard deviations below the mean.
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That's a different percentile.
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So it's similar to like in chess,
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you have an ELO rating that's designed to rank order people.
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So you can't say it's twice one person.
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If your ELO rating is twice another person,
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I don't think you're twice as good at chess.
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It's not stable in that way,
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but because it's very difficult
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to do these kinds of comparisons.
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But so what can we say about the number itself?
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Is that stable across tests and so on, or no?
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There are a number of statistical properties of any test.
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They're called psychometric properties.
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You have validity, you have reliability,
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reliability, there are many different kinds of reliability.
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They all essentially measure stability.
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And IQ tests are stable within an individual.
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There are some longitudinal studies
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where children were measured at age 11.
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And again, when they were 70 years old
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and the two IQ scores are highly correlated with each other.
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This comes from a fascinating study from Scotland.
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In the 1930s, some researchers decided to get an IQ test
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on every single child age 11 in the whole country.
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And those records were discovered in an old storeroom
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at the University of Edinburgh by a friend of mine,
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Ian Deary, who found the records, digitized them,
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and has done a lot of research
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on the people who are still alive today
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from that original study,
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including brain imaging research, by the way.
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It really, it's a fascinating group of people
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Not to get ahead of the story,
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but one of the most interesting things they found
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is a very strong relationship
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between IQ measured at age 11 and mortality.
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So that, you know,
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in the 70 years later, they looked at the survival rates
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and they could get death records from everybody.
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And Scotland has universal healthcare for everybody.
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And it turned out if you divide the people
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by their age 11 IQ score into quartiles
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and then look at how many people are alive 70 years later,
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the, I know this is in the book,
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I have the graph in the book,
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but there are essentially twice as many people alive
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in the highest IQ quartile than in the lowest IQ quartile.
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It's true in men and women.
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So it makes a big difference.
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Now, why this is the case is not so clear
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since everyone had access to healthcare.
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Well, there's a lot, and we'll talk about it, you know,
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just the sentences you used now
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could be explained by nature or nurture.
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Now, there's a lot of science that starts to then dig in
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and investigate that question.
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But let me linger on the IQ test.
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How are the test design, IQ test design, how do they work?
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Maybe some examples for people who are not aware.
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What makes a good IQ test question
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that sneaks up on this G factor measure?
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Well, your question is interesting
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because you want me to give examples of items
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that make good items.
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And what makes a good item is not so much its content,
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but its empirical relationship to the total score
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that turns out to be valid by other means.
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So for example, let me give you an odd example
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from personality testing.
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So there's a personality test
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called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, MMPI.
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Been around for decades.
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I've heard about this test recently
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because of the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial.
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I don't know if you've been paying attention to that.
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But they had psychologists.
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I have not been paying attention to it.
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They had psychologists on the stand,
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and they were talking, apparently those psychologists did,
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again, I'm learning so much from this trial.
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They did different battery of tests
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to diagnose personality disorders.
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Apparently there's that systematic way of doing so,
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and the Minnesota one is one of the ones
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that there's the most science on.
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There's a lot of great papers,
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which were all continuously cited on the stand,
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which is fascinating to watch.
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Sorry, a little bit of attention.
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I mean, this is interesting because you're right.
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It's been around for decades.
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There's a lot of scientific research
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on the psychometric properties of the test,
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including what it predicts with respect
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to different categories of personality disorder.
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But what I wanna mention is the content
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of the items on that test.
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All of the items are essentially true false items.
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True or false, I prefer a shower to a bath.
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True or false, I think Lincoln
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was a better president than Washington.
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But what of all these, what does that have to do?
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And the point is the content of these items,
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nobody knows why these items in aggregate predict anything,
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but empirically they do.
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It's a technique of choosing items for a test
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that is called dust bowl empiricism.
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That the content doesn't matter,
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but for some reason when you get a criterion group
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of people with this disorder and you compare them
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to people without that disorder,
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these are the items that distinguish,
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irrespective of content.
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It's a hard concept to grasp.
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Well, first of all, it's fascinating.
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But from, because I consider myself part psychologist
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because I love human robot interaction,
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and that's a problem.
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Half of that problem is a psychology problem
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because there's a human.
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So designing these tests to get at the questions
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is the fascinating part.
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Like how do you get to,
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like what does dust bowl empiricism refer to?
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Does it refer to the final result?
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Yeah, so it's the test is dust bowl empiricism.
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But how do you arrive at the battery of questions?
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I presume one of the things,
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now again, I'm going to the excellent testimony
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in that trial, they explain it,
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because they also, they explain the tests.
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That a bunch of the questions are kind of
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make you forget that you're taking a test.
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Like it makes it very difficult for you
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to somehow figure out what you're supposed to answer.
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Yes, it's called social desirability.
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But we're getting a little far afield
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because I only wanted to give that example
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of dust bowl empiricism.
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When we talk about the items on an IQ test,
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many of those items in the dust bowl empiricism method
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have no face validity.
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In other words, they don't look like they measure anything.
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Whereas most intelligence tests,
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the items actually look like they're measuring
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some mental ability.
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So here's one of the.
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So you were bringing that up as an example
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as what it is not.
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So I don't want to go too far afield on it.
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Too far afield is actually one of the names of this podcast.
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So I should mention that.
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Yeah, so anyway, sorry.
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So they feel the questions look like
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they pass the face validity test.
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And some more than others.
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So for example, let me give you a couple of things here.
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If I, one of the subtests on a standard IQ test
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is general information.
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Let me just think a little bit
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because I don't want to give you the actual item.
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But if I said, how far is it between Washington DC
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and Miami, Florida?
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Within 500 miles plus or minus.
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Well, you know, it's not a fact most people memorize,
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but you know something about geography.
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You say, well, I flew there once.
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I know planes fly for 500 miles.
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You know, you can kind of make an estimate.
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But it's also seems like it would be very cultural,
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you know, so there's that kind of general information.
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Then there's vocabulary test.
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What does regatta mean?
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And I choose that word because that word was removed
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from the IQ test because people complained
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that disadvantaged people would not know that word
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just from their everyday life.
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Okay, here's another example
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from a different kind of subtest on.
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What's regatta, by the way?
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I think I'm disadvantaged.
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A sailing competition, a competition with boats.
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Not necessarily sailing, but a competition with boats.
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Yep, yep, I'm probably disadvantaged in that way.
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Okay, excellent, so that was removed anyway you were saying.
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Okay, so here's another subtest.
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I'm gonna repeat a string of numbers,
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and when I'm done, I want you to repeat them back to me.
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Okay, seven, four, two, eight, one, six.
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That's way too many.
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Seven, four, two, eight, one, six.
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Okay, you get the idea.
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Now the actual test starts with a smaller number,
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like two numbers, and then as people get it right,
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you keep going, adding to the string of numbers
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until they can't do it anymore.
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Okay, but now try this.
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I'm gonna say some numbers, and when I'm done,
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I want you to repeat them to me backwards.
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Okay, now, so I gave you some examples
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of the kind of items on an IQ test.
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General information, I can't even remember all,
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general information, vocabulary, digit span forward
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and digit span backward.
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Well, you said I can't even remember them.
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That's a good question for me.
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What does memory have to do with GFactor?
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Okay, well, let's hold on.
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Let's just talk about these examples.
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Now, some of those items seem very cultural,
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and others seem less cultural.
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Which ones do you think, scores on which subtest
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are most highly correlated with the GFactor?
link |
Well, the intuitive answer is less cultural.
link |
Well, it turns out vocabulary is highly correlated,
link |
and it turns out that digit span backwards
link |
is highly correlated.
link |
How do you figure?
link |
Now you have decades of research to answer the question,
link |
how do you figure?
link |
Right, so now there's good research that gives you
link |
intuition about what kind of questions get at it,
link |
just like there's something I've done,
link |
I've actually used for research in semi autonomous vehicle,
link |
like whether humans are paying attention,
link |
there's a body of literature that does end back test,
link |
for example, we have to put workload on the brain
link |
to do recall, memory recall, and that helps you
link |
kind of put some work onto the brain
link |
while the person is doing some other task,
link |
and does some interesting research with that.
link |
But that's loading the memory,
link |
so there's like research around stably
link |
what that means about the human mind,
link |
and here you're saying recall backwards
link |
is a good protector.
link |
It's a transformation.
link |
Yeah, so you have to do some,
link |
like you have to load that into your brain,
link |
and not just remember it, but do something with it.
link |
Right, here's another example of a different kind of test
link |
called the Hick paradigm, and it's not verbal at all.
link |
It's a little box, and there are a series of lights
link |
arranged in a semi circle at the top of the box,
link |
and then there's a home button that you press,
link |
and when one of the lights goes on,
link |
there's a button next to each of those lights,
link |
you take your finger off the home button,
link |
and you just press the button
link |
next to the light that goes on,
link |
and so it's a very simple reaction time.
link |
Light goes on, as quick as you can, you press the button,
link |
and you get a reaction time
link |
from the moment you lift your finger off the button
link |
to when you press the button where the light is.
link |
That reaction time doesn't really correlate
link |
with IQ very much, but if you change the instructions,
link |
and you say three lights are gonna come on simultaneously,
link |
I want you to press the button next to the light
link |
that's furthest from the other two.
link |
So maybe lights one and two go on,
link |
and light six goes on simultaneously.
link |
You take your finger off,
link |
and you would press the button by light six.
link |
That's that reaction time to a more complex task.
link |
It's not really hard.
link |
Almost everybody gets it all right,
link |
but your reaction time to that
link |
is highly correlated with the G factor.
link |
This is fascinating.
link |
So reaction time, so there's a temporal aspect to this.
link |
So what role does time?
link |
Speed of processing.
link |
It's the speed of processing.
link |
Is this also true for ones that take longer,
link |
like five, 10, 30 seconds?
link |
Is time part of the measure with some of these things?
link |
Yes, and that is why some of the best IQ tests
link |
have a time limit, because if you have no time limit,
link |
people can do better,
link |
but it doesn't distinguish among people that well.
link |
So that adding the time element is important.
link |
So speed of information processing,
link |
and reaction time is a measure
link |
of speed of information processing,
link |
turns out to be related to the G factor.
link |
But the G factor only accounts for maybe half
link |
or some amount on the test performance.
link |
For example, I get pretty bad test anxiety.
link |
Like I was never, I mean,
link |
I just don't enjoy tests.
link |
I enjoy going back into my cave and working.
link |
Like I've always enjoyed homework way more than tests,
link |
no matter how hard the homework is,
link |
because I can go back to the cave
link |
and hide away and think deeply.
link |
There's something about being watched
link |
and having a time limit that really makes me anxious,
link |
and I can just see the mind not operating optimally at all.
link |
But you're saying underneath there,
link |
there's still a G factor, there's still.
link |
No question, there's no question.
link |
And if you get anxious taking the test,
link |
many people say, oh, I didn't do well,
link |
because I'm anxious.
link |
I hear that a lot.
link |
Say, well, fine, if you're really anxious during the test,
link |
the score will be a bad estimate of your G factor.
link |
It doesn't mean the G factor isn't there.
link |
And by the way, standardized tests like the SAT,
link |
they're essentially intelligence tests.
link |
They are highly G loaded.
link |
Now, the people who make the SAT don't wanna mention that.
link |
They have enough trouble justifying standardized testing,
link |
but to call it an intelligence test
link |
is really beyond the pale.
link |
But in fact, it's so highly correlated,
link |
because it's a reasoning test.
link |
SAT is a reasoning test,
link |
a verbal reasoning, mathematical reasoning.
link |
And if it's a reasoning test, it has to be related to G.
link |
But if people go in and take a standardized test,
link |
whether it's an IQ test or the SAT,
link |
and they happen to be sick that day with 102 fever,
link |
the score is not going to be a good estimate of their G.
link |
If they retake the test when they're not anxious
link |
or less anxious or don't have a fever,
link |
the score will go up, and that will be a better estimate.
link |
But you can't say their G factor increased
link |
between the two tests.
link |
Well, it's interesting.
link |
So the question is how wide of a battery of tests
link |
is required to estimate the G factor well?
link |
Because I'll give you as my personal example,
link |
I took the SAT in, I think it was called the ACT,
link |
where I was two, also, I took SAT many times.
link |
Every single time, I got it perfect on math.
link |
And verbal, the time limit on the verbal
link |
made me very anxious.
link |
I did not, I mean, part of it,
link |
I didn't speak English very well.
link |
But honestly, it was like you're supposed to remember stuff,
link |
and I was so anxious.
link |
And as I'm reading, I'm sweating, I can't,
link |
you know that feeling you have when you're reading a book
link |
and you just read a page and you know nothing
link |
about what you've read because you zoned out.
link |
That's the same feeling of like, I can't, I have to,
link |
you're like, nope, read and understand.
link |
And that anxiety is like, and you start seeing
link |
like the typography versus the content of the words.
link |
Like that was, I don't, it's interesting
link |
because I know that what they're measuring,
link |
I could see being correlated with something.
link |
But that anxiety or some aspect of the performance
link |
sure plays a factor.
link |
And I wonder how you sneak up in a stable way.
link |
I mean, this is a broader discussion
link |
about like standardized testing, how you sneak up,
link |
how you get at the fact that I'm super anxious
link |
and still nevertheless measure some aspect
link |
I wonder, I don't know.
link |
I don't know if you can say to that,
link |
that time limit sure is a pain.
link |
Well, let me say this.
link |
There are two ways to approach the very real problem
link |
that you say that some people just get anxious
link |
or not good test takers.
link |
By the way, part of testing is you know the answer,
link |
you can figure out the answer or you can't.
link |
If you don't know the answer, there are many reasons
link |
you don't know the answer at that particular moment.
link |
You may have learned it once and forgotten it.
link |
It may be on the tip of your tongue
link |
and you just can't get it
link |
because you're anxious about the time limit.
link |
You may never have learned it.
link |
You may have been exposed to it,
link |
but it was too complicated and you couldn't learn it.
link |
I mean, there are all kinds of reasons here.
link |
But for an individual to interpret your scores
link |
as an individual, whoever is interpreting the score
link |
has to take into account various things
link |
that would affect your individual score.
link |
And that's why decisions about college admission
link |
or anything else where tests are used
link |
are hardly ever the only criterion to make a decision.
link |
And I think people are, college admissions
link |
letting go of that very much.
link |
But what does that even mean?
link |
Because is it possible to design standardized tests
link |
that do get, that are useful to college admissions?
link |
Well, they already exist.
link |
The SAT is highly correlated with many aspects
link |
of success at college.
link |
Here's the problem.
link |
So maybe you could speak to this.
link |
The correlation across the population versus individuals.
link |
So our criminal justice system is designed to make sure,
link |
wow, it's still, there's tragic cases
link |
where innocent people go to jail,
link |
but you try to avoid that.
link |
And the same way with testing,
link |
it just, it would suck for an SAT to miss genius.
link |
Yes, and it's possible, but it's statistically unlikely.
link |
So it really comes down to which piece of information
link |
maximizes your decision making ability.
link |
So if you just use high school grades, it's okay.
link |
But you will miss some people
link |
who just don't do well in high school,
link |
but who are actually pretty smart,
link |
smart enough to be bored silly in high school,
link |
and they don't care,
link |
and their high school GPA isn't that good.
link |
So you will miss them in the same sense
link |
that somebody who could be very able and ready for college
link |
just doesn't do well on their SAT.
link |
This is why you make decisions
link |
with taking in a variety of information.
link |
The other thing I wanted to say,
link |
I talked about when you make a decision for an individual,
link |
statistically for groups,
link |
there are many people who have a disparity
link |
between their math score and their verbal score.
link |
That disparity, or the other way around,
link |
that disparity is called tilt.
link |
The score is tilted one way or the other.
link |
And that tilt has been studied empirically
link |
to see what that predicts.
link |
And in fact, you can't make predictions
link |
about college success based on tilt.
link |
And mathematics is a good example.
link |
There are many people,
link |
especially non native speakers of English
link |
who come to this country,
link |
take the SATs, do very well on the math
link |
and not so well on the verbal.
link |
Well, if they're applying to a math program,
link |
the professors there who are making the decision
link |
or the admissions officers
link |
don't wait so much to score on verbal,
link |
especially if it's a non native speaker.
link |
Well, so yeah, you have to try to,
link |
in the admission process, bring in the context.
link |
But non native isn't really the problem.
link |
I mean, that was part of the problem for me.
link |
But it's the anxiety was, which it's interesting.
link |
Oh boy, reducing yourself down to numbers.
link |
But it's still true.
link |
It's still the truth.
link |
It's a painful truth.
link |
That same anxiety that led me to be,
link |
to struggle with the SAT verbal tests
link |
is still within me in all ways of life.
link |
So maybe that's not anxiety.
link |
Maybe that's something, like personality
link |
is also pretty stable.
link |
Personality is stable.
link |
Personality does impact the way you navigate life.
link |
There's no question.
link |
Yeah, and we should say that the G factor in intelligence
link |
is not just about some kind of number on a paper.
link |
It also has to do with how you navigate life.
link |
How easy life is for you in this very complicated world.
link |
So personality's all tied into that
link |
in some deep fundamental way.
link |
But now you've hit the key point
link |
about why we even want to study intelligence.
link |
And personality, I think, to a lesser extent.
link |
But that's my interest, is more on intelligence.
link |
I went to graduate school and wanted to study personality,
link |
but that's kind of another story
link |
how I got kind of shifted from personality research
link |
over to intelligence research.
link |
Because it's not just a number.
link |
Intelligence is not just an IQ score.
link |
It's not just an SAT score.
link |
It's what those numbers reflect about your ability
link |
to navigate everyday life.
link |
It has been said that life is one long intelligence test.
link |
And who can't relate to that?
link |
And if you doubt, see, another problem here
link |
is a lot of critics of intelligence research,
link |
intelligence testing, tend to be academics
link |
who, by and large, are pretty smart people.
link |
And pretty smart people, by and large,
link |
have enormous difficulty understanding
link |
what the world is like for people with IQs of 80 or 75.
link |
It is a completely different everyday experience.
link |
Even IQ scores of 85, 90.
link |
You know, there's a popular television program, Judge Judy.
link |
Judge Judy deals with everyday people
link |
with everyday problems, and you can see the full range
link |
of problem solving ability demonstrated there.
link |
And sometimes she does it for laughs,
link |
but it really isn't funny because people who are,
link |
there are people who are very limited
link |
in their life navigation, let alone success,
link |
by not having good reasoning skills, which cannot be taught.
link |
We know this, by the way, because there are many efforts.
link |
You know, the United States military,
link |
which excels at training people,
link |
I mean, I don't know that there's a better organization
link |
in the world for training diverse people,
link |
and they won't take people with IQs under,
link |
I think, 83 is the cutoff, because they have found
link |
they are unable to train people with lower IQs
link |
to do jobs in the military.
link |
So one of the things that G Factor has to do is learning.
link |
Absolutely, some people learn faster than others.
link |
Some people learn more than others.
link |
Now, faster, by the way, is not necessarily better,
link |
as long as you get to the same place eventually.
link |
But, you know, there are professional schools
link |
that want students who can learn the fastest
link |
because they can learn more or learn better.
link |
Or learn deeper, or all kinds of ideas
link |
about why you select people with the highest scores.
link |
And there's nothing funnier, by the way,
link |
to listen to a bunch of academics
link |
complain about the concept of intelligence
link |
and intelligence testing, and then you go
link |
to a faculty meeting where they're discussing
link |
who to hire among the applicants.
link |
And all they talk about is how smart the person is.
link |
We'll get to that, we'll sneak up to that in different ways,
link |
but there's something about reducing a person
link |
to a number that in part is grounded
link |
to the person's genetics that makes people very uncomfortable.
link |
But nobody does that.
link |
Nobody in the field actually does that.
link |
That is a worry that is a worry like,
link |
well, I don't wanna call it a conspiracy theory.
link |
I mean, it's a legitimate worry,
link |
but it just doesn't happen.
link |
Now, I had a professor in graduate school
link |
who was the only person I ever knew
link |
who considered the students only by their test scores.
link |
And later in his life, he kind of backed off that.
link |
Let me ask you this, so we'll jump around,
link |
I'll come back to it, but I tend to,
link |
I've had like political discussions with people
link |
and actually my friend Michael Malice, he's an anarchist.
link |
I disagree with him on basically everything
link |
except the fact that love is a beautiful thing in this world.
link |
And he says this test about left versus right,
link |
whatever, it doesn't matter what the test is,
link |
but he believes, the question is,
link |
do you believe that some people are better than others?
link |
Question is ambiguous.
link |
Do you believe some people are better than others?
link |
And to me, sort of the immediate answer is no.
link |
It's a poetic question, it's an ambiguous question, right?
link |
Like people wanna maybe the temptation
link |
to ask better at what, better at like sports and so on.
link |
No, to me, I stand with the sort of defining documents
link |
of this country, which is all men are created equal.
link |
There's a basic humanity.
link |
And there's something about tests of intelligence.
link |
Just knowing that some people are different,
link |
like the science of intelligence that shows
link |
that some people are genetically
link |
in some stable way across a lifetime,
link |
have a greater intelligence than others,
link |
makes people feel like some people are better than others.
link |
And that makes them very uncomfortable.
link |
And I, maybe you can speak to that.
link |
The fact that some people are more intelligent than others
link |
in a way that's, cannot be compensated
link |
through education, through anything you do in life.
link |
What do we do with that?
link |
Okay, there's a lot there.
link |
We haven't really talked about the genetics of it yet.
link |
But you are correct in that it is my interpretation
link |
of the data that genetics has a very important influence
link |
And this is controversial, and we can talk about it,
link |
but if you think that genetics,
link |
that genes are deterministic, are always deterministic,
link |
that leads to kind of the worry that you expressed.
link |
But we know now in the 21st century
link |
that many genes are not deterministic,
link |
that are probabilistic,
link |
meaning their gene expression can be influenced.
link |
Now, whether they're influenced only
link |
by other biological variables or other genetic variables
link |
or environmental or cultural variables,
link |
that's where the controversy comes in.
link |
And we can discuss that in more detail if you like.
link |
But to go to the question about better, are people better?
link |
There's zero evidence that smart people are better
link |
with respect to important aspects of life,
link |
like honesty, even likability.
link |
I'm sure you know many very intelligent people
link |
who are not terribly likable or terribly kind
link |
or terribly honest.
link |
Is there something to be said?
link |
So one of the things I've recently reread
link |
for the second time, I guess that's what the word reread
link |
means, the rise and fall of the Third Reich,
link |
which is, I think, the best telling
link |
of the rise and fall of Hitler.
link |
And one of the interesting things about the people that,
link |
how should I say it?
link |
Justified or maybe propped up the ideas
link |
that Hitler put forward is the fact
link |
that they were extremely intelligent.
link |
They were the intellectual class.
link |
They were like, it was obvious that they thought
link |
very deeply and rationally about the world.
link |
So what I would like to say is one of the things
link |
that shows to me is some of the worst atrocities
link |
in the history of humanity have been committed
link |
by very intelligent people.
link |
So that means that intelligence
link |
doesn't make you a good person.
link |
I wonder if there's a G factor for intelligence.
link |
I wonder if there's a G factor for goodness.
link |
The Nietzschean good and evil,
link |
of course that's probably harder to measure
link |
because it's such a subjective thing
link |
what it means to be good.
link |
And even the idea of evil is a deeply uncomfortable thing
link |
because how do we know?
link |
But it's independent, whatever it is,
link |
it's independent of intelligence.
link |
So I agree with you about that.
link |
But let me say this.
link |
I have also asserted my belief
link |
that more intelligence is better than less.
link |
That doesn't mean more intelligent people are better people
link |
but all things being equal,
link |
would you like to be smarter or less smart?
link |
So if I had a pill, I have two pills.
link |
I said, this one will make you smarter,
link |
this one will make you dumber.
link |
Which one would you like?
link |
Are there any circumstances
link |
under which you would choose to be dumber?
link |
Well, let me ask you this.
link |
That's a very nuanced and interesting question.
link |
There's been books written about this, right?
link |
Now we'll return to the hard questions,
link |
the interesting questions,
link |
but let me ask about human happiness.
link |
Does intelligence lead to happiness?
link |
So, okay, so back to the pill then.
link |
So when would you take the pill?
link |
So you said IQ 80, 90, 100, 110,
link |
you start going through the quartiles
link |
and is it obvious?
link |
Isn't there diminishing returns
link |
and then it starts becoming negative?
link |
This is an empirical question.
link |
And so that I have advocated in many forums
link |
more research on enhancing the G factor.
link |
Right now there have been many claims
link |
about enhancing intelligence with,
link |
you mentioned the NBAC training,
link |
it was a big deal a few years ago, it doesn't work.
link |
Data is very clear, it does not work.
link |
Or doing like memory tests, like training and so on.
link |
Yeah, it may give you a better memory in the short run,
link |
but it doesn't impact your G factor.
link |
It was very popular a couple of decades ago
link |
that the idea that listening to Mozart
link |
could make you more intelligent.
link |
There was a paper published on this
link |
with somebody I knew published this paper,
link |
and intelligence researchers never believed it for a second.
link |
Been hundreds of studies, all the meta analyses,
link |
all the summaries and so on,
link |
show that there's nothing to it, nothing to it at all.
link |
But wouldn't it be something,
link |
wouldn't it be world shaking
link |
if you could take the normal distribution of intelligence,
link |
which we haven't really talked about yet,
link |
but IQ scores and the G factor
link |
is thought to be a normal distribution,
link |
and shift it to the right so that everybody is smarter?
link |
Even a half a standard deviation would be world shaking,
link |
because there are many social problems,
link |
many, many social problems that are exacerbated
link |
by people with lower ability to reason stuff out
link |
and navigate everyday life.
link |
I wonder if there's a threshold.
link |
So maybe I would push back and say universal shifting
link |
of the normal distribution
link |
may not be the optimal way of shifting.
link |
Maybe it's better to,
link |
whatever the asymmetric kind of distributions
link |
is like really pushing the lower up
link |
versus trying to make the people
link |
at the average more intelligent.
link |
So you're saying that if in fact
link |
there was some way to increase G,
link |
let's just call it metaphorically a pill, an IQ pill,
link |
we should only give it to people at the lower end.
link |
No, it's just intuitively I can see
link |
that life becomes easier at the lower end if it's increased.
link |
It becomes less and less,
link |
it is an empirical scientific question,
link |
but it becomes less and less obvious to me
link |
that more intelligence is better.
link |
At the high end, not because it would make life easier,
link |
but it would make whatever problems you're working on
link |
And if you are working on artificial intelligence,
link |
there's a tremendous potential for that to improve society.
link |
So at whatever problems you're working on, yes.
link |
But there's also the problem of the human condition.
link |
There's love, there's fear,
link |
and all of those beautiful things
link |
that sometimes if you're good at solving problems,
link |
you're going to create more problems for yourself.
link |
It's, I'm not exactly sure.
link |
So ignorance is bliss is a thing.
link |
So there might be a place,
link |
there might be a sweet spot of intelligence
link |
given your environment, given your personality,
link |
all of those kinds of things.
link |
And that becomes less beautifully complicated
link |
the more and more intelligent you become.
link |
But that's a question for literature,
link |
not for science perhaps.
link |
Well, imagine this.
link |
Imagine there was an IQ pill
link |
and it was developed by a private company
link |
and they are willing to sell it to you.
link |
And whatever price they put on it,
link |
you are willing to pay it
link |
because you would like to be smarter.
link |
But just before they give you a pill,
link |
they give you a disclaimer form to sign.
link |
you understand that this pill has no guarantee
link |
that your life is going to be better
link |
and in fact it could be worse.
link |
Well, yes, that's how lawyers work.
link |
But I would love for science to answer the question
link |
to try to predict if your life
link |
is going to be better or worse
link |
when you become more or less intelligent.
link |
It's a fascinating question
link |
about what is the sweet spot for the human condition.
link |
Some of the things we see as bugs
link |
might be actually features,
link |
may be crucial to our overall happiness
link |
as our limitations might lead to more happiness than less.
link |
But again, more intelligence is better at the lower end.
link |
That's more, that's something that's less arguable
link |
and fascinating if possible to increase.
link |
But you know, there's virtually no research
link |
that's based on a neuroscience approach
link |
to solving that problem.
link |
All the solutions that have been proposed
link |
to solve that problem or to ameliorate that problem
link |
are essentially based on the blank slate assumption
link |
that enriching the environment, removing barriers,
link |
all good things by the way,
link |
I'm not against any of those things.
link |
But there's no empirical evidence
link |
that they're going to improve the general reasoning ability
link |
or make people more employable.
link |
Have you read Flowers of Algernon? Yes.
link |
That's to the question of intelligence and happiness.
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There are many profound aspects of that story.
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It was a film that was very good.
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The film was called Charlie
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for the younger people who are listening to this.
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You might be able to stream it on Netflix or something,
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but it was a story about a person
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with very low IQ who underwent a surgical procedure
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in the brain and he slowly became a genius.
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And the tragedy of the story is the effect was temporary.
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It's a fascinating story really.
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That goes in contrast to the basic human experience
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that each of us individually have,
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but it raises the question of the full range of people
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you might be able to be given different levels
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You've mentioned the normal distribution.
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So let's talk about it.
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There's a book called The Bell Curve written in 1994,
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written by psychologist Richard Herrnstein
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and political scientist Charles Murray.
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Why was this book so controversial?
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This is a fascinating book.
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I know Charles Murray.
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I've had many conversations with him.
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Yeah, what is the book about?
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The book is about the importance of intelligence
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That's what the book is about.
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It's an empirical book.
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It has statistical analyses of very large databases
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that show that essentially IQ scores or their equivalent
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are correlated to all kinds of social problems
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and social benefits.
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And that in itself is not where the controversy
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about that book came.
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The controversy was about one chapter in that book.
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And that is a chapter about the average difference
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in mean scores between black Americans and white Americans.
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And these are the terms that were used in the book
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at the time and are still used to some extent.
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And historically, or really for decades,
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it has been observed that disadvantaged groups
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score on average lower than Caucasians
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on academic tests, tests of mental ability,
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and especially on IQ tests.
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And the difference is about a standard deviation,
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which is about 15 points, which is a substantial difference.
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In the book, Herrnstein and Murray in this one chapter
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assert clearly and unambiguously
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that whether this average difference
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is due to genetics or not, they are agnostic.
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Moreover, they assert they don't care
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because you wouldn't treat anybody differently
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knowing if there was a genetic component or not
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because that's a group average finding.
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Every individual has to be treated as an individual.
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You can't make any assumption
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about what that person's intellectual ability might be
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from the fact of a average group difference.
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They're very clear about this.
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Nonetheless, people took away,
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I'm gonna choose my words carefully
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because I have a feeling that many critics
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didn't actually read the book.
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They took away that Herrnstein and Murray were saying
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that blacks are genetically inferior.
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That was the take home message.
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And if they weren't saying it, they were implying it
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because they had a chapter that discussed
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this empirical observation of a difference.
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And isn't this horrible?
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And so the reaction to that book was incendiary.
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What do we know about from that book
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and the research beyond about race differences
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It's still the most incendiary topic in psychology.
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Nothing has changed that.
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Anybody who even discusses it is easily called a racist
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just for discussing it.
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It's become fashionable to find racism
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in any discussion like this.
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The short answer to your question is
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there's been very little actual research
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on this topic since 19...
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Since the bell curve.
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Since the bell curve, even before.
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This really became incendiary in 1969
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with an article published by an educational psychologist
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named Arthur Jensen.
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Let's just take a minute and go back to that
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to see the bell curve in a little bit more
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historical perspective.
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Arthur Jensen was a educational psychologist
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I knew him as well.
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And in 1969 or 68, the Harvard Educational Review
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asked him to do a review article
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on the early childhood education programs
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that were designed to raise the IQs of minority students.
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This was before the federally funded Head Start program.
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Head Start had not really gotten underway
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at the time Jensen undertook his review
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of what were a number of demonstration programs.
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And these demonstration programs were for young children
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who were around kindergarten age.
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And they were specially designed to be
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cognitively stimulating, to provide lunches,
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do all the things that people thought would
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minimize this average gap of intelligence tests.
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There was a strong belief among virtually all psychologists
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that the cause of the gap was unequal opportunity
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due to racism, due to all negative things in the society.
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And if you could compensate for this, the gap would go away.
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So early childhood education back then was called
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literally compensatory education.
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Jensen looked at these programs.
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He was an empirical guy.
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He understood psychometrics.
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And he wrote a, it was over a hundred page article
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detailing these programs
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and the flaws in their research design.
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Some of the programs reported IQ gains
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of on average five points,
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but a few reported 10, 20 and even 30 point gains.
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One was called the miracle in Milwaukee.
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That investigator went to jail ultimately
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for fabricating data.
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But the point is that Jensen wrote an article that said,
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look, the opening sentence of his article is classic.
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The opening sentence is, I may not quote it exactly right,
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but it's, we have tried compensatory education
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and it has failed.
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And he showed that these gains were essentially nothing.
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You couldn't really document empirically any gains at all
link |
from these really earnest efforts to increase IQ.
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But he went a step further, a fateful step further.
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He said, not only have these efforts failed,
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but because they have had essentially no impact,
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we have to reexamine our assumption
link |
that these differences are caused by environmental things
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that we can address with education.
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We need to consider a genetic influence,
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whether there's a genetic influence
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on this group difference.
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So you said that this is one of the more controversial works
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ever in science. I think it's the most infamous paper
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in all of psychology, I would go on to say.
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Because in 1969, the genetic data was very skimpy
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on this question, skimpy and controversial.
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It's always been controversial,
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but it was even skimpy and controversial.
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It's kind of a long story that I go into a little bit
link |
in more detail in the book, Neuroscience of Intelligence.
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But to say he was vilified is an understatement.
link |
I mean, he couldn't talk at the American
link |
Psychological Association without bomb threats
link |
clearing the lecture hall.
link |
Campus security watched him all the time.
link |
They opened his mail.
link |
He had to retreat to a different address.
link |
This was one of the earliest kinds,
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this is before the internet
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and kind of internet social media mobs.
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But it was that intense.
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And I have written that overnight,
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after the publication of this article,
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all intelligence research became radioactive.
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Nobody wanted to talk about it.
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Nobody was doing more research.
link |
And then the bell curve came along.
link |
And the Jensen controversy was dying down.
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I have stories that Jensen told me about his interaction
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with the Nixon White House on this issue.
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I mean, this was like a really big deal.
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It was some unbelievable stories,
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but he told me this, so I kind of believe these stories.
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All this silence, basically, saying,
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nobody wants to do this kind of research.
link |
There's so much pressure, so much attack
link |
against this kind of research.
link |
And here's sort of a bold, stupid, crazy people
link |
that decide to dive right back in.
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I wonder how much discussion that was.
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Do we include this chapter or not?
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Murray has said they discussed it,
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and they felt they should include it.
link |
And they were very careful in the way they wrote it,
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which did them no good.
link |
So, as a matter of fact, when the bell curve came out,
link |
it was so controversial.
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I got a call from a television show called Nightline.
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It was with a broadcaster called Ted Koppel.
link |
We had this evening show, I think it was on late at night.
link |
Talked about news.
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It was a straight up news thing.
link |
And a producer called and asked if I would be on it
link |
to talk about the bell curve.
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And I said, she asked me what I thought
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about the bell curve as a book.
link |
And I said, look, it's a very good book.
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It talks about the role of intelligence in society.
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And she said, no, no, what do you think
link |
about the chapter on race?
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That's what we want you to talk about.
link |
I remember this conversation.
link |
I said, well, she said, what would you say
link |
if you were on TV?
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And I said, well, what I would say is that
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it's not at all clear if there's any genetic component
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to intelligence, any differences.
link |
But if there were a strong genetic component,
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that would be a good thing.
link |
And complete silence on the other end of the phone.
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And she said, well, what do you mean?
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And I said, well, if it's the more genetic
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any difference is, the more it's biological.
link |
And if it's biological, we can figure out how to fix it.
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I see, that's interesting.
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She said, would you say that on television?
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And so that was the end of that.
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So that's for more like biology is within the reach
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of science and the environment is a public policy,
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is social and all those kinds of things.
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From your perspective, whichever one you think
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is more amenable to solutions in the short term
link |
is the one that excites you.
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But you saying that is good, the truth of genetic differences,
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no matter what, between groups is a painful, harmful,
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potentially dangerous thing.
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So let me ask you to this question,
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whether it's bell curve or any research
link |
on race differences, can that be used to increase
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the amount of racism in the world?
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Can that be used to increase the amount of hate
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Do you think about this kind of stuff?
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I've thought about this a lot, not as a scientist,
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And my sense is there is such enormous reservoirs
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of hate and racism that have nothing to do
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with scientific knowledge of the data,
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that speak against that.
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That no, I don't wanna give racist groups a veto power
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over what scientists study.
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If you think that the differences, and by the way,
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virtually no one disagrees that there are differences
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in scores, it's all about what causes them
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and how to fix it.
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So if you think this is a cultural problem,
link |
then you must ask the problem,
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what do you want to change anything about the culture?
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Or are you okay with the culture?
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Cause you don't feel it's appropriate
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to change a person's culture.
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So are you okay with that?
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And the fact that that may lead to disadvantages
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in school achievement.
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If you think it's environmental,
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what are the environmental parameters that can be fixed?
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I'll tell you one, lead from gasoline in the atmosphere.
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Lead in paint, lead in water.
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That's an environmental toxin that society
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has the means to eliminate, and they should.
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Yeah, just to sort of try and define some insights
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and conclusion to this very difficult topic.
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Is there been research on environment versus genetics,
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nature versus nurture, on this question
link |
of race differences?
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There is not, no one wants to do this research.
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First of all, it's hard research to do.
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Second of all, it's a minefield.
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No one wants to spend their career on it.
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Tenured people don't want to do it, let alone students.
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The way I talk about it,
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well, before I tell you the way I talk about it,
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I want to say one more thing about Jensen.
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He was once asked by a journalist straight out,
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His answer was very interesting.
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His answer was, I've thought about that a lot,
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and I've concluded it doesn't matter.
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Now, I know what he meant by this.
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The guts to say that, wow.
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He was a very unusual person.
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I think he had a touch of Asperger's syndrome,
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to tell you the truth,
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because I saw him in many circumstances.
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He would be canceled on Twitter immediately
link |
with that sentence.
link |
But what he meant was he had a hypothesis,
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and with respect to group differences,
link |
he called it the default hypothesis.
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He said, whatever factors affect individual intelligence
link |
are likely the same factors that affect group differences.
link |
It was the default.
link |
But it was a hypothesis.
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It should be tested, and if it turned out
link |
empirical tests didn't support the hypothesis,
link |
he was happy to move on to something else.
link |
He was absolutely committed to that scientific ideal,
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that it's an empirical question,
link |
we should look at it, and let's see what happens.
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The scientific method cannot be racist,
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from his perspective.
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It doesn't matter what the scientists,
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if they follow the scientific method,
link |
it doesn't matter what they believe.
link |
And if they are biased, and they consciously
link |
or unconsciously bias the data,
link |
other people will come along to replicate it,
link |
they will fail, and the process over time will work.
link |
So let me push back on this idea.
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Because psychology to me is full of gray areas.
link |
And what I've observed about psychology,
link |
even replication crisis aside,
link |
is that something about the media,
link |
something about journalism,
link |
something about the virality of ideas in the public sphere,
link |
they misinterpret, they take up things from studies,
link |
willfully or from ignorance, misinterpret findings,
link |
and tell narratives around that.
link |
I personally believe, for me,
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I'm not saying that broadly about science,
link |
but for me, it's my responsibility to anticipate
link |
the ways in which findings will be misinterpreted.
link |
So I thought about this a lot,
link |
because I published papers on semi autonomous vehicles,
link |
and those cars, people die in cars.
link |
There's people that have written me letters saying emails,
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nobody writes letters, I wish they did,
link |
that have blood on my hands,
link |
because of things that I would say positive or negative,
link |
there's consequences.
link |
In the same way, when you're a researcher of intelligence,
link |
I'm sure you might get emails,
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or at least people might believe
link |
that a finding of your study is going to be used
link |
by a large number of people
link |
to increase the amount of hate in the world.
link |
I think there's some responsibility on scientists,
link |
but for me, I think there's a great responsibility
link |
to anticipate the ways things will be misinterpreted,
link |
and there, you have to, first of all,
link |
decide whether you want to say a thing at all,
link |
do the study at all, publish the study at all,
link |
and two, the words with which you explain it.
link |
I find this on Twitter a lot, actually,
link |
which is, when I write a tweet,
link |
and I'm usually just doing it so innocently,
link |
I'll write it, it takes me five seconds to write it,
link |
or whatever, 30 seconds to write it,
link |
and then I'll think, all right, I close my eyes open,
link |
and try to see how will the world interpret this,
link |
what are the ways in which this will be misinterpreted,
link |
and I'll sometimes adjust that tweet to see,
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yeah, so in my mind, it's clear,
link |
but that's because it's my mind from which this tweet came,
link |
but you have to think, in a fresh mind that sees this,
link |
and it's spread across a large number of other minds,
link |
how will the interpretation morph?
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I mean, for a tweet, it's a silly thing, it doesn't matter,
link |
but for a scientific paper and study and finding,
link |
I think it matters.
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So I don't know what your thoughts are on that,
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because maybe for Jensen, the data's there,
link |
what do you want me to do?
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This is a scientific process that's been carried out,
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if you think the data was polluted by bias,
link |
do other studies that reveal the bias,
link |
but the data's there.
link |
And I'm not a poet, I'm not a literary writer,
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what do you want me to do?
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I'm just presenting you the data.
link |
What do you think on that spectrum?
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What's the role of a scientist?
link |
The reason I do podcasts,
link |
the reason I write books for the public
link |
is to explain what I think the data mean
link |
and what I think the data don't mean.
link |
I don't do very much on Twitter other than to retweet
link |
references to papers.
link |
I don't think it's my role to explain these,
link |
because they're complicated, they're nuanced.
link |
But when you decide not to do a scientific study
link |
because you're, or not to publish a result
link |
because you're afraid the result could be harmful
link |
or insensitive, that's not an unreasonable thought.
link |
And people will make different conclusions
link |
and decisions about that.
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I wrote about this, I'm the editor
link |
of a journal called Intelligence,
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which publishes scientific papers.
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Sometimes we publish papers on group differences.
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Those papers sometimes are controversial.
link |
These papers are written for a scientific audience.
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They're not written for the Twitter audience.
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I don't promote them very much on Twitter.
link |
But in a scientific paper,
link |
you have to now choose your words carefully also,
link |
because those papers are picked up by non scientists,
link |
by writers of various kinds,
link |
and you have to be available to discuss what you're saying
link |
and what you're not saying.
link |
Sometimes you are successful at having a good conversation
link |
like we are today, that doesn't start out pejorative.
link |
Other times I've been asked to participate in debates
link |
where my role would be to justify race science.
link |
Well, you can see you start out.
link |
That was a BBC request that I received.
link |
I have so much, it's a love hate relationship,
link |
mostly hate with these shallow journalism organizations.
link |
So they would want to use you
link |
as a kind of in a debate setting to communicate
link |
as to like there is raised differences between groups
link |
and make that into debate and put you in a role of...
link |
Justifying racism.
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Justifying racism.
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That's what they're asking me to do.
link |
Courses like educating about this field
link |
of the science of intelligence, yeah.
link |
I wanna say one more thing
link |
before we get off the normal distribution.
link |
You also asked me what is the science after the bell curve?
link |
And the short answer is there's not much new work,
link |
but whatever work there is supports the idea
link |
that there still are group differences.
link |
It's arguable whether those differences
link |
have diminished at all or not.
link |
And there is still a major problem
link |
in underperformance for school achievement
link |
for many disadvantaged and minority students.
link |
And there so far is no way to fix it.
link |
What do we do with this information?
link |
Is this now a task?
link |
Now we'll talk about the future
link |
on the neuroscience and the biology side,
link |
but in terms of this information as a society
link |
in the public policy, in the political space,
link |
in the social space, what do we do with this information?
link |
I've thought a lot about this.
link |
The first step is to have people interested in policy
link |
understand what the data actually show
link |
to pay attention to intelligence data.
link |
You can read policy papers about education
link |
and using your word processor,
link |
you can search for the word intelligence.
link |
You can search a 20,000 word document in a second
link |
and find out the word intelligence does not appear anywhere.
link |
In most discussions about what to do about achievement gaps,
link |
I'm not talking about test gaps,
link |
I'm talking about actual achievement gaps in schools,
link |
which everyone agrees is a problem,
link |
the word intelligence doesn't appear among educators.
link |
That's fascinating.
link |
As a matter of fact, in California,
link |
there has been tremendous controversy
link |
about recent attempts to revise the curriculum
link |
for math in high schools.
link |
And we had a Stanford professor of education
link |
who was running this review assert
link |
there's no such thing as talent, mathematical talent.
link |
And she wanted to get rid of the advanced classes in math
link |
because not everyone could do that.
link |
Now, of course, this has been very controversial,
link |
they've retreated somewhat,
link |
but the idea that a university professor
link |
was in charge of this who believes
link |
that there's no talent, that it doesn't exist,
link |
this is rather shocking,
link |
let alone the complete absence of intelligence data.
link |
By the way, let me tell you something
link |
about what the intelligence data show.
link |
Let's take race out of it.
link |
Even though the origins of these studies
link |
were a long time ago,
link |
I'm blocking on the name of the report,
link |
the Coleman report was a famous report about education.
link |
And they measured all kinds of variables about schools,
link |
and they looked at academic achievement as an outcome.
link |
And they found the most predictive variables
link |
of education outcome were the variables
link |
the student brought with him or her into the school,
link |
essentially their ability.
link |
And that when you combine the school
link |
and the teacher variables together,
link |
the quality of the school, the funding of the school,
link |
the quality of the teachers, their education,
link |
you put all the teacher and school variables together,
link |
it barely accounted for 10% of the variance.
link |
And this has been replicated now.
link |
So the best research we have shows that school variables
link |
and teacher variables together account
link |
for about 10% of student academic achievement.
link |
Now, you wanna have some policy
link |
on improving academic achievement,
link |
how much money do you wanna put into teacher education?
link |
How much money do you wanna put into the quality
link |
of the school administration?
link |
You know who you can ask?
link |
You can ask the Gates Foundation,
link |
because they spent a tremendous amount of money doing that.
link |
And at the end of it, because they're measurement people,
link |
they wanna know the data,
link |
they found it had no impact at all.
link |
And they've kind of pulled out of that kind of program.
link |
Let me ask you, this is me talking, but there's...
link |
Just the two of us.
link |
Just the two of us, but I'm gonna say
link |
some funny and ridiculous things,
link |
so you're surely not approving of it.
link |
But there's a movie called Clerks.
link |
I've seen it, I've seen it, yeah.
link |
There's a funny scene in there where a lovely couple
link |
are talking about the number
link |
of previous sexual partners they had.
link |
And the woman says that,
link |
I believe she just had a handful,
link |
like two or three or something like that sexual partners,
link |
but then she also mentioned that she...
link |
What's that called?
link |
Fallacia, what's the scientific?
link |
But she went, you know, gave a blow job
link |
to 37 guys, I believe it is.
link |
And so that has to do with the truth.
link |
So sometimes, knowing the truth
link |
can get in the way of a successful relationship
link |
of love of some of the human flourishing.
link |
And that seems to me that's at the core here,
link |
that facing some kind of truth
link |
that's not able to be changed
link |
makes it difficult to sort of...
link |
Is limiting as opposed to empowering.
link |
That's the concern.
link |
If you sort of test for intelligence
link |
and lay the data out,
link |
it feels like you will give up on certain people.
link |
You will sort of start bidding people,
link |
it's like, well, this person is like,
link |
let's focus on the average people
link |
or let's focus on the very intelligent people.
link |
That's the concern.
link |
And there's a kind of intuition
link |
that if we just don't measure
link |
and we don't use that data,
link |
that we will treat everybody equal
link |
and give everybody equal opportunity.
link |
If we have the data in front of us,
link |
we're likely to misdistribute
link |
the amount of sort of attention we allocate,
link |
resources we allocate to people.
link |
That's probably the concern.
link |
It's a realistic concern,
link |
but I think it's a misplaced concern
link |
if you wanna fix the problem.
link |
If you wanna fix the problem,
link |
you have to know what the problem is.
link |
Now, let me tell you this,
link |
let's go back to the bell curve,
link |
not the bell curve, but the normal distribution.
link |
Yes, 16% of the population on average has an IQ under 85,
link |
which means they're very hard.
link |
If you have an IQ under 85,
link |
it's very hard to find gainful employment
link |
at a salary that sustains you
link |
at least minimally in modern life, okay?
link |
Not impossible, but it's very difficult.
link |
16% of the population of the United States
link |
is about 51 or 52 million people with IQs under 85.
link |
This is not a small issue.
link |
14 million children have IQs under 85.
link |
Is this something we wanna ignore?
link |
Does this have any, what is the Venn diagram between,
link |
you know, when you have people with IQs under 85,
link |
and you have achievement in school or achievement in life?
link |
There's a lot of overlap there.
link |
This is why, to go back to the IQ pill,
link |
if there were a way to shift that curve toward the higher end,
link |
that would have a big impact.
link |
If I could maybe, before we talk about the impact on life
link |
and so on, some of the criticisms of the bell curve.
link |
So Steven Jay Gould wrote that the bell curve
link |
rests on four incorrect assumptions.
link |
It would be just interesting to get your thoughts
link |
on the four assumptions, which are,
link |
intelligence must be reducible to a single number,
link |
intelligence must be capable of rank ordering people
link |
in a linear order,
link |
intelligence must be primarily genetically based,
link |
and intelligence must be essentially immutable.
link |
Maybe not as criticisms, but as thoughts about intelligence.
link |
Oh yeah, we could spend a lot of time on him.
link |
On Steven Jay Gould?
link |
He wrote that in what, about 1985, 1984?
link |
His views were overtly political, not scientific.
link |
He was a scientist,
link |
but his views on this were overtly political,
link |
and I would encourage people listening to this,
link |
if they really want to understand his criticisms,
link |
they should just Google what he had to say,
link |
and Google the scientific reviews of his book,
link |
The Mismeasure of Man,
link |
and they will take these statements apart.
link |
They were wrong, not only were they wrong,
link |
but when he asserted in his first book
link |
that there was no biological basis essentially to IQ,
link |
by the time the second edition came around,
link |
there were studies of MRIs showing that brain size,
link |
brain volume were correlated to IQ scores,
link |
which he declined to put in his book.
link |
So I'm learning a lot today.
link |
I didn't know actually the extent of his work.
link |
I was just using a few little snippets of criticism.
link |
That's interesting.
link |
There was a battle here.
link |
He wrote a book, Mismeasure of Man,
link |
that's missing a lot of the scientific grounding.
link |
His book is highly popular in colleges today.
link |
You can find it in any college bookstore
link |
under assigned reading.
link |
It's highly popular.
link |
The Mismeasure of Man?
link |
Yes, highly influential.
link |
Can you speak to the Mismeasure of Man?
link |
I'm undereducated about this.
link |
So is this the book basically criticizing the ideas in the book?
link |
Yeah, where those four things came from.
link |
And it is really a book that was really taken apart point by point
link |
by a number of people who actually understood the data.
link |
And he didn't care.
link |
He didn't modify anything.
link |
Listen, because this is such a sensitive topic,
link |
like I said, I believe the impact of the work,
link |
because it is misinterpreted, has to be considered.
link |
Because it's not just going to be scientific discourse,
link |
it's going to be political discourse,
link |
there's going to be debates,
link |
there's going to be politically motivated people
link |
that will use messages in each direction,
link |
make something like the bulk of the enemy
link |
or the support for one's racist beliefs.
link |
And so I think you have to consider that.
link |
But it's difficult because Nietzsche was used by Hitler
link |
to justify a lot of his beliefs.
link |
And it's not exactly on Nietzsche to anticipate Hitler
link |
or how his ideas will be misinterpreted and used for evil.
link |
But there is a balance there.
link |
This is really interesting.
link |
Is there any criticism of the book you find compelling
link |
or interesting or challenging to you from a scientific perspective?
link |
There were factual criticisms about the nature of the statistics
link |
that were used, the statistical analyses.
link |
These are more technical criticisms.
link |
And they were addressed by Murray in a couple of articles
link |
where he took all the criticisms and spoke to them.
link |
And people listening to this podcast
link |
can certainly find all those online.
link |
And it's very interesting.
link |
Murray went on to write some additional books,
link |
two in the last couple of years, one about human diversity
link |
where he goes through the data refuting the idea that race
link |
is only a social construct with no biological meaning.
link |
He discusses the data.
link |
It's a very good discussion.
link |
You don't have to agree with it.
link |
But he presents data in a cogent way.
link |
And he talks about the critics of that.
link |
And he talks about their data in a cogent, nonpersonal way.
link |
It's a very informative discussion.
link |
The book is called Human Diversity.
link |
He talks about race.
link |
And he talks about gender, same thing, about sex differences.
link |
And more recently, he's written what
link |
might be his final say on this, a book called Facing Reality
link |
where he talks about this again.
link |
So he can certainly defend himself.
link |
He doesn't need me to do that.
link |
But I would urge people who have heard
link |
about him and the bell curve and who
link |
think they know what's in it, you are likely incorrect.
link |
And you need to read it for yourself.
link |
But it is, scientifically, it's a serious subject.
link |
It's a difficult subject.
link |
Ethically, it's a difficult subject.
link |
Everything you said here, calmly and thoughtfully,
link |
is difficult. It's difficult for me
link |
to even consider that G factor exists.
link |
I don't mean from like that somehow G factor is inherently
link |
racist or sexist or whatever.
link |
It's just it's difficult in the way
link |
that considering the fact that we die one day is difficult.
link |
That we are limited by our biology is difficult.
link |
And at least from an American perspective,
link |
you would like to believe that everything
link |
is possible in this world.
link |
Well, that leads us to what I think
link |
we should do with this information.
link |
And what I think we should do with this information
link |
Because I think what we need to do
link |
is fund more neuroscience research on the molecular
link |
biology of learning and memory.
link |
Because one definition of intelligence
link |
is based on how much you can learn
link |
and how much you can remember.
link |
And if you accept that definition of intelligence,
link |
then there are molecular studies going on now,
link |
and Nobel Prizes being won on molecular biology
link |
or molecular neurobiology of learning and memory.
link |
Now, the step those researchers, those scientists
link |
need to take when it comes to intelligence
link |
is to focus on the concept of individual differences.
link |
Intelligence research has individual differences
link |
as its heart because it assumes that people
link |
differ on this variable.
link |
And those differences are meaningful
link |
and need understanding.
link |
Cognitive psychologists who have morphed
link |
into molecular biologists studying learning and memory
link |
hate the concept of individual differences historically.
link |
Some now are coming around to it.
link |
I once sat next to a Nobel Prize winner
link |
for his work on memory.
link |
And I asked him about individual differences.
link |
And he said, don't go there.
link |
It'll set us back 50 years.
link |
But I said, don't you think they're
link |
the key, though, to understand?
link |
Why can some people remember more than others?
link |
He said, you don't want to go there.
link |
I think the 21st century will be remembered
link |
by the technology and the science that
link |
goes to individual differences.
link |
Because we have now data.
link |
We have now the tools to much, much better
link |
to start to measure, start to estimate,
link |
not just on the sort of through tests and IQ test type
link |
of things, sort of outside the body kind of things,
link |
but measuring all kinds of stuff about the body.
link |
So yeah, truly go into the molecular biology,
link |
to the neurobiology, to the neuroscience.
link |
Let me ask you about life.
link |
How does intelligence correlate with or lead to
link |
or has anything to do with career success?
link |
You've mentioned these kinds of things.
link |
And is there any data?
link |
You had an excellent conversation
link |
with Jordan Peterson, for example.
link |
Is there any data on what intelligent
link |
means for success in life?
link |
There is a tremendous amount of validity data
link |
that looked at intelligence test scores and various measures
link |
Now, of course, life success is a pretty broad topic.
link |
And not everybody agrees on what success means.
link |
But there's general agreement on certain aspects of success
link |
that can be measured.
link |
Including life expectancy, like you said.
link |
Now, there's life success.
link |
Life expectancy, I mean, that is such an interesting finding.
link |
But IQ scores are also correlated to things like income.
link |
Now, OK, so who thinks income means you're successful?
link |
That's not the point.
link |
The point is that income is one empirical measure
link |
in this culture that says something
link |
about your level of success.
link |
You can define success in ways that
link |
have nothing to do with income.
link |
You can define success based on your evolutionary natural
link |
selection success.
link |
But for variables, and even that, by the way,
link |
is correlated to IQ in some studies.
link |
So however you want to define success, IQ is important.
link |
It's not the only determinant.
link |
People get hung up on, well, what about personality?
link |
What about so called emotional intelligence?
link |
Yes, all those things matter.
link |
The thing that matters empirically,
link |
the single thing that matters the most
link |
is your general ability, your general mental intellectual
link |
ability, your reasoning ability.
link |
And the more complex your vocation,
link |
the more complex your job, the more G matters.
link |
G doesn't matter in a lot of occupations
link |
don't require complex thinking.
link |
And there are occupations like that, and G doesn't matter.
link |
Within an occupation, the G might not matter so much.
link |
So that if you look at all the professors at MIT
link |
and had a way to rank order them,
link |
there's a ceiling effect is what I'm saying.
link |
Also, when you get past a certain threshold,
link |
then there's impact on wealth, for example,
link |
or career success, however that's
link |
defined in each individual discipline.
link |
But after a certain point, it doesn't matter.
link |
Actually, it does matter in certain things.
link |
So for example, there is a very classic study
link |
that was started at Johns Hopkins when
link |
I was a graduate student there.
link |
And I actually worked on this study at the very beginning.
link |
It's the study of mathematically and scientifically
link |
And they gave junior high school students
link |
age 11 and 12 the standard SAT math exam.
link |
And they found a very large number of students
link |
scored very high on this exam.
link |
Not a large number.
link |
I mean, they found many students when
link |
they cast the net to all of Baltimore.
link |
They found a number of students who
link |
scored as high on the SAT math when
link |
they were 12 years old as incoming Hopkins freshmen.
link |
And they said, gee, now this is interesting.
link |
What shall we do now?
link |
And on a case by case basis, they
link |
got some of those kids into their local community college
link |
Many of those kids went on to be very successful.
link |
And now there's a 50 year follow up of those kids.
link |
And it turns out these kids were in the top 1%.
link |
So everybody in this study is in the top 1%.
link |
If you take that group, that rarefied group,
link |
and divide them into quartiles so that you have the top 25%
link |
of the top 1% and the bottom 25% of the top 1%,
link |
you can find unmeasurable variables of success.
link |
The top quartile does better than the bottom quartile
link |
They have more patents.
link |
They have more publications.
link |
They have more tenure at universities.
link |
And this is based on, you're dividing them
link |
based on their score at age 12.
link |
I wonder how much interesting data
link |
is in the variability in the differences.
link |
So but that's really, oh, boy.
link |
That's very interesting.
link |
But it's also, I don't know, somehow painful.
link |
I don't know why it's so painful that that G
link |
factor is so determinant of even in the nuanced top percent.
link |
This is interesting that you find that painful.
link |
Do you find it painful that people with charisma
link |
are very successful, can be very successful in life,
link |
even though having no other attributes other than they're
link |
famous and people like them?
link |
Do you find that painful?
link |
Yes, if that charisma is untrainable.
link |
So one of the things, again, this
link |
is like I learned psychology from the Johnny Depp trial.
link |
But one of the things the psychologist, the personality
link |
psychologist, he can maybe speak to this
link |
because he had an interest in this for a time,
link |
is she was saying that personality, technically
link |
speaking, is the thing that doesn't change over a lifetime.
link |
It's the thing you're, I don't know if she was actually
link |
implying that you're born with it.
link |
Well, it's a trait.
link |
It's a trait that's state.
link |
It's a trait that's relatively stable over time.
link |
I think that's generally correct.
link |
So to the degree your personality
link |
is stable over time, yes, that too is painful.
link |
Because what's not painful is the thing,
link |
if I'm fat and out of shape, I can
link |
exercise and become healthier in that way.
link |
If my diet is a giant mess and that's
link |
resulting in some kind of conditions
link |
that my body is experiencing, I can fix that
link |
by having a better diet.
link |
That sort of my actions, my willed actions
link |
can make a change.
link |
If charisma is part of the personality that's,
link |
the part of the charisma that is part of the personality that
link |
is stable, yeah, yeah, that's painful too.
link |
Because it's like, oh shit, I'm stuck with this.
link |
I'm stuck with this.
link |
Well, and this pretty much generalizes
link |
to every aspect of your being.
link |
This is who you are.
link |
You've got to deal with it.
link |
And what it undermines, of course,
link |
is a realistic appreciation for this,
link |
undermines the fairly recent idea prevalent in this country
link |
that if you work hard, you can be anything you want to be,
link |
which has morphed from the original idea
link |
that if you work hard, you can be successful.
link |
Those are two different things.
link |
And now we have if you work hard,
link |
you can be anything you want to be.
link |
This is completely unrealistic.
link |
Now, you can work hard and be successful.
link |
There's no question.
link |
But you know what?
link |
I could work very hard, and I am not
link |
going to be a successful theoretical physicist.
link |
That said, I mean, we should, because we
link |
had this conversation already, but it's good to repeat.
link |
The fact that you're not going to be
link |
a theoretical physicist is not judgment
link |
on your basic humanity.
link |
We're turning again to the all men, which means
link |
men and women are created equal.
link |
So again, some of the differences
link |
we're talking about in quote unquote success, wealth,
link |
number of whether you win a Nobel Prize or not,
link |
that doesn't put a measure on your basic humanity
link |
and basic value and even goodness of you
link |
Because your basic role and value in society
link |
is largely within your control.
link |
It's some of these measures that we're talking about.
link |
It's good to remember this.
link |
One question about the Flynn effect.
link |
Are humans getting smarter over the years, over the decades,
link |
over the centuries?
link |
The Flynn effect is James Flynn, who passed away about a year
link |
ago, published a set of analyses going back
link |
a couple of decades when he first noticed this,
link |
that IQ scores, when you looked over the years,
link |
seemed to be drifting up.
link |
Now, this was not unknown to the people who make the test
link |
because they renorm the test periodically
link |
and they have to renorm the test periodically
link |
because what 10 items correct meant
link |
relative to other people 50 years ago
link |
is not the same as what 10 items mean relative today.
link |
People are getting more things correct.
link |
Now, the scores have been drifting up about three points.
link |
IQ scores have been drifting up about three points per decade.
link |
This is not a personal effect.
link |
This is a cohort effect.
link |
Well, it's not for an individual, but.
link |
The world, how do you explain?
link |
And this has presented intelligence researchers
link |
with a great mystery.
link |
First, is it effect on the 50% of the variance that's
link |
the G factor or on the other 50%?
link |
And there's evidence that it is a G factor effect.
link |
And second, what on earth causes this?
link |
And doesn't this mean intelligence and G factor
link |
cannot be genetic because the scale of natural selection
link |
is much, much longer than a couple of decades ago?
link |
And so it's been used to try to undermine the idea
link |
that there can be a genetic influence on intelligence.
link |
But certainly, it can be the Flynn effect
link |
can affect the nongenetic aspects of intelligence
link |
because genes account for maybe 50% of the variance.
link |
Maybe higher, could be as high as 80% for adults,
link |
but let's just say 50% for discussion.
link |
So the Flynn effect, it's still a mystery.
link |
It's still a mystery.
link |
That's interesting.
link |
It's still a mystery, although the evidence is coming out.
link |
I told you before I edited a journal on intelligence,
link |
and we're doing a special issue in honor of James Flynn.
link |
So I'm starting to see papers now on really
link |
the latest research on this.
link |
I think most people who specialize
link |
in this area of trying to understand the Flynn effect
link |
are coming to the view based on data
link |
that it has to do with advances in nutrition and health care.
link |
And there's also evidence that the effect is slowing down
link |
and possibly reversing.
link |
So how would nutrition and health,
link |
so nutrition would still be connected to the G factor.
link |
So nutrition as it relates to the G factor,
link |
so the biology that leads to the intelligence.
link |
That would be the claim.
link |
Like the hypothesis being tested by the research.
link |
And there's some evidence from infants
link |
that nutrition has made a difference.
link |
So it's not an unreasonable connection.
link |
But does it negate the idea that there's a genetic influence?
link |
Not logically at all.
link |
But it is very interesting.
link |
So that if you take an IQ test today but you take the score
link |
and use the tables that were available in 1940,
link |
you're going to wind up with a much higher IQ number.
link |
So are we really smarter than a couple of generations ago?
link |
No, but we might be able to solve problems a little better.
link |
And make use of our G because of things like Sesame Street
link |
and other curricula in school.
link |
More people are going to school.
link |
So there are a lot of factors here to disentangle.
link |
It's fascinating though.
link |
It's fascinating that there's not clear answers yet.
link |
That as a population, we're getting smarter.
link |
When you just zoom out, that's what it looks like.
link |
As a population, we're getting smarter.
link |
And it's interesting to see what the effects of that are.
link |
I mean, this raises the question.
link |
We've mentioned it many times but haven't clearly addressed it,
link |
which is nature versus nurture question.
link |
So how much of intelligence is nature?
link |
How much of it is nurture?
link |
How much of it is determined by genetics versus environment?
link |
All of it is genetics.
link |
No, all of it is nature and nurture.
link |
But how much of the variance can you apportion to either?
link |
Most of the people who work in this field say that the framing of that, if the question
link |
is framed that way, it can't be answered because nature and nurture are not two independent
link |
They interact with each other.
link |
And understanding those interactions is so complex that many behavioral geneticists say
link |
it is today impossible and always will be impossible to disentangle that, no matter
link |
what kind of advances there are in DNA technology and genomic informatics.
link |
But there's still, to push back on that, that same intuition from behavioral geneticists
link |
would lead me to believe that there cannot possibly be a stable G factor because it's
link |
Many of them would assert that as a logical outcome.
link |
But because I believe there is a stable G factor from lots of sources of data, not just
link |
one study, but lots of sources of data over decades, I am more amenable to the idea that
link |
whatever interactions between genes and environment exist, they can be explicated, they can be
link |
studied, and that information can be used as a basis for molecular biology of intelligence.
link |
Yeah, and we'll do this exact question because doesn't the stability of the G factor give
link |
you at least a hint that there is a biological basis for intelligence?
link |
Yes, I think it's clear that the fact that an IQ score is correlated to things like thickness
link |
of your cortex, that it's correlated to glucose metabolic rate in your brain, that identical
link |
twins reared apart are highly similar in their IQ scores.
link |
These are all important observations that indicate, not just suggest, but indicate that
link |
there's a biological basis.
link |
And does anyone believe intelligence has nothing to do with the brain?
link |
I mean, it's so obvious.
link |
Well indirectly definitely has to do with it, but the question is environment interacting
link |
with the brain or is it the actual raw hardware of the brain?
link |
Well some would say that the raw hardware of the brain as it develops from conception
link |
through adulthood, or at least through the childhood, that that so called hardware that
link |
you are assuming is mostly genetic, in fact, is not as deterministic as you might think,
link |
but it is probabilistic and what affects the probabilities are things like in uterine environment
link |
and other factors like that, including chance.
link |
That chance affects the way the neurons are connecting during gestation.
link |
It's not, hey, it's pre programmed.
link |
So there is push back on the concept that genes provide a blueprint, that it's a lot
link |
Well, but also, yeah, so there's a lot, a lot, a lot happens in the first few months
link |
So in nine months inside the mother's body and in the few months afterwards, there's
link |
a lot of fascinating stuff, like including chance and luck, like you said, how things
link |
The question is afterwards in your plasticity of the brain, how much adjustment there is
link |
relative to the environment, how much that affects the G factor, but that's where the
link |
whole conclusions of the studies that we've been talking about is that seems to have less
link |
and less and less of an effect as pretty quickly.
link |
As yes, and I do think there is more of a genetic, by my view, and I'm not an expert
link |
on this, I mean, genetics is a highly technical and complex subject.
link |
I am not a geneticist, not a behavioral geneticist, but my reading of this, my interpretation
link |
of this is that there is a genetic blueprint, more or less, and that has a profound influence
link |
on your subsequent intellectual development, including the G factor.
link |
And that's not to say things can't happen to, I mean, if you think of that genes provide
link |
a potential, fine, and then various variables impact that potential, and every parent of
link |
a newborn, implicitly or explicitly, wants to maximize that potential.
link |
This is why you buy educational toys.
link |
This is why you pay attention to organic baby food.
link |
This is why you do all these things, because you want your baby to be as healthy and as
link |
smart as possible, and every parent will say that.
link |
Is there a case to be made, can you steel man the case, that genetics is a very tiny
link |
component of all of this, and the environment is essential?
link |
I don't think the data supports that genetics is a tiny component.
link |
I think the data support the idea that the genetics is a very important, and I don't
link |
say component, I say influence, a very important influence, and the environment is a lot less
link |
than people believe.
link |
Most people believe environment plays a big role.
link |
I guess what I'm asking you is, can you see where what you just said, it might be wrong?
link |
Can you imagine a world, and what kind of evidence would you need to see to say, you
link |
know what, the intuition, the studies so far, like reversing the directions.
link |
So one of the cool things we have now more and more is we're getting more and more data,
link |
and the rate of the data is escalating because of the digital world.
link |
So when you start to look at a very large scale of data, both on the biology side and
link |
the social side, we might be discovering some very counterintuitive things about society.
link |
We might see the edge cases that reveal that if we actually scale those edge cases and
link |
they become like the norm, that we'll have a complete shift in our, like you'll see G
link |
factor be able to be modified throughout life in the teens and in later life.
link |
So is it any case you can make or for where your current intuitions are wrong?
link |
Yes, and it's a good question because I think everyone should always be asked what evidence
link |
would change your mind.
link |
It's certainly not only a fair question, it is really the key question for anybody working
link |
on any aspect of science.
link |
I think that if environment was very important, we would have seen it clearly by now.
link |
It would have been obvious that school interventions, compensatory education, early childhood education,
link |
all these things that have been earnestly tried in well funded, well designed studies
link |
would show some effect, and they don't.
link |
What if the school, the way we've tried school, compensatory school sucks and we need to do
link |
That's what everybody said at the beginning.
link |
That's what everybody said to Jensen.
link |
He said, well, maybe we need to start earlier.
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Maybe we need not do prekindergarten, but pre, prekindergarten.
link |
It's always an infinite, well, maybe we didn't get it right.
link |
But after decades of trying, 50 years, 50 or 60 years of trying, surely something would
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have worked to the point where you could actually see a result and not need a probability level
link |
at 0.05 on some means.
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So that's why I, that's the kind of evidence that would change my mind.
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Population level interventions like schooling that you would see like this actually has
link |
And when you take adopted kids and they grow up in another family and you find out when
link |
those adopted kids are adults, their IQ scores don't correlate with the IQ scores of their
link |
adoptive parents, but they do correlate with their IQ scores of their biological parents
link |
whom they've never met.
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I mean, these are important, these are powerful observations.
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And it would be convincing to you if the reverse was true.
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That would be more.
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And there is some data on adoption that indicates that the adopted children are moving a little
link |
bit more toward their adoptive parents.
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But it's to me the overwhelming, I have this concept called the weight of evidence where
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I don't interpret any one study too much.
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The weight of evidence tells me genes are important.
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But what does that mean?
link |
What does it mean that genes are important?
link |
Knowing that gene expression, genes don't express themselves in a vacuum, they express
link |
themselves in an environment.
link |
So the environment has to have something to do with it, especially if the best genetic
link |
estimates of the amount of variants are around 50 or even if it's as high as 80%, it still
link |
leaves 20% of non genetic.
link |
Now maybe that is all luck.
link |
Maybe that's all chance.
link |
I could believe that, I could easily believe that.
link |
But I do think after 50 years of trying various interventions and nothing works, including
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memory training, including listening to Mozart, including playing computer games, none of
link |
that has shown any impact on intelligence test scores.
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Is there data on the intelligence, the IQ of parents as it relates to the children?
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Yes, and there is some genetic evidence of an interaction between the parents IQ and
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High IQ parents provide an enriched environment, which then can impact the child in addition
link |
to the genes, it's that environment.
link |
So there are all these interactions that, think about the number of books in a household.
link |
This was a variable that's correlated with IQ and, well, why?
link |
Especially if the kid never reads any of the books, it's because more intelligent people
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have more books in their house.
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And if you're more intelligent and there's a genetic component to that, the child will
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get those genes or some of those genes as well as the environment.
link |
But it's not the number of books in the house that actually directly impacts the child.
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So the two scenarios on this are you find that, and this was used to get rid of the
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SAT test, oh, the SAT score is highly correlated with the social economic status of the parents.
link |
So all you're really measuring is how rich the parents are.
link |
Okay, well, why are the parents rich?
link |
And so the opposite kind of syllogism is that people who are very bright make more money,
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they can afford homes in better neighborhoods so their kids get better schools.
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Now the kids grow up bright.
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Where in that chain of events does that come from?
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Well, unless you have a genetically informative research design where you look at siblings
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that have the same biological parents and so on, you can't really disentangle all that.
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Most studies of social economic status and intelligence do not have a genetically informed
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So any conclusions they make about the causality of the social economic status being the cause
link |
of the IQ is a stretch.
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And where you do find genetically informative designs, you find most of the variance in
link |
your outcome measures are due to the genetic component.
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And sometimes the SES adds a little, but the weight of evidence is it doesn't add very
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much variance to predict what's going on beyond the genetic variance.
link |
So when you actually look at it in some, and there aren't that many studies that have genetically
link |
informed designs, but when you do see those, the genes seem to have an advantage.
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Sorry for the strange questions, but is there a connection between fertility or the number
link |
of kids that you have and G factor?
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So you know, the kind of conventional wisdom is people of maybe higher economic status
link |
or something like that are having fewer children.
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I just loosely hear these kinds of things.
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Is there data that you're aware of in one direction or another on this?
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Strange questions always get strange answers.
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Do you have a strange answer for that strange question?
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The answer is there were some studies that indicated the more children in a family, the
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firstborn children would be more intelligent than the fourth or fifth or sixth.
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It's not clear that those studies hold up over time.
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And of course what you see also is that families where there are multiple children, four, five,
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six, seven, you know, really big families, the social economic status of those families
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usually in the modern age is not that high.
link |
Maybe it used to be the aristocracy used to have a lot of kids, I'm not sure exactly.
link |
But there have been reports of correlations between IQ and fertility, but I'm not sure
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that the data are very strong that the firstborn child is always the smartest.
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It seems like there's some data to that, but I'm not current on that.
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How would that be explained?
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That would be in a nurture.
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Well, it could be nurture, it could be in uterine environment, I mean, and this is why
link |
this, you know, like many areas of science, you said earlier that there are a lot of gray
link |
areas and no definitive answers.
link |
This is not uncommon in science that the closer you look at a problem, the more questions
link |
you get, not the fewer questions, because the universe is complicated.
link |
And the idea that we have people on this planet who can study the first nanoseconds of the
link |
Big Bang, that's pretty amazing.
link |
And I've always said that if they can study the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang, we
link |
can certainly figure out something about intelligence that allows that.
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I'm not sure what's more complicated, the human mind or the physics of the universe.
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It's unclear to me.
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I think we overemphasize.
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Well, that's a very humbling statement.
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Maybe it's a very human centric, egotistical statement that our mind is somehow super complicated,
link |
but biology is a tricky one to unravel.
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Consciousness, what is that?
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I've always believed that consciousness and intelligence are the two real fundamental
link |
problems of the human brain, and therefore I think they must be related.
link |
Yeah, heart problems like walk together, holding hands kind of idea.
link |
You may not know this, but I did some of the early research on anesthetic drugs with brain
link |
imaging trying to answer the question, what part of the brain is the last to turn off
link |
when someone loses consciousness?
link |
And is that the first part of the brain to turn on when consciousness is regained?
link |
And I was working with an anesthesiologist named Mike Alkire, who was really brilliant
link |
These were really the first studies of brain imaging using positron emission tomography
link |
And you would inject a radioactive sugar that labeled the brain, and the harder the brain
link |
was working, the more sugar it would take up, and then you could make a picture of glucose
link |
And he was amazing.
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He managed to do this in normal volunteers he brought in and anesthetized as if they
link |
were going into surgery.
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He managed all the human subjects requirements on this research, and he was brilliant at
link |
And what we did is we had these normal volunteers come in on three occasions.
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On one occasion, he gave them enough anesthetic drug so they were a little drowsy.
link |
And on another occasion, they came in and he fully anesthetized them.
link |
And he would say, Mike, can you hear me, and the person would say, uh, yeah.
link |
And then we would scan people under no anesthetic condition.
link |
And we were looking to see if we could see the part of the brain turn off.
link |
He subsequently tried to do this with fMRI, which has a faster time resolution, and you
link |
could do it in real time as the person went under and then regain consciousness where
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you couldn't do that with PET.
link |
You had to have three different occasions.
link |
And the results were absolutely fascinating.
link |
We did this with different anesthetic drugs, and different drugs impacted different parts
link |
So we were naturally looking for the common one, and it seemed to have something to do
link |
with the thalamus.
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And consciousness, this was actual data on consciousness, actual consciousness.
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What part of the brain turns on?
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What part of the brain turns off?
link |
It's not so clear.
link |
But maybe has something to do with the thalamus.
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The sequence of events seemed to have the thalamus in it.
link |
Now here's the question.
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Are some people more conscious than others?
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Are there individual differences in consciousness?
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And I don't mean it in the psychedelic sense.
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I don't mean it in the political consciousness sense.
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I just mean it in everyday life.
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Do some people go through everyday life more conscious than others?
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And are those the people we might actually label more intelligent?
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Now the other thing I was looking for is whether the parts of the brain we were seeing in the
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anesthesia studies were the same parts of the brain we were seeing in the intelligence
link |
Now, this was very complicated, expensive research.
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We didn't really have funding to do this.
link |
We were trying to do it on the fly.
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I'm not sure anybody has pursued this.
link |
He's gone on to other things.
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But I think it's an area of research that would be fascinating to see the parts, a lot
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more imaging studies now of consciousness.
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I'm just not up on them.
link |
But basically the question is which imaging, so newer imaging studies to see in high resolution,
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spatial and temporal way, which part of the brain lights up when you're doing intelligence
link |
tasks and which parts of the brain lights up when you're doing consciousness tasks and
link |
see the interplay between them, try to infer, that's the challenge of neuroscience, without
link |
understanding deeply, looking from the outside, try to infer something about how the whole
link |
Well, imagine this.
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Here's a simple question.
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Does it take more anesthetic drug to have a person lose consciousness if their IQ is
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140 than a person with an IQ of 70?
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That's an interesting way to study it.
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I mean, if the answer to that is a stable yes, that's very interesting.
link |
So I tried to find out and I went to some anesthesiology textbooks about how you dose
link |
and they dose by weight.
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And what I also learned, this is a little bit off subject, anesthesiologists are never
link |
sure how deep you are.
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And they usually tell by poking you with a needle and if you don't jump, they tell the
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surgeon to go ahead.
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I'm not sure that's literally true, but it's...
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Well, it might be very difficult to know precisely how deep you are.
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It has to do with the same kind of measurements that you were doing with the consciousness.
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It's difficult to know.
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So I don't lose my train of thought.
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I couldn't find in the textbooks anything about dosing by intelligence.
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I asked my friend, the anesthesiologist, he said, no, he doesn't know.
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I said, can we do a chart review and look at people using their years of education as
link |
Because if someone's gone to graduate school, that tells you something.
link |
You can make some inference as opposed to someone who didn't graduate high school.
link |
Can we do a chart review?
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And he says, no, they never really put down the exact dose.
link |
And no, he said, no.
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So to this day, the simple question, does it take more anesthetic drug to put someone
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under if they have a high IQ or less, or less?
link |
It could go either way.
link |
Because by the way, our early PET scan studies of intelligence found the unexpected result
link |
of an inverse correlation between glucose metabolic rate and intelligence.
link |
It wasn't how much a brain area lit up.
link |
How much it lit up was negatively correlated to how well they did on the test, which led
link |
to the brain efficiency hypothesis, which is still being studied today.
link |
And there's more and more evidence that the efficiency of brain information processing
link |
is more related to intelligence than just more activity.
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Yeah, and it'll be interesting, again, this is the total hypothesis, how much in the relationship
link |
between intelligence and consciousness, it's not obvious that those two, if there's correlation,
link |
they could be inversely correlated.
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Wouldn't that be funny?
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If you, the consciousness factor, the C factor plus the G factor equals one.
link |
It's a nice trade off, you get a trade off, how deeply you experience the world versus
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how deeply you're able to reason through the world.
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What a great hypothesis.
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Certainly somebody listening to this can do this study.
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Even if it's the aliens analyzing humans a few centuries from now, let me ask you from
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an AI perspective, I don't know how much you've thought about machines, but there's the famous
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Turing test, test of intelligence for machines, which is a beautiful, almost like a cute formulation
link |
of intelligence that Alan Turing proposed.
link |
Basically conversation being, if you can fool a human to think that a machine is a human
link |
that passes the test, I suppose you could do a similar thing for humans.
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If I can fool you that I'm intelligent, then that's a good test of intelligence.
link |
You're talking to two people, and the test is saying who has a higher IQ.
link |
It's an interesting test, because maybe charisma can be very useful there, and you're only
link |
allowed to use conversation, which is the formulation of the Turing test.
link |
Anyway, all that to say is what are good tests of intelligence for machines?
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What do you think it takes to achieve human level intelligence for machines?
link |
I have thought a little bit about this, but every time I think about these things, I rapidly
link |
reach the limits of my knowledge and imagination.
link |
When Alexa first came out, and I think there was a competing one, well, there was Siri
link |
with Apple, and Google had Alexa.
link |
No, no, Amazon had Alexa.
link |
Google has Google Home.
link |
Google has something.
link |
I proposed to one of my colleagues that he buy one of these, one of each, and then ask
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it questions from the IQ test.
link |
But it became apparent that they all searched the internet, so they all can find answers
link |
to questions like how far is it between Washington and Miami, and repeat after me.
link |
Now, I don't know if you said to Alexa, I'm going to repeat these numbers backwards to
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I don't know what would happen.
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I've never done it.
link |
So one answer to your question is you're going to try it right now.
link |
So it would actually probably go to Google search, and it will be all confusing kind
link |
Well, then I guess there was a test that it would fail.
link |
Well, but that's not, that has to do more with the language of communication versus
link |
So if you did an IQ test to a person who doesn't speak English, and the test was administered
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in English, that's not really the test of...
link |
Well, let's think about the computers that beat the Jeopardy champions.
link |
Yeah, so that, because I happen to know how those are programmed, those are very hard
link |
coded, and there's definitely a lack of intelligence there.
link |
There's something like IQ tests, there's a guy, an artificial intelligence researcher,
link |
Francois Chollet, he's at Google, he's one of the seminal people in machine learning.
link |
He also, as a fun aside thing, developed an IQ test for machines.
link |
Oh, I haven't heard that.
link |
I'd just like to know about that.
link |
I'll actually email you this, because it'd be very interesting for you.
link |
It doesn't get much attention, because people don't know what to do with it, but it deserves
link |
a lot of attention, which is, it basically does a pattern type of tests, where you have
link |
to do, you know, one standard one is, you're given three things, and you have to do a fourth
link |
one, that kind of thing, so you have to understand the pattern here.
link |
And for that, it really simplifies to, so the interesting thing is, he's trying not
link |
to achieve high IQ, he's trying to achieve like, pretty low bar for IQ.
link |
Things that are kind of trivial for humans, and they're actually really tough for machines.
link |
It's just seeing, playing with these concepts of symmetry, of counting, like if I give you
link |
one object, two objects, three objects, you'll know the last one is four objects, you can
link |
like count them, you can cluster objects together, it's both visually and conceptually, we can
link |
do all these things with our mind, that we take for granted, the objectness of things.
link |
You can like, figure out what spatially is an object and isn't, and we can play with
link |
those ideas, and machines really struggle with that, so he really cleanly formulated
link |
these IQ tests, I wonder what like, that would equate to for humans with IQ, but it'd be
link |
a very low IQ, but that's exactly the kind of formulation, like okay, we want to be able
link |
to solve this, how do we solve this, and he does it as a challenge, and nobody's been
link |
able to, it's similar to the Alexa prize, which is Amazon is hosting a conversational
link |
challenge, nobody's been able to do well on his, but that's an interesting, those kinds
link |
of tests are interesting, because we take for granted all the ability of the human mind
link |
to play with concepts, and to formulate concepts out of novel things, so like, things we've
link |
never seen before, we're able to use that, I mean that's, I've talked to a few people
link |
that design IQ tests, sort of online, they write IQ tests, and I was trying to get some
link |
questions from them, and they spoke to the fact that we can't really share questions
link |
with you, because part of the, like first of all, it's really hard work to come up with
link |
questions, it's really, really hard work, it takes a lot of research, but it also takes
link |
a lot, it's novelty generating, you're constantly coming up with really new things, and part
link |
of the point is that they're not supposed to be public, they're supposed to be new
link |
to you when you look at them, it's interesting that the novelty is fundamental to the hardness
link |
of the problem, at least a part of what makes the problem hard is that you've never seen
link |
Right, that's called fluid intelligence, as opposed to what's called crystallized intelligence,
link |
which is your knowledge of facts, you know things, but can you use those things to solve
link |
a problem, those are two different things.
link |
Do you think we'll be able to, because we spoke, I don't want to miss opportunity to
link |
talk about this, we spoke about the neurobiology, about the molecular biology of intelligence,
link |
do you think one day we'll be able to modify the biology of, or the genetics of a person
link |
to modify their intelligence, to increase their intelligence, we started this conversation
link |
by talking about a pill you could take, do you think that such a pill would exist?
link |
Metaphorically, I do, and I am supremely confident that it's possible because I am supremely
link |
ignorant of the complexities of neurobiology, and so I have written that the nightmares
link |
of neurobiologists, understanding the complexities, this cascade of events that happens at the
link |
synaptic level, that these nightmares are what fuel some people to solve.
link |
So some people, you have to be undaunted, I mean yeah, this is not easy, look we're
link |
still trying to figure out cancer, it was only recently that they figured out why aspirin
link |
works, you know, these are not easy problems, but I also have the perspective of the history
link |
of science, is the history of solving problems that are extraordinarily complex.
link |
And seem impossible at the time.
link |
And seem impossible at the time.
link |
And so one of the things you look at, at companies like Neuralink, you have brain computer interfaces,
link |
you start to delve into the human mind and start to talk about machines measuring but
link |
also sending signals to the human mind, and you start to wonder what that has, what impact
link |
that has on the G factor.
link |
Modifying in small ways or in large ways the functioning, the mechanical, electrical, chemical
link |
functioning of the brain.
link |
I look at everything about the brain, there are different levels of explanation.
link |
On one hand you have a behavioral level, but then you have brain circuitry, and then you
link |
have neurons, and then you have dendrites, and then you have synapses, and then you have
link |
the neurotransmitters, and the presynaptic and the postsynaptic terminals, and then you
link |
have all the things that influence neurotransmitters, and then you have the individual differences
link |
Yeah, it's complicated, but 51 million people in the United States have IQs under 85 and
link |
struggle with everyday life.
link |
Shouldn't that motivate people to take a look at this?
link |
Yeah, but I just want to linger one more time that you have to remember that the science
link |
of intelligence, the measure of intelligence is only a part of the human condition.
link |
The thing that makes life beautiful and the creation of beautiful things in this world
link |
is perhaps loosely correlated, but is not dependent entirely on intelligence.
link |
Absolutely, I certainly agree with that.
link |
So for anyone sort of listening, I'm still not convinced that more intelligence is always
link |
better if you want to create beauty in this world.
link |
Well, I didn't say more intelligence is always better if you want to create beauty.
link |
I just said all things being equal, more is better than less.
link |
That's all I mean.
link |
Yeah, but that's sort of that I just want to sort of say because a lot to me, one of
link |
the things that makes life great is the opportunity to create beautiful things, and so I just
link |
want to sort of empower people to do that no matter what some IQ test says.
link |
At the population level, we do need to look at IQ tests to help people and to also inspire
link |
us to take on some of these extremely difficult scientific questions.
link |
Do you have advice for young people in high school, in college, whether they're thinking
link |
about career or they're thinking about a life they can be proud of?
link |
Is there advice you can give whether they want to pursue psychology or biology or engineering
link |
or they want to be artists and musicians and poets?
link |
I can't advise anybody on that level of what their passion is, but I can say if you're
link |
interested in psychology or if you're interested in science and the science around the big
link |
questions of consciousness and intelligence and psychiatric illness, we haven't really
link |
talked about brain illnesses and what we might learn from.
link |
If you are trying to develop a drug to treat Alzheimer's disease, you are trying to develop
link |
a drug to impact learning and memory, which are core to intelligence.
link |
So it could well be that the so called IQ pill will come from a pharmaceutical company
link |
trying to develop a drug for Alzheimer's disease.
link |
Because that's exactly what you're trying to do, right, yeah, just like you said.
link |
What will that drug do in a college student that doesn't have Alzheimer's disease?
link |
So I would encourage people who are interested in psychology, who are interested in science
link |
to pursue a scientific career and address the big questions.
link |
And the most important thing I can tell you if you're going to be in kind of a research
link |
environment is you got to follow the data where the data take you.
link |
You can't decide in advance where you want the data to go.
link |
And if the data take you to places that you don't have the technical expertise to follow,
link |
like you know, I would like to understand more about molecular biology, but I'm not
link |
going to become a molecular biologist now.
link |
But I know people who are, and my job is to get them interested to take their expertise
link |
into this direction.
link |
And that it's not so easy.
link |
And if the data takes you to a place that's controversial, that's counterintuitive in
link |
this world, no, I would say it's probably a good idea to still push forward boldly,
link |
but to communicate the interpretation of the results with skill, with compassion, with
link |
the greater breadth of understanding of humanity, not just the science, of the impact of the
link |
One famous psychologist wrote about this issue that somehow a balance has to be found between
link |
pursuing the science and communicating it with respect to people's sensitivities, the
link |
legitimate sensitivities, somehow.
link |
He didn't say how.
link |
This sense, somehow, and balance is left up to the interpretation of the reader.
link |
Let me ask you, you said big questions, the biggest, or one of the biggest, we already
link |
talked about consciousness and intelligence, one of the most fascinating, one of the biggest
link |
But let's talk about the why.
link |
What's the meaning of life?
link |
I'm not going to tell you.
link |
You know you're not going to tell me?
link |
I'm going to have to wait for your next book.
link |
The meaning of life.
link |
We do the best we can to get through the day.
link |
And then there's just a finite number of the days.
link |
Are you afraid of the finiteness of it?
link |
I think about it more and more as I get older.
link |
And it's one of these human things, that it is finite, we all know it.
link |
Most of us deny it and don't want to think about it.
link |
Sometimes you think about it in terms of estate planning, you try to do the rational thing.
link |
Sometimes it makes you work harder because you know your time is more and more limited
link |
and you want to get things done.
link |
I don't know where I am on that.
link |
It is just one of those things that's always in the back of my mind.
link |
And I don't think that's uncommon.
link |
Well it's just like G factor and intelligence, it's a hard truth that's there.
link |
And sometimes you kind of walk past it and you don't want to look at it, but it's still
link |
Yes, you can't escape it.
link |
And the thing about the G factor and intelligence is everybody knows this is true on a personal
link |
Even if you think back to when you were in school, you know who the smart kids were.
link |
When you are on the phone talking to a customer service representative, that in response to
link |
your detailed question is reading a script back to you and you get furious at this.
link |
Have you ever called this person a moron or wanted to call this person a moron?
link |
You're not listening to me.
link |
Everybody has had the experience of dealing with people who they think are not at their
link |
It's just common because that's the way human beings are.
link |
That's the way life is.
link |
But we also have a poor estimation of our own intelligence.
link |
We have a poor, and we're not always a great, our judgment of human character of other people
link |
is not as good as a battery of tests.
link |
That's where bias comes in.
link |
That's where our history, our emotions, all of that comes in.
link |
So, you know, people on the internet, you know, there's such a thing as the internet
link |
and people on the internet will call each other dumb all the time.
link |
You know, that's the worry here is that we give up on people.
link |
We put them in a bin just because of one interaction or some small number of interactions as if
link |
That's just in their genetics.
link |
But I think no matter what the science here says, once again, that does not mean we should
link |
not have compassion for our fellow man.
link |
That's exactly what the science does say.
link |
It's not opposite of what the science says.
link |
Everything I know about psychology, everything I've learned about intelligence, everything
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points to the inexorable conclusion that you have to treat people as individuals respectfully
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and with compassion.
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Because through no fault of their own, some people are not as capable as others.
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And you want to turn a blind eye to it, you want to come up with theories about why that
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might be true, fine.
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I would like to fix some of it as best I can.
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And everybody is deserving of love.
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Richard, this is a good way to end it, I think.
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I'm just getting warmed up here.
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I know you can go for another many hours, but to respect your extremely valuable time,
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this is an amazing conversation.
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Thank you for the teaching company, the lectures you've given with the New York Science of
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Thank you for everything you're doing, it's a difficult topic, it's a topic that's controversial
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and sensitive to people and to push forward boldly and in that nuanced way, just thank
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you for everything you do.
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And thank you for asking the big questions of intelligence, of consciousness.
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Well thank you for asking me.
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I mean, there's nothing like good conversation on these topics.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Haier.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein.
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It is not that I'm so smart, but I stay with the questions much longer.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.