Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Openness. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Openness. Sort by date Show all posts

Monday, 6 August 2012

Creativity and Eysenck's Psychoticism trait

Wednesday, 27 June 2012

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Hans J Eysenck (1916-1997) was one of the few psychologists of near-genius ability to engage seriously with the question of genius.


(See his book Genius of 1995).

He regarded the essence of genius as a combination of high intelligence with creativity: the mechanism being that creativity generated the raw material and intelligence provided the evaluation mechanism.

And therefore much of Eysenck's contribution focused on the correlation between the trait of Psychoticism with creativity.

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Psychoticism is a trait which is more often moderately high in men than women - and it includes at least three main strands:

1. The 'psychotic' aspect which is seen as a style of thinking characterized by broad field of association between concepts. (The opposite would be a narrowly predictable sequence of thoughts: if you start at A you will always get to B).

This style of thinking may be familiar from recalled dreams where one thing reminds of another thing, similarities are felt between things lacking a tight 'logical' connection, and the train of thought seems loose and unpredictable. It is also found in psychotic illnesses, intoxication, and of course the trance-like state reported by some creative people such as artists and scientists.

This aspect of Psychoticism is pretty much the same thing as Schizotypy.

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2. Impulsiveness, spontaneity, desire for rapid gratification. (The opposite is conscientiousness, ability to sustain work at something which is uninteresting, sacrificing present gratification for future gratification.)

This aspect of Psychoticism is pretty much the opposite of Conscientiousness.

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3. Emotional detachment, unawareness or indifference to feelings of others, selfishness. (The opposite is empathic tuning-into the emotions of others, sympathy with their feelings, fitting-in with the views of others - not wanting to offend or be ostracized.)

This aspect of Psychoticism is pretty much the opposite of Agreeableness (or Simon Baron Cohen's Empathizing).

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Looking across the aspects, it can be seen that moderately high Psychoticism is a pattern of preferences which is suited to genuinely creative thinking which - when combined with high intelligence - may lead to 'breakthoughs' into qualitatively different forms of understanding. In other words: genius.

But it also shows why there is a dark side to genuine creativity, since many of the traits of Psychoticism are awkward or actively undesirable.

The concept of the high Psychoticism genius therefore strikingly resembles the shaman of hunter gatherer societies - respected but feared and often isolated - useful but usually semi-crazy and sometimes actually-crazy. Or the prophets of the Old Testament. Or the mad scientists (some eccentric, some dangerous) of modern popular stories.

These are individuals who we may admire, may be grateful to - but seldom like - and seldom want to be-like.

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By contrast, modern mainstream ideas of creativity are sanitized fakes of pseudo-creativity - and usually focus on the personality trait called Openness to Experience: a scale which is (de facto) 'How much do you resemble the stereotypical Leftist intellectual elite member'.

High Openness is a measure of highbrow interests, love of the new (neophilia), and all those modernist concepts of art as being 'radical', 'challenging', 'subversive' etc.

Openness-'creativity' is about being anti-traditional, anti-Christian, anti-'conventional' - it is bohemian rebellion.

The High Openness person is a culture vulture whose idea of creativity is someone like Malcolm Gladwell. A high empathizing, highly agreeable, conscientious pick-and-mix, inversion and re-combination of pre-existing ideas constrained implicitly within the Leftist world-view.

This is the kind of Openness-'creativity' promoted by educationalists and government bureaucracies, subsidized, and lionized by high status highbrow media with profiles and groups of the Ten most-promising geniuses of today, and 'cool' viral video web lectures.

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In sum, the fake creativity of Openness may be charming; while real Psychoticsm creativity is not.

Indeed, Openness-creativity has all the advantages over genuine creativity: except that it is a parasitic fake.

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Eysenck's Psychoticism is - in academic circles - generally supposed to have been superceded; and in terms of academic fashion it has been superseded.

For one thing high Psychoticism is too rare among the usual psychology study populations (i.e. university students) so that its distribution is positively skewed (mostly low scorers).

And there are flaws in Eysenck's scale - especially that he does not include direct questions on the 'psychotic' aspects of Psychoticism - which is confusing and potentially distorting.

But the basic concept of Psychoticism is substantially correct and important - as would be expected from a man who was pretty much a high-Psychoticism genius himself - unlike the high-Openness personality psychologists who followed after him.

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And indeed academics themselves, including scientists, have become almost uniformly high-Openness types. Those high in trait Psychoticism are filtered-out by a prolonged and multi-stage selection process that - at every level - explicitly favours women (lower in trait Psychoticism), and implicitly selects those high in Conscientiousness and Agreeableness; while being indifferent to, or punishing, genuine creativity and the impulsive and autonomous behaviours necessary to it.

The situation in the modern university or research institutions is therefore better in every way and for everybody - except that it is a parasitic fake.

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Monday, 30 June 2014

A comment on the personality trait of Openness (and Personality in general)

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Personality is supposed to be independent of intelligence - Personality is a separate explanatory variable which can be seen after Intelligence is controlled-for.

Intelligence is primary as an explanation of behaviour - primary both historically, and because intelligence (very obviously) affects personality - but personality does not affect intelligence.

In other words, as a matter of routine - when measuring personality, one should also test for intelligence - and before looking at the effect of personality on behaviour, one ought to remove the effect of intelligence (by stratified analysis, preferably - i.e. creating narrow strata of IQ and only looking a personality effects within these strata - or else by some kind of regression).

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However, much personality research is done on an already-intelligence-stratified sample - such as Psychology Students at Mudsville State University - in these situations the researcher can usually get-away-with missing out IQ testing and just evaluating Personality.

However, this does not apply to the pseudo-trait of Openness - which is often so sensitive to IQ differences that it varies even within strata such as the same class of the same college.

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If Intelligence is controlled-for, then the effect of Openness disappears - because Openness is merely 'the personality type of intelligent people in Western-type societies' (but rather badly conceptualized).

While the other personality traits (C, E, A and N), which derive essentially from HJ Eysenck, are robust to IQ differences (especially in college populations which provide most of the subjects): Openness is not.

Openness merely a (weak) correlate of IQ (in Western Societies)... plus noise and cross-contamination from other personality traits (e.g. a little bit of Psychoticism/ Schizotypy).

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Take home message: all research on so-called Openness is either ignorant, incompetent - or (usually) both. 

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This began as a comment on  the Isegoria blog

http://www.isegoria.net/2014/06/how-does-iq-relate-to-personality/



Tuesday, 1 July 2014

The relationship between Intelligence (IQ) and Personality traits: Intelligence is Primary - Personality is Secondary

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Historically, Intelligence was the first and most powerfully predictive variable of individual differences.
Personality came later - and was formalized by the work of H.J Eysenck as a separate explanatory variable which can be seen after Intelligence is controlled-for.

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Personality evaluations are not 'tests' in the way that IQ is measured by tests. Usually Personality is evaluated from self-rating questionnaires - sometimes from ratings by other people (e.g. teachers or parents). Sometimes Personality is measured indirectly in terms of behaviours - for example Conscientiousness might be measured by how many hours a person spends studying, or by their record of employment attendance.

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What is the formal relationship between Intelligence and Personality?

The answer is that Intelligence is hierarchically superior to Personality.

Because intelligence very obviously affects personality - but personality does not affect intelligence.

Intelligence is primary as an explanation of behaviour - primary both historically, and formally, analytically.

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Thus, Personality is Secondary to Intelligence.

How can this be understood? Intelligence is a measure of brain efficiency - something like speed of cognitive processing. therefore it affects pretty much all cognitive attributes in a quantitative manner.

Personality is disposition, related to the set-up and balance of attributes. Personality could be conceptualized as a different kind (or balance) of cognitive processing (not a different speed).

So that when exposed to the same stimulus - different Personalities (of the same Intelligence) will process the stimulus differently, to lead to different behavours.

But to establish a difference in Personality, the Intelligence must be controlled - because the same personalities exposed to the same stimuli will generate different behaviours if they have different intelligences - because differences in processing speed will suffice to produce different behaviours.

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This has not been well understood - indeed I did not properly understand it until a few hours ago! Until then I thought of Intelligence and Personality as independent ways of predicting human behaviour. But I now see this is wrong - Intelligence is Primary and hierarchically above Personality - and only after Intelligence has been sufficiently controlled-for should Personality be evaluated.

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In other words, as a matter of routine - when measuring Personality, one should also do an IQ test.

And before looking at the effect of personality on behaviour, one ought to remove the effect of intelligence (by stratified analysis, preferably - i.e. creating narrow strata of IQ and only looking a personality effects within these strata - or else by some kind of regression).

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To put it differently, it is legitimate to measure IQ without Personality - but not legitimate to measure Personality without IQ.

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What this means is that:

1. Two people (or groups) with the same IQ but different measured-Personalities traits (as evaluated using self-rating scales, or whatever), nonetheless have the same IQ.

2. Two people (or groups) with the same measured-Personality traits but different IQs, in reality have different Personalities.

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However, in practice, much personality research is done on an already-intelligence-stratified sample - such as Psychology Students at Mudsville State University - in these situations the researcher can usually get-away-with missing out IQ testing and just evaluating Personality.

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(However, this does not apply to the Big Five pseudo-trait of Openness - which is often so sensitive to IQ differences that it varies even within strata such as the same class of the same college. If Intelligence is controlled-for, then the effect of Openness disappears - because Openness is merely 'the personality type of intelligent people in Western-type societies'  - but rather badly conceptualized.)

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The best conceptualized Personality traits, which derive essentially from HJ Eysenck, are Introversion versus Extraversion and Neuroticism versus Emotional Stability - and these are relatively robust to IQ differences (especially in college populations which provide most of the subjects).

(However, it seems likely that high levels of trait Neuroticism are contaminated by pathology; and likewise extremes of both Extraversion and Introversion. in other words, some personality differences are the result of diseases in specific people.)

The other major Eysenck trait is Psychoticism - which the Big Five splits into the inverse of Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness (which is the same entity as Simon Baron Cohen's Empathizing) - to which could be added Schizotypy to capture the 'psychotic' element of Psychoticism.

Ultimately, Personality needs to be related to some underlying biological, and adaptive, mechanism - and the most likely of these underlying explanatory models seems to be Life History; which is another topic for another time.

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Monday, 6 August 2012

Creativity and intuition

Tuesday, 28 December 2010

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In academic psychology, there are two concepts of creativity:

1. an older one which sees creativity in terms of dreamlike cognition, psychoticism, 'primary process' thinking, and thoughts linked-by emotional-associations; and

2. a newer one which sees creativity in terms of 'openness to experience' - that is neophilia, novelty-generation, random permutations and combination of memorized information.

I believe that the earlier concept is much closer to the truth, or to validity - and that indeed the idea of creativity as Openness is a modern, bureaucratic and politically-correct corruption and hijacking of creativity: creativity redefined such that the shallow childishness of modernist art and the committee-defined-consensus of Big Science counts asif creative in the same way as the great art and natural philosophy of the past.

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But there is, I suspect, something intrinsically corrupt in the concept of creativity; which emerged into public discourse at about the time of the Romantic movement in the late 17th and early 18th centuries; as a contrast with scholastic logic, and an explanation for the difference between philosophy/ science and the arts.

Properly speaking, rather than the twin poles of creativity and logic as the basis of human knowledge, I think the proper (or closer) conceptualization is intuition and reason.

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Intuition is inborn, spontaneous, it comes first, and everything is based upon it and it varies between people.

Intuition is related to 'common sense' and also to understanding other people and to instant apprehension of situations. It is related to the emotions; and seems to proceed by emotional association.

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Reason is also mostly innate, although partial forms can be learned (e.g. mathematics, geometry, formal logic), and it also varies between individuals.

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However there is not a close correlation between intuitive ability and reason; and people can be unusually high in one and unusually low in the other.

Indeed, there is probably an inverse correlation between intuitive ability and reason among healthy people; although the correlation is not very close and there are exceptions (which get rarer as they get more extreme).

These exceptions are the very rare 'creative geniuses' who are both intelligent and intuitive...

...and the more numerous and more obviously dysfunctional people who lack both intuition and intelligence - the number of these vary between societies, because intelligence and intuition can both simultaneously be damaged by brain pathology (due to degenerative disease, trauma, infection, malnutrition etc.) and the causes of brain pathology vary widely in frequency between societies.

Intelligent people who are lacking in intuition are much commoner. These are the 'clever sillies', more-or-less - the i.e. bulk of the modern ruling elite.

And also common are highly intuitive people of moderate or lower-than-average intelligence. This group includes, but is not confined-to, people with irrational ideas and illogical thought processes who may be psychotic - or regarded as mentally ill by the high intelligence-low intuition types.

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My point is that while these processes of knowing I have called intuition and reason can be statistically separated and contrasted, ultimately they are meant to work together.

It is only reliable for knowledge to proceed such that both intuition and intelligence are satisfied by each step and conclusion.

Otherwise we get the strange distortions which are usually conceptualized as of logic unsupported by emotion; or emotionality unchecked by logic - more correctly this is reasoning in contradiction to intuition and intuition apart from the context of reason.

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I am sure that humans cannot function unless intuition and reason go together; otherwise we mistrust ourselves and become detached (alienated), proud, despondent, exploitative - oscillating between domination by logic and then by emotions in unrelated sequence.

In other words we get the normal mainstream fragmentary, sound-bite-sized, conduct of modern public discourse.

We get the counter-cultural advocates of impulse and instinct alternating with the absurdly restricted and legalistic procedures of bureaucracy.

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At root, I think we need to recognize that neither creativity nor intelligence are good in themselves: which recognition is easy to say, but hard to do. 

We must recognize that creativity can be, has been, highly destructive, proud and evil. Many of the worst tyrants and sinners of history have been highly intuitive creative individuals: Napoleon, Hitler, Mao.

And that reason/ intelligence is also, more often than not, highly destructive - as evidenced by communism and its descendant political correctness.

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When it comes to Christianity we cannot allow either reason or intuition to go ahead alone; the one must always be able to catch up with the other, in each of us.

This sets a limit to how far we can go in understanding.

Rational understanding (following a line of logic) cannot go further than intuition allows; and intuition cannot go further than is check-able by reason.

So we should not follow systematic theology further than our intuition can follow; and we should not follow what seem to be personal insights and revelations further than we can personally support with reason.

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In this refusal we must each of us be stubborn - especially in a secular and corrupt world where valid spiritual advice may be impossible to find.

Better not to know than to know wrongly.

To do otherwise - and to allow logic or emotion to run-away independently - is to pull-apart human understanding and to split our souls when they should be unified.

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Disadvantages of high IQ

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Saturday, 23 May 2009
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Having a high IQ is not always good news

Mensa Magazine June 2009 pp 34-5

Bruce G Charlton

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There are so many advantages to having a high IQ that the disadvantages are sometimes neglected – and I don’t mean just short-sightedness, which is commoner among the highly intelligent. It really is true that people who wear glasses tend to be smarter!

High IQ is, mostly, good for you

First it is worth emphasizing that high IQ is mostly very good for you.
This has been known since Lewis Terman’s 1920s follow-up study of Californian high IQ children revealed that they were not just cleverer but also taller, healthier and more athletic than average; and mostly grew-up to become wealthy and successful.

Professor Ian Deary of Edinburgh University has confirmed that both health and life-expectancy improve along with increasing IQ. So that, remarkably, a single childhood IQ test done on one morning in Scotland in 1932 made significantly-valid statistical predictions about when people would die many decades later.
And other studies have shown that higher IQ people tend to be less violent, so smarter people usually make less-troublesome neighbours.

Indeed, Geoffrey Miller has put forward the idea that IQ is a measure of biological fitness. Since it takes about half of our genes to make and operate the brain, most damaging genetic mutations will show-up in reduced intelligence. So it would have made sense for our ancestors to choose their mates on the basis of intelligence, because a good brain implies good genes.

Sidis and the problems of ultra-high IQ

However, high IQ is not always beneficial. Terman’s study of the highest IQ group among his cohort revealed that more than one third grew up to be ‘maladjusted’ in some way: for example having significant problems of anxiety, depression, personality disorder or experience of ‘nervous breakdowns’.

This applied to William James Sidis (1898-1944), who is often considered to have had the highest-ever IQ (about 250-300). Sidis was a child prodigy, famous throughout the USA as having enrolling at Harvard aged 11 and graduated at 16. Yet he was certainly ‘maladjusted’, and had a chaotic, troubled and short life. Indeed, Sidis was widely considered to have been a failure as an adult – although this failure has been exaggerated, since it turns out that Sidis published a number of interesting books and articles anonymously.

In fact, there seems to be a consensus among psychometricians (and among the possessors of ultra-high IQ themselves) that - while an IQ of about 120-150 is mostly advantageous - extremely high IQ levels above this may prove to be as often of a curse as a benefit from the perspective of leading a happy and fulfilling life.

On the one hand, the ranks of genius are often recruited from amongst the more creative and stable of ultra-high IQ people; but on the other hand there are also a high proportion of chronically-disaffected ultra-high IQ people that have been termed ‘The Outsiders’ in a famous essay of that title by Grady M Towers
( www.prometheussociety.org/articles/Outsiders.html )

Socialism, atheism and low-fertility

Sidis himself demonstrated, in exaggerated form, three traits which I put forward as being aspects of high IQ which are potentially disadvantageous: socialism, atheism and low-fertility.

1. Socialism

Higher IQ is probably associated with socialism via the personality trait called Openness-to-experience, which is modestly but significantly correlated with IQ. (To be more exact, left wing political views and voting patterns are characteristic of the highest and lowest IQ groups – the elite and the underclass - and right wingers tend to be in the mid-range.)

Openness summarizes such attributes as imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, preference for variety and intellectual curiosity – it also (among high IQ people in Western societies) predicts left-wing political views. Sidis was an extreme socialist, who received a prison sentence for participating in a May Day parade which became a riot (in the event, he ‘served his time’ in a sanatorium).

Now, of course, not everyone would agree that socialism is wrong (indeed, Mensa members reading this are quite likely to be socialists). But if socialism is regarded as a mistaken ideology (as I personally would argue!), then it could be said that high IQ people are more likely to be politically wrong. But whether correct or wrong, the point is that high IQ people do seem to have a built-in psychological and political bias.

2. Atheism

Something similar applies to atheism. Sidis was an atheist, and it has been pretty conclusively demonstrated by Richard Lynn that increasing IQ is correlated with increasing likelihood of atheism. The most famous atheists – like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett – are ferociously intelligent individuals.

Again, whether atheism is a disadvantage is a matter of opinion (to put it mildly!) – but what is not merely opinion is that religious people are on average more altruistic in terms of measures such as giving to charity, giving blood, and volunteering time for good causes.

So, higher IQ may be associated with greater selfishness. In other words, smarter neighbours may be less troublesome on average, but they may also be less helpful.

3. Fertility

However the biggest and least-controversial disadvantage of high IQ is reduced fertility. Again Sidis serves as an example: as a teenager he published a vow of celibacy, and he neither married nor had children.

Pioneer intelligence researchers such as Francis Galton (1822-1911) noticed that (since the invention of contraception) increasing intelligence usually meant fewer offspring. Terman confirmed this, especially among women – so the group of the highest IQ women had only about a quarter of the number of children required for replacement fertility.

This trend has, if anything, increased in recent years as ever-more high IQ women delay reproduction in order to pursue higher education and professional careers. Indeed, more than 30 percent of women college graduates in the UK and Europe have no children at all – and more than half of women now attend college.

Since IQ is highly heritable, this low fertility implies that over time high IQ will tend to select itself out of the population.

The bad news and the good news

So much for the bad news about high IQ.

The good news is that while the advantages of high IQ are built-in; the disadvantages of high IQ are mostly a matter of choice.

People can potentially change their political and religious views. For example, Sidis apparently changed from being a socialist to a libertarian, indeed many adult conservatives went through a socialist phase during their youth (declaration of interest: this applies to me).

And religious conversions among the high IQ are not unknown (declaration of interest: this applies to me). For instance, GK Chesterton and C.S Lewis being famous examples of atheists who became the two greatest Christian apologists of the twentieth century.

Indeed, although it does not often happen, smart people can also choose to be more fertile. One example is the Mormons in the USA, whose average IQ and fertility are both above the national average, and where the wealthiest Mormons also have the biggest families. Presumably - since wealth and IQ are positively correlated - this means that for US Mormons higher IQ leads to higher fertility.

So, on the whole it remains good news to have a high IQ - although perhaps not too-high an IQ. But perhaps the high IQ community needs to take a more careful look at the question of low fertility. It may be that, under modern conditions, high intelligence is stopping people from ‘doing what comes naturally’ and having large families.

Human reproduction could be one situation where the application of intelligence may be needed to over-ride our spontaneous emotions or the prevailing societal incentives.

Or else at some point in the future, high IQ could become very rare indeed.

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Reliable but dumb, or smart but slapdash?

Monday, 31 August 2009

Bruce G Charlton

Why it is ‘better’ to be reliable but dumb than smart but slapdash: Are intelligence (IQ) and Conscientiousness best regarded as gifts or virtues?

Medical Hypotheses. 2009; Volume 73: 465-467

Editorial

Summary

The psychological attributes of intelligence and personality are usually seen as being quite distinct in nature: higher intelligence being regarded a ‘gift’ (bestowed mostly by heredity); while personality or ‘character’ is morally evaluated by others, on the assumption that it is mostly a consequence of choice? So a teacher is more likely to praise a child for their highly Conscientious personality (high ‘C’) – an ability to take the long view, work hard with self-discipline and persevere in the face of difficulty – than for possessing high IQ. Even in science, where high intelligence is greatly valued, it is seen as being more virtuous to be a reliable and steady worker. Yet it is probable that both IQ and personality traits (such as high-C) are about-equally inherited ‘gifts’ (heritability of both likely to be in excess of 0.5). Rankings of both IQ and C are generally stable throughout life (although absolute levels of both will typically increase throughout the lifespan, with IQ peaking in late-teens and C probably peaking in middle age). Furthermore, high IQ is not just an ability to be used only as required; higher IQ also carries various behavioural predispositions – as reflected in the positive correlation with the personality trait of Openness to Experience; and characteristically ‘left-wing’ or ‘enlightened’ socio-political values among high IQ individuals. However, IQ is ‘effortless’ while high-C emerges mainly in tough situations where exceptional effort is required. So we probably tend to regard personality in moral terms because this fits with a social system that provides incentives for virtuous behaviour (including Conscientiousness). In conclusion, high IQ should probably more often be regarded in morally evaluative terms because it is associated with behavioural predispositions; while C should probably be interpreted with more emphasis on its being a gift or natural ability. In particular, people with high levels of C are very lucky in modern societies, since they are usually well-rewarded for this aptitude. This includes science, where it seems that C has been selected-for more rigorously than IQ. Indeed, those ‘gifted’ with high Conscientiousness are in some ways even luckier than the very intelligent – because there are more jobs for reliable and hard-working people (even if they are relatively ‘dumb’) than for smart people with undependable personalities.

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Moral evaluations of intelligence and personality

The psychological attributes of intelligence and personality are usually seen as being quite distinct in nature: higher intelligence being regarded as a morally-neutral aptitude which is a lucky ‘gift’; while personality or ‘character’ is morally evaluated by others, on the assumption that it is mostly a consequence of choices. So a teacher is much more likely repeatedly to praise a child for exceptional self-discipline and hard work than for being of high intelligence. In other words, virtue is seen as an aspect of character/personality rather than intelligence.

General intelligence (aka. ‘g factor’ intelligence, or ‘intelligence quotient’ or IQ) [1], [2], [3] and [4] and the ‘Big Five’ personality trait of Conscientiousness [5], [6] and [7] are the two main measurable psychological factors, higher levels of which are predictive of better educational and job performance [8] and [9]. IQ is the aptitude that enables a person to think abstractly and logically, to solve a wide range of novel problems, and to learn rapidly.

The personality trait of Conscientiousness (‘C’) incorporates features such as perseverance, self-discipline, meticulousness, and long-termism. In a nutshell, Conscientiousness is the capacity to work hard at a task over the long-term despite finding the task uninteresting and despite receiving no immediate reward.

The usual conceptualization sees IQ as a gift and C as a virtue; i.e. intelligence as an ability available to be used when necessary and personality traits such as Conscientiousness as a moral disposition to make better or worse behavioural choices. The mainstream idea would be that people are not responsible for the level of their intelligence but are responsible for their behaviour. So apparently it makes sense to praise Conscientiousness as virtuous but not similarly to praise IQ.

However, I will argue that – while there are indeed practical reasons to praise good behaviour – in reality IQ has morally-relevant elements, while high-C (and other valued personality traits) should also be regarded as a gift. So, both intelligence and personality can be regarded either as gifts or as virtues, according to context.

Intelligence is regarded as a gift

Most people regard intelligence as a ‘gift’ – and highly intelligent children have sometimes been termed gifted. This interpretation is accurate, in the sense that the main known determinant of general intelligence is heredity: people inherit intelligence from their parents [1], [2], [3] and [4]. While bad experiences (such as starvation and disease in the womb or during infancy) can pull intelligence downwards, it is at present difficult or impossible significantly to raise a person’s real, underlying, long-term predictive general intelligence by any kind of environmental intervention[10]. (It may, however, be possible to raise IQ scores by practicing IQ tests and other focused interventions; but this does not cash-out into significant and prolonged general benefits in terms of education and employment).

IQ is calculated by testing groups of people at different ages, and (usually) putting their scores into rank order and organizing rankings onto a normal distribution curve with a mean average IQ of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Using this type of calculation, intelligence scores/rankings are relatively stable throughout life – so that a child of 8 with high IQ will usually grow to become an adult with similarly high IQ, and vice versa [1], [2], [3] and [4].

Because intelligence is a gift which is substantially hereditary and stable throughout life, on the whole it is regarded as a result of ‘luck’ and something for which people should be grateful; and not, therefore, as a virtue deserving of moral approbation or praise. Indeed, people with high intelligence may be given less help than they need, and may be held to a higher standard of behaviour, precisely because they are regarded as lucky.

Higher intelligence is socially valued more highly than lower intelligence, probably because people with a higher IQ are on average more useful economically [11] (having higher economic productivity, on average); nonetheless the most intelligent people are not usually regarded as intrinsically virtuous nor especially morally praiseworthy. And although it is true that people of low intelligence may attract hurtful and insulting descriptors such as dumb, dull, slow or stupid; nonetheless, a person with these attributes is not regarded as intrinsically wicked.

Personality traits are morally evaluated

There is a contrast between IQ and personality in respect of moral evaluations. While IQ is seen as a gift there is a spontaneous tendency to regard personality as a morally distinguishing feature – as a visible marker of a person’s underlying moral nature. It is quite normal to praise the most diligent people for their high capacity for hard work, and at the same time to regard them as merely fortunate if they are also of high intelligence.

Yet it is probable that both IQ and personality traits (such as the ability to work hard) are almost-equally hereditary ‘gifts’. The heritability of IQ is generally quoted as between 0.5 and 0.8 (probably at the higher end) [1], [2], [3] and [4] and the heritability of personality is quoted as being around 0.5 [5], [6] and [7]. However, the estimate of personality heritability is certainly an underestimate due to the sub-optimal conceptualization of personality traits, and especially to the lesser precision of current personality measurement methods compared with IQ tests [4]. To the extent that these things can be observed in everyday experience, both IQ and personality are probably about-equally inherited; and the high IQ and extra-hard-working person should about-equally thank their genes rather than congratulate themselves.

Furthermore, rankings of personality, like IQ, are generally stable throughout life; so that a highly Conscientious child will probably grow into a highly Conscientious adult and vice versa (whatever their familial, educational and socially experiences may be). However, it is also important to recognize that average personality traits change through the lifespan – e.g. Conscientiousness levels increase through early adult life, while Extraversion declines [12]. The high-C personality type which enables people to work hard, be self-disciplined and pursue long-term goals is therefore, in this sense, no more ‘virtuous’ than the high IQ ability quickly to do complex verbal, mathematic and symbolic puzzles.

But Conscientiousness is often regarded as highly moral behaviour, and an exceptionally-reliable individual will probably be regarded as virtuous even when they are of low IQ. However, in contrast, a person who is low in C is likely to be feckless, distractible, slapdash, and focused on short-term rewards – even when they are very intelligent. These behaviours are regarded as moral deficiencies; and the coexistence of high IQ in some ways makes it worse, because it is often felt that clever people ‘should know better’. Of course, low-C traits are negatively evaluated probably for the obvious reason that they are not very useful socially – indeed a person of very low Conscientiousness is likely to be a poor student and troublesome employee under most circumstances.

Aside, it should be noted that low-C may also be associated with some positively-evaluated attributes; especially creativity (insofar as highly creative people tend to have very high IQ and moderately high ‘Psychoticism’ which trait includes moderately-low Conscientiousness [13]). I have previously suggested that selecting for very high-C will therefore – as an unintended side effect – tend to reduce the average level of creativity; and that this may have happened in science over the past several decades [14].

Furthermore, it has been argued that in the hunter gatherer societies of our ancestors it would probably have been advantageous for most people to have lower levels of C than seem to be optimal nowadays; in the sense that it was more important for hunter gatherers to react spontaneously and quickly to immediate stimuli; and less important for them to plan far ahead, or to be able to persevere in the unrewarding and often repetitive tasks that characterize much of formal education or agricultural and industrial employment [7].

But in modern societies, it is certainly an advantage (on average) to have higher levels of C.

Moral evaluation of personality

The evidence therefore suggests that it is likely that although the two psychological attributes of IQ and C are not highly-correlated (see Ref. [13] for review); the ability to work hard and with self-discipline and the ability of general intelligence are about-equally inherited, about-equally stable throughout life, and about-equally difficult to change either by self-determination or by the social interventions of other people. It seems that we as individuals are pretty much ‘stuck with’ the intelligence and the personalities with which we were born; and it is strange that exceptional IQ should be regarded as a gift while exceptional C is regarded as being the praiseworthy result of resolution and effort.

It might be argued that personality traits are associated with moral behaviours in a way that IQ is not. Certainly personality traits do have moral aspects. Three of the Big Five – Conscientiousness, Agreeableness and Neuroticism – have one extreme which would generally be immoral [6] and [7]. For example, it would generally be regarded as ‘bad behaviour’ to be low in Agreeableness since this would include selfishness, uncooperativeness, emotional coldness, unfriendliness, unhelpfulness. Likewise it may be regarded as socially-undesirable to be high in Neuroticism since this would include proneness to mood swings, irritability and anger.

But the reason that humans apparently spontaneously regard personality in moral terms is presumably because humans respond to incentives. Society would probably wish to encourage pro-social behaviour by praising it, on the basis that even though personality rankings cannot be much changed by whole-population interventions, at the individual level behaviour can be shaped by incentives – by rewards and punishments.

Furthermore, high-C behaviour takes more effort than low-C behaviour. Although the ability to work hard on topics that are uninteresting is mostly hereditary, and therefore a gift, hard work is still hard work, and it is still easier not to work hard! Slapdash, distractible behaviour is undemanding, takes less effort. So, unless there is system of incentives which encourages hard work, then the default position is to work less hard, or not to work at all.

However, when the same incentives are applied to the whole of a group of people varying in C; it is unreasonable and may be cruel to expect that the Conscientiousness gap between high and low individuals to disappear. Although all students might work harder, at least while the incentives were being applied, the gap between high-C and low-C students would remain, and the size of this gap might increase. Certainly, this is what has been found with IQ, when attempting to close various IQ-testing ‘gaps’. And, insofar as C is like IQ (heritable and stable), the possible size of improvement due to interventions is likely to be modest or negligible [2]. The accumulated experience of trying to improve general intelligence (in developed nations) is that it is difficult or impossible to produce sustained long-term improvements in intelligence, especially when the improvements are tested by independent outcomes such performance in employment. Improvements are often superficial results of specific training which only enhance specific types of test performance or evaluations done while under the influence of structured motivational systems [10].

Conclusion

Personality clearly has a moral dimension, but something similar could also be said of intelligence in the indirect sense that higher intelligence is associated with reduced levels of a range of social pathologies including crime and family breakdown [15].

Furthermore intelligence is associated with several aspects of personality and behaviour. There is a positive association between IQ and the Big Five trait of Openness to Experience – which means that more-intelligent people are more likely to seek novelty, enjoy artistic experiences, and be imaginative [7]. Furthermore, intelligence is associated positively with atheism and also with what have been termed ‘enlightened’ values such as left-wing or ‘liberal’ and anti-traditional/anti-conservative views [16]. So that IQ is associated with several morally-evaluated socio-political views which could be judged as virtuous, adaptive, mistaken or even damaging – according to one’s socio-political and religious perspective.

I do not, however, wish to press the similarity of personality and intelligence too hard since these attributes may have a somewhat distinct evolutionary rationale, and selectional basis [17]. My main point is that, although we regard intelligence and personality as different kinds of psychological attributes, in fact they are similar in several important ways.

Nonetheless, in sum, it seems that our traditional interpretations of intelligence and personality require modification. IQ is not just an ability which can be used as required; instead higher IQ is also a predisposition which on average includes a bias towards some types of behaviours and away from others. And high conscientiousness – such as the ability to take the long view, work hard and persevere in the face of difficulty – should probably be interpreted with more emphasis on its being a gift in much the same sense as high intelligence – despite the fact that IQ is ‘effortless’ while high-C emerges mainly in tough situations where exceptional diligence is required.

People with high levels of IQ are mostly very lucky, as is widely recognized; but people with high-C are very lucky too, because they are usually well-rewarded for this aptitude in modern society; and indeed rewarded in science too, where it seems that self-discipline is now selected-for more rigorously than IQ [14].

Indeed, in some ways those ‘gifted’ with high-C are even luckier than very intelligent people, because there are always going to be more jobs for reliable and hard-working people (even if they are relatively ‘dumb’) than jobs which are suitable for smart people who are undependable, short-termist and slapdash.

References

[1] U. Neisser et al., Intelligence: knowns and unknowns, Am Psychol 51 (1996), pp. 77–101.

[2] A.R. Jensen, The g factor: the science of mental ability, Praeger, Westport, CT, USA (1988).

[3] N.J. Mackintosh, IQ and human intelligence, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1998).

[4] I.J. Deary, Intelligence: a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2001).

[5] J.R. Harris, The nurture assumption: why children turn out the way they do, Bloomsbury, London (1998).

[6] G. Matthews, I.J. Deary and M.C. Whiteman, Personality traits, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK (2003).

[7] D. Nettle, Personality: what makes you the way you are, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK (2007).

[8] M.R. Barrick and M.K. Mount, The big five personality dimensions and job performance: a meta analysis, Pers Psychol 44 (1991), pp. 1–26.

[9] A.L. Duckworth and M.E.P. Seligman, Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents, Psychol Sci 12 (2005), pp. 939–944.

[10] H.H. Spitz, The raising of intelligence: a selected history of attempts to raise retarded intelligence, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, USA (1986).

[11] L.S. Gottfredson, Implications of cognitive differences for schooling within diverse societies. In: C.L. Frisby and C.R. Reynolds, Editors, Comprehensive handbook of multicultural school psychology, Wiley, New York (2005), pp. 517–554.

[12] P.T. Costa and R.R. McCrae, Stability and change in personality from adolescence through adulthood. In: C.F. Halverson Jr, G.A. Kohnstamm and R.P. Martin, Editors, The developing structure of temperament and personality from infancy to adulthood, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, USA (1994), pp. 139–150.

[13] H.J. Eysenck, Genius: the natural history of creativity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK (1995).

[14] B.G. Charlton, Why are modern scientists so dull? How science selects for perseverance and sociability at the expense of intelligence and creativity, Med Hypotheses 72 (2009), pp. 237–243.

[15] R.J. Herrnstein and C. Murray, The bell curve: intelligence and class structure in American life, Forbes, New York (1994).

[16] I.J. Deary, C.D. Batty and C.R. Gale, Bright children become enlightened adults, Psychol Sci 19 (2008), pp. 1–6.

[17] L. Penke, J.J. Denissen and G.F. Miller, The evolutionary genetics of personality, Eur J Personality 21 (2007), pp. 549–587.
 
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Tuesday, 13 August 2013

Is creativity random? An intrinsic ability? No: ultimately it is a matter of sensitivity to external inspiration

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Most scientific accounts of creativity converge onto the idea that creativity is one half of a kind of natural selection process by which creativity produces an undirected spectrum of undirected 'random' variations, and intelligence selects plausibly true or useful variants from this spectrum by testing the variants against established knowledge.

(High intelligence being necessary - or at least very useful- to make these large numbers of comparisons that are testing random variants against knowledge with sufficient rapidity; and a large knowledge base being facilitated by that rapid learning which is characteristic of high intelligence).

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But, this convergence of scientific theories upon creativity being random is not a discovery of science, rather it is simply a consequence of the metaphysical assumptions of science.

Science as a metaphysical system excludes teleology, excludes there being any direction for functionality whereby a system might 'know in advance' what was closer to reality. Indeed, science denies the possibility of comparing theories and experiments with reality to estimate how close they come - because if reality was known outwith science, then there would be no need to do science - it would merely be a long-cut to reality, a resource-consuming and indirect method of doing-philosophy .

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So, the basic set-up of science excludes the possibility of creativity being directed toward discovery of the nature of reality.

This exclusion of teleology has not and never could be discovered by science - it is built-into science, and emerges with inevitability (when it is sometimes - often! - naively mistaken for a discovery!).

Yet, in practice teleology is almost always smuggled into science covertly - and this seems to be inevitable considering that the number of possible random variations which could be generated is open-ended ('infinite') and there is no possibility of sorting among them.

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However, the idea that creativity is random leads to some important - but false conclusions: for example the idea that there is 'something wrong' with the brains/ thought processes of creative people.

This idea is indeed in the background of Eysenck's work on creativity, and is a flaw - but it is a flaw shared with all the other psychologists I have read on the topic. Eysenck sees creativity in terms of a fuzziness of the thought processes, a widening of the association-field of thinking - which generates more random variation in the associational-chain of reasoning; this wider-variation/ imprecision then being sifted and selected-from by the extra powers of an extra-high intelligence.

In sum, according to this prevalent view, the creative genius is one who produces more randomly-generated garbage from his thinking, but who is also much better than average at sorting the garbage - and consequently finds the occasional nugget of usefulness among the garbage.

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As I say, this conclusion is not a discovery but in fact a necessary consequence of the metaphysical assumptions brought to the field. And it is a conclusion which - although not impossible in principle - may be impossible in practice due to the likelihood that randomness generates an impossibly high ratio of wrong/ useless variation compared with the rarity of correct/ useful variation.

I think this view also fails to correspond with common sense ideas about creative genius, or even everyday creativity; and also fails to match the 'phenomenology' or introspective psychology of successful creation (so far as this can be ascertained) - which has teleological (goal-seeking) features, and a sense of sureness and truth very much a part of it.

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Nonetheless, regarding creativity as random has fed into (or at least supports) the prevalent modern Western secular account of creativity as being about novelty, and the distortion of evaluation which sees novelty as merely something different - and which reject the possibility of evaluating novelties.

I mean the view that puts 'modern art' (post Picasso) on a level with the great art of the past, and the latest critic-approved examples of 'artistic genius' into galleries alongside Rembrandt.

And the view (the prevalent, mainstream view among professional psychologists) with argues that this novelty-creativity comes from the (incoherent) personality trait called Openness to Experience -

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience

- which more or less reduces to the personality trait of being high IQ with Left wing views.

This modern 'creativity' is essentially definable as high status novelty; derived from almost-randomly-generated novelty (in practice, novelty generated by rote procedures of extrapolation from or selection and recombination of the products of past-creativity derived form social and political studies) - upon which are conferred high social status by the prevalent dominant secular Left wing intelligentsia.

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But, but but...

The traditionally, in previous non-secular cultures; the underlying reality of creativity, above and beyond science, is that creativity is primarily from outwith the creative person.

That the creative person is one who has some gift conferred from outwith himself - from inspiration - the muses, gods or evil spirits.

So the creative person is not - in the final bottom-line analysis - someone with a particular ability, but someone with a particular sensitivity.

Namely, a particular sensitivity to these sources of external inspiration - inspirations which may be benign/ useful, or indeed malign and destructive. 

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Thursday, 18 December 2014

Creativity is transcendentally the opposite of fashion

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Creativity is nowadays frequently confused with - but must be distinguished from,  fashion - because the one is essentially good (although may be used for evil), while the other is essentially evil (although may well have good aspects).

So to regard the 'design' of modern products - such as Apple computers - as prime examples of creativity is strictly mistaken; such design has the imperative of novelty, which makes it primarily fashion - and creativity is an optional extra.

True creativity is about reality - and qualities such as functionality and excellence; but fashion is about the requirement for novelty and change.

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I think it probable that high creativity is a group selected trait - which means that (on average) it benefits group reproductive success rather than the individual; many products of creativity have the effect of promoting group cohesion and cooperation.

Fashion, however, is a luxury good and parasitic on the group functionality - because its changes and reversals tend to promote inter--group conflict and damage group cohesion.

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Real creativity springs from the individual's motivations, drives and internal reward system: creativity is natural and spontaneous for the truly creative person - although it can, of course, be suppressed - by contrast fashion, design, novelty.

So to control creativity the group would actively need to crush it; otherwise the creative person just will be creative.

Fashion, on the other hand, is done for the usual reasons of external reward: status, salary, sex and so on. Fashion needs to be incentivised; designers need to be paid; recurrent novelty is a consequence of reward; perpetual change is driven by paid managers (and managers do not manage unless they are 'paid' in some valued currency).  

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Therefore, psychological tests of the kind that ask subjects to list as many uses as possible for a stick or a hook or a ball are not asking about real creativity, but about something more like fashion - because they are measuring novelty but not measuring functionality or usefulness.

And the Big Five psychological trait of  'Openness to experience' is essentially about novelty/ fashion, rather than excellence/ creativity.

But Eysenck's personality trait of Psychoticism (flawed as it is) is essentially trying to probe and quantify real creativity, not fashion.

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Fashion, novelty, change... these are intrinsic to modernity and have become the primary attribute of secular Leftism: they are more dominant now than ever before.

But real creativity is in a bad way in the modern world. Major geniuses have all-but disappeared, and minor geniuses are ignored, their work (even when potentially useful to group 'fitness') is attacked, suppressed, made illegal; creative people are punished not rewarded.

So real creativity is one kind of thing - being scape-goated and declining fast; while the pseudo-creativity of fashion - which is celebrated and expanding - is a very different thing.

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Friday, 13 September 2013

The main problem of creativity is the disposition to recognize problems

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I get the impression that most of the psychology of creativity has been too much focused on the problem of 'where do (good) ideas come from?'

The main idea, and indeed the only idea compatible with the non-teleological assumptions of modern biology, is some version of the mechanism of Natural Selection, for example that the creative process involves:

1. a random generation of ideas followed by
2. selection among them.

(HJ Eysenck surveys and expounds this model in his book Genius of 1995).

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Broadly, the theory is that a creative person is one with high trait psychoticism/ schizotypy (or possibly Openness to Experience) has a way of thinking which is prone to more-inclusive and wide ranging associations - so instead of generating just one idea, they generate a range of ideas which are novel, but of course nearly all wrong or incoherent or in some way worse.

(The analogy is with genetic mutations, nearly all of which are deleterious.)

A creative genius is assumed to be a person who does this, but who is also able to select among these many random ideas using their extremely high intelligence to test their plausibility in terms of coherence with existing knowledge.

(The analogy is with the natural selection mechanism of reproductive success - most mutations lead to death, sterility, or reduced reproduction; but a few beneficial mutations are selected because they increase reproductive success - and 'good ideas' are selected because they first of all make sense and then do well when scientifically 'tested'.)

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So, the answer to 'where do good ideas come from?' is that they are chosen from a pool of what are mostly (nearly-but-not-quite ALL) bad ideas, having been randomly generated - and the essence of genius is is to sift these bad ideas in hope that a good idea might be lurking among them.

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Whether or not this is a plausible or possible way n which genius works is not really a matter for empirical study - rather it is just about the only way that genius could work, given the constraints of post-Darwinian biology and the ruling-out of their existing any external source of correct ideas, which the genius might be supposed to be accessing. 

In particular, given that the standard ancient explanation of 'divine inspiration' is ruled out as an explanation of Genius, then some version of natural selection is the only alternative that humankind has come up with.

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But the focus of explanation of creativity could, and perhaps should, be shifted. 

Rather than focusing on 'where do good ideas come from?' it may be more useful to focus on what it is that enables - or predisposes - a person to recognize that there is a problem.

By this account a creative person is one who perceives problems that would benefit from being solved; so the special gift of a creative genius would have a lot to do with their ability to discern soluble problems. Soluble problems of such a type that - if they can be solved - would make a big difference to things.

Such a genius would not have to be better than other people at coming up with answers, just much better at knowing when and where there was a problem.

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Indeed, this might be his main contribution - and having defined the problem, it might be that a lot of people are able to contribute possible solutions just as well as the genius who made it all possible.

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An example would be the act of creativity involved in recognizing a new disease - recognizing that there was a pattern - drawing a line around some part of the world and revealing it as a coherent entity.

So - by this account - Michael S Gottlieb was the primary creative mind involved in the discovery of AIDS because he looked at the sea of disorders and drew a line around a particular combination of signs and symptoms - a new syndrome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_S._Gottlieb#Identification_of_AIDS

Once this had been done, the famous, over-praised (and over-rewarded) leaders of uncreative but hyper-resourced Big Lab teams could throw manpower and machines at the problem until the causal agent was discovered (which was almost inevitable, sooner or later).

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So - I am suggesting that a creative person is one who has the personality, or disposition, to recognize and define problems - and not necessarily the person who is especially good at solving problems

(Because the 'creative' may not have the power and resources to solve the problem he has discovered - and anyway solving the problem may not require much creativity - nonetheless, without the creative person, there would be no problem to be solved. Creativity is primary.) 

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Friday, 4 April 2014

The Natural Selection of European Genius - a speculation

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Speculation time...

Creative Genius is a combination of high general intelligence (g) and (moderately) high Psychoticism (see elsewhere on this blog for the evidence) plus some other things, including luck.

But these are the necessary attributes - intelligence gives metal quickness, quick learning and general knowledge - and psychoticism provides the creativity plus the personal autonomy required to focus on something due to its intrinsic interest and in despite of social pressure to stop doing it and do something else.

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1. In the beginning, hunter gatherers were low in intelligence and high in Psychoticism - they were creative back lacked cognitive ability, and seldom made discoveries.

HG = Low IQ & High P

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2. In stable and large scale agricultural societies there was selection for higher intelligence and higher 'General Factor Personality' GFP - GFP is what J Phillipe Rushton termed a putative underlying unitary 'pro-social' personality trait which can be assumed to underpin the Costa and McCrae Big Five (i.e. High GFP =  high Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Openness and low Neuroticism) or Eysenck's Big Three (i.e. High GFP = high Extraversion and low Neuroticism and Psychoticism).

(GFP statistically-underpins the various specific personality traits in just the same way as g underpins the various cognitive abilities.)

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Such populations became high in intelligence but uncreative, since individuals would be focused on social expectations (for stable emotions, sociability, hard work and empathy) and would be most rewarded hence motivated by conforming to social expectations.

Their whole mental set up would be outward looking at other people - as contrasted with the inward looking self-evaluating set-up which seems to be required for creativity.

Agriculturalists = High IQ & High GFP (i.e. Low P)

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3. Specifically in European societies (of the Middle Ages) there was a further selection for economic specialization in men.

This selection worked because the most reproductively successful men were cognitive specialists - merchants, skilled tradesmen, doctors, lawyers, clerks... indeed these were the ONLY men who actually managed to raise on average more than two children per family.

In order to do such work, these men were Naturally Selected to be motivated not by 'other people' but by the innate rewards of their, often solitary, cognitive and physical skills. This was in fact selection for high Psychoticism - for creativity.

Despite not being very sociable nor very 'charming', such men got good wives via arranged marriages - since parents of a young and healthy girls would prefer their grandchildren not to starve to death.

The result was a population that was both intelligence and creative - due to having high P.

Europeans = High IQ & (relatively) High P

But the High P of the Europeans is NOT the same as the High P of the Hunter Gatherers - it is a High P which is not 'natural and spontaneous' but a High P which has secondarily evolved-from a High GFP.

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So we get three types of world population in terms of what I regard as the primary variables of general intelligence (g) and Psychoticism

H-G - High Primary P and Low g

Agric - High GFP and High g

European - High Secondary P and High g.

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This is my explanation for why a high incident rate of Creative genius was confined to European populations.

As I said - this is speculation!

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Monday, 6 August 2012

Replacing education with psychometrics

Saturday, 11 July 2009

Bruce G Charlton

Replacing education with psychometrics: How learning about IQ almost-completely changed my mind about education.

Medical Hypotheses. 2009; 73: 273-277

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Summary

I myself am a prime example of the way in which ignorance of IQ leads to a distorted understanding of education (and many other matters). I have been writing on the subject of education – especially higher education, science and medical education – for about 20 years, but now believe that many of my earlier ideas were wrong for the simple reason that I did not know about IQ. Since discovering the basic facts about IQ, several of my convictions have undergone a U-turn. Just how radically my ideas were changed has been brought home by two recent books: Real Education by Charles Murray and Spent by Geoffrey Miller. Since IQ and personality are substantially hereditary and rankings (although not absolute levels) are highly stable throughout a persons adult life, this implies that differential educational attainment within a society is mostly determined by heredity and therefore not by differences in educational experience. This implies that education is about selection more than enhancement, and educational qualifications mainly serve to ‘signal’ or quantify a person’s hereditary attributes. So education mostly functions as an extremely slow, inefficient and imprecise form of psychometric testing. It would therefore be easy to construct a modern educational system that was both more efficient and more effective than the current one. I now advocate a substantial reduction in the average amount of formal education and the proportion of the population attending higher education institutions. At the age of about sixteen each person could leave school with a set of knowledge-based examination results demonstrating their level of competence in a core knowledge curriculum; and with usefully precise and valid psychometric measurements of their general intelligence and personality (especially their age ranked degree of Conscientiousness). However, such change would result in a massive down-sizing of the educational system and this is a key underlying reason why IQ has become a taboo subject. Miller suggests that academics at the most expensive, elite, intelligence-screening universities tend to be sceptical of psychometric testing; precisely because they do not want to be undercut by cheaper, faster, more-reliable IQ and personality evaluations.

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Introduction

It was only in early 2007 that I began properly to engage, for the first time in my professional career, with the literature on IQ. Surprisingly, this engagement had been stimulated by a book of economic history. And learning the basic facts about IQ rapidly changed my views on many things, none more so than education.

Just how radically my ideas about education were changed by learning about IQ has been brought home by two recent books: Real Education By Charles Murray [1] and Spent by Geoffrey Miller [2]. In line with analyses of Murray and Miller, I would now repudiate many of my previous opinions on the subject, and advocate a substantial reduction in the average amount of formal education and the proportion of the population attending higher education. In general, I now believe that many years of formal education can and should be substantially (but not entirely!) replaced with ‘psychometric’ measures of intelligence and personality as a basis for evaluating career potential.

In this article I use my own experience as a case study of the potentially-disruptive influence of psychometric knowledge, and discuss further the reasons why basic IQ facts have been so effectively concealed, confused and denied by mainstream elite intellectual opinion in the UK and USA.

The importance of IQ

I have been writing on the subject of education for about 20 years (especially on higher education, science and medical education), but I now believe that much of what I wrote was wrong for the simple reason that I did not know about IQ. Personality traits are important in a similar way to IQ, however personality measurement is currently less reliable and valid than IQ testing, and less-well quantified.

In the early 2000s I argued that modern formal education should be directed primarily at inculcating the ability to think abstractly and systematically [3] and that therefore the structure and not the specific content of education was critical (although ‘science’ – broadly defined – was likely to be the best basis for this type of education [4]). I suggested that higher education should be regarded as a non-vocational process, in which most degrees are modular, and modules were optional and multi-disciplinary, so that each student would assemble their own degree program in a minimally-constrained, ‘pick and mix’ fashion [5]. I also contended that since abstract systemizing cognition was so essential to modernizing societies, a major aim of social reform should be to include as many people as possible in formal education for as long as possible [6].

All of these views I would now regard as mistaken – and the reason is mostly my new understanding of IQ [7], [8], [9] and [10]. Miller concisely explains the basic facts about IQ:

“General intelligence (a.k.a. IQ, general cognitive ability, the g factor) is a way of quantifying intelligence’s variability among people. It is the best-established, most predictive, most heritable mental trait ever discovered in psychology. Whether measured with formal IQ tests or assessed through informal conversations and observations, intelligence predicts objective performance and learning ability across all important life-domains that show reliable individual differences” [2].

The crux of my new understanding is that IQ, and to a lesser but important extent personality traits, are highly predictive of educational attainment. This is a very old finding, and scientifically uncontroversial – but the implications have still not been acknowledged.

Since IQ is very substantially inherited with a true heritability of about 80% [7], [8], [9] and [10] and personality too has about a 50% heritability [11] and [12]; and since both IQ and personality rankings are highly stable throughout a persons adult life [13] (it is, for example, very difficult for educational interventions to have any significant and lasting effect on underlying IQ [1]) – then this implies that differential educational attainment within societies is mostly determined by heredity and therefore not by differences in educational experience.

(The other big factor which influences attainment is of course the large element of chance – which affects individuals unpredictably. However, chance is not completely random, in the sense that many outcomes such as accidental injuries and a range of illnesses are also correlated with IQ and personality [14]).

When full account has been taken of IQ and personality (and the measured effects of IQ and personality have been increased to take account of the inevitable imprecision of IQ measurements and the even greater difficulties of determining personality), and when the presumed effects of chance have also been subtracted – then there is not much variation of outcomes left-over within which educational differences could have an effect. Of course there will be some systemic effect of educational differences, but the effect is likely to be very much smaller than generally assumed, and even the direction of the education effect may be hard to detect when other more powerful factors are operative [1].

I found the fact that differences in educational attainment within a society are mostly due to heredity to be a stunning conclusion, which effectively demolished most of what I believed about education. My understanding of what education was doing was radically reshaped, and my beliefs about the justifiable duration and proper focus of the system of formal education were transformed. I began to realize that the educational system in modern societies was operating under false pretences. It seems that current educational systems are barely ‘fit for purpose’ and (lacking a proper understanding of IQ) are in many instances progressively getting worse rather than better.

In sum, education is more about selection than enhancement, and educational qualifications mostly serve to ‘signal’ or quantify a person’s hereditary attributes [15] – especially IQ and personality. Differential educational experience does not seem to have much of a systemic effect on people’s ability to think or work.

To put it another way – education mostly functions as an extremely slow, inefficient and imprecise form of psychometric testing. And because this fact is poorly understood, those aspects of modern education which are not psychometric are consequently neglected and misdirected.

Policy implications of psychometrics

If psychometric measures of IQ and personality were available, then it would be easy to construct a modern educational system that was both more efficient and more effective than the current one. However, such change would result in a massive down-sizing of the educational system – with substantial and permanent loss of jobs and status for educational professionals of all types including teachers, professors, administrators and managers.

According to Geoffrey Miller’s analysis [2], this impact on educational professionals is likely to be a key underlying reason why IQ has become a taboo subject, and why the basic facts of IQ have been so effectively obfuscated. Miller notes that it is the ultra-elite, most-selective and heavily research-oriented universities which are the focus of IQ resistance. At the same time more functionally-orientated institutions, such as the United States military, have for many decades quietly been using IQ as a tool to assist with selection and training allocations [16].

“Is it an accident that researchers at the most expensive, elite, IQ-screening universities tend to be most sceptical of IQ tests? I think not. Universities offer a costly, slow, unreliable intelligence-indicating product that competes directly with cheap, fast, more-reliable IQ tests. (…) Harvard and Yale sell nicely printed sheets of paper called degrees that cost about $160,000 (…). To obtain the degree, one must demonstrate a decent level of Conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness in one’s coursework, but above all, one must have the intelligence to get admitted, based on SAT scores and high school grades. Thus the Harvard degree is basically an IQ guarantee”.

“Elite universities do not want to be undercut by competitors. They do not want their expensive IQ-warranties to suffer competition from cheap, fast IQ tests which would commodify the intelligence-display market and drive down costs. Therefore, elite universities have a hypocritical, love-hate relationship with intelligence tests”.

The vulnerability of the elite institutions to IQ knowledge is because most of the assumed advantages of an expensive elite education can be ascribed to their historic ability to select the top stratum of IQ (and also the most desirable personality types): given the stability and predictive power of these traits the elite students are therefore pre-determined to be (on average) highly successful.

Consequently the most elite institutions and their graduates have in the past few decades, both via academic publications and in the mass media, thoroughly obscured the basic and validated facts about IQ. We now have a situation where the high predictive powers of IQ and personality and the stable and hereditary nature of these traits are routinely concealed, confused or (in extremis) explicitly denied by some of the most prestigious and best-educated members of modern society [17].


Four mistaken beliefs resulting from my lack of IQ knowledge

I will summarize under four heading my main pre-IQ errors regarding education.

Mistaken belief number 1: Modern formal education should be directed primarily at inculcating the ability to think abstractly and systematically [3].

Revision: Modern formal education should be directed primarily at inculcating specific knowledge content.

Abstract systematic thinking is exceptionally important in modern societies. And I used to believe that that abstract systematic thinking was mostly a product of formal education – indeed I regarded this as the main function of formal education [3]. But I now recognize that abstract systematic thinking is pretty close to a definition of IQ; and that strongly IQ related (or heavily ‘g-loaded’) educational outcomes – such as differentials in reading comprehension and mathematical ability – are very difficult/impossible to improve in a real and sustained fashion by educational interventions [1].

In other words, a person’s level of ability to think abstractly and systematically is mostly a biological given – and not a consequence of formal education. The implication is that formal education should not be focusing on trying to do what it cannot do – i.e. enhance IQ. Instead, formal education should focus on educational goals where is can make a difference: i.e. the teaching of specific knowledge [1].

Mistaken belief number 2: Structure not content of formal education is crucial [5].

Revision: Content not structure of education is crucial.

I used to think that it did not matter what subject was studied in formal education, so long as the method of education was one which nurtured abstract systematic thinking [3]. I believed that how we learned was more important than what we learned, because I believed that abstract systematic thinking was a result of formal education – and this cognitive ability was more important than any particular body of information which had been memorized.

This line of reasoning meant that I favoured ‘pick and mix’, wide choice and multi-disciplinary curricula as a method of improving motivation by allowing students to study what most interested them, and giving students practice in learning new material and applying systematic thinking in many knowledge domains [5].

The reason that I believed all this has been summarized by Geoffrey Miller:

“The highly selective credential with little relevant content [such as an elite college degree in any subject] often trumps the less-selective credential with very relevant content. Nor are such preferences irrational. General intelligence is such a powerful predictor of job performance that a content-free IQ guarantee can be much more valuable to an employer or graduate school than a set of rote-learned content with no IQ guarantee” [2].

Since IQ is such a powerful influence on educational (and other) outcomes [18], the value of specific educational content is therefore only apparent when IQ has been controlled-for. Since IQ is routinely ignored or denied, the value of educational content is not apparent in outcomes which are sensitive to differences in general intelligence.

Murray argues that variations in the structure and methods of education are not able significantly to influence those educational outcomes which are ‘g-loaded’ such as reading comprehension or mathematic reasoning [1]. Numerous attempts to raise real long-term intelligence (rather than merely raising specific test scores) have failed [19]. However, the subject matter being studied will (obviously!) make a big difference to what gets learned. Once we set aside the delusional goal of enhancing IQ by educational reform, then the subject matter – or curriculum – becomes a more important focus than educational structure and methods.

Charles Murray therefore endorses the approach to ‘Cultural Literacy’ or a core knowledge curriculum pioneered by Ed Hirsch (www.coreknowledge.org). This educational philosophy focuses on constructing a comprehensive curriculum of the factual material that people should know, or ‘need to know’. Over the past couple of decades some detailed and well-validated programmes of study have been developed for the USA, and these can be purchased by educational institutions and also home-schooling parents.

It is claimed that such a core knowledge curriculum should enable the student to become a citizen participating at the highest possible social level, and that a shared education in core knowledge should hold society together with a stronger ‘cultural glue’. If such benefits are real, then school, especially between the ages of about 6 and 14, is the best place to follow such a program; since, although the core curriculum involves more than mere memorization, nonetheless memorization is an important element – and young children can memorize information much more easily and lastingly than adults [1].

Understanding IQ has therefore provoked me into a U-turn on the matter of curricula. I now believe that what we learn in formal education is more important than how we learn, because what we learn can have a lasting effect on what we know; while how we learn does not, after all, teach us how to think.

Mistaken belief number 3: A major aim of social reform should be to include as many people as possible in formal education for as long as possible. Ever-more people should get ever-more education for the foreseeable future [6].

Revision: The system of formal education is hugely over-expanded and should be substantially reduced (to considerably less than half its current size). The average person should receive fewer years of formal education, fewer people should attend higher education institutions and do fewer bachelor’s degrees, and those in higher education should – on average – complete the process in fewer years.

The proportion of school leavers entering higher education in the UK has at least trebled over the past three decades, from around 15% to more than 45%. The rationale behind this vast expansion was based on the observation of higher all-round performance among college graduates – better performance in jobs, and also a wide range of other good outcomes including improved health and happiness [6].

However, it turns out that almost all of this differential in behaviours can be explained in terms of selection for (mostly hereditary) intelligence, rather than these improvements being something added to individuals by their educational experience. The main extra information provided by the successful completion of prolonged educational programs (i.e. extra in addition to signalling IQ) is that educational certification provides a broadly-reliable signal of a highly-Conscientious personality.

Miller has neatly described this trait: “Conscientiousness is the Big Five personality trait that includes such characteristics as integrity, reliability, predictability, consistency, and punctuality. It predicts respect for social norms and responsibilities, and the likelihood of fulfilling promises and contracts. A century ago, people would have called it character, principle, honor, or moral fiber. (…) Conscientiousness is lower on average in juveniles, and it matures slowly with age” [2].

Other attributes of a highly-Conscientious personality are self-discipline, perseverance and long-termism [20].

But a person’s degree of Conscientiousness is not a product of their educational experience; rather it is a mostly-inherited psychological attribute which develops throughout life, the relative (or differential) possession of which is stable throughout life [13]. In other words, Conscientiousness is (mostly) an innate ability in a similar sense to intelligence – and similarly difficult to influence by educational means.

It turns out that modern formal education is mainly signalling [15], or providing indirect evidence about, a person’s IQ and personality abilities which they have mostly inherited [1] and [2]. This means that imposing an ever-increasing number of years of formal education for an ever-increasing proportion of the population is ever-increasingly inefficient – and is wasting years of people’s lives, wasting vast amounts of money on the education provision, and imposing huge economic and social ‘opportunity costs’ by forcing people to remain in formal education when their time would often be better spent doing something else (for example something economically-productive or something more personally-fulfilling).

Mistaken belief number 4: Higher education should be regarded as a general, non-vocational process, in which most degrees are modular and multi-disciplinary; and where specialization or vocational preparation should be a relatively brief and ‘last-minute’ training at the end of a long process of education [3], [5] and [6].

Revision: The period of general education should not extend much beyond about 16 (the approximate age of IQ maturity), and this general education should be focused on the basic skills of literacy and numeracy together with a core knowledge curriculum.

At the age of about 16 each person could potentially leave school with a set of knowledge-based examination results demonstrating their level of competence in a core knowledge curriculum; and with usefully precise and valid psychometric measurements of their general intelligence and personality (especially their age ranked degree of Conscientiousness). The combination of psychometric measures of IQ and Conscientiousness would serve the same kind of function as educational evaluations do at present, providing a basis for employment selection or valid predictions to guide the allocation of access to further levels of formal education.

Beyond this I believe that most education should be ‘functional’ or vocational, in the sense of being a relatively-focused training in the knowledge and skills required to do something specific. This functional post-sixteen formal higher education could vary in duration from weeks or months (for semi-skilled jobs) to several years (for access to the starting level of the most highly skilled and knowledge-intensive professions such as architecture, engineering, medicine or law).

But when IQ and personality measurements are available, then the majority of ‘white collar’ jobs – jobs such as management, administration, or school teaching (up to the age of about 16) – would no longer require a college degree. Instead specific knowledge-based training would be provided ‘on the job’, presumably by the traditional mixture of a formally-structured curriculum for imparting the core knowledge and systematic elements with apprenticeship and individual instruction in order to impart specialized skills.

Murray also suggests that much specialist educational certification for careers could in principle be better done by rigorous public examinations such as those for accountancy, than by the medium of minimum-duration college degrees [1].

Measuring personality

The main unsolved problem for this psychometric approach is the evaluation of personality. Most of the current evidence for the predictive and explanatory power of personality comes from self-rating questionnaires, and clearly these would not be suitable for educational and job evaluations since it is facile to learn the responses which would lead to a high rating for Conscientiousness.

Rather than being simply asserted in a questionnaire, a Conscientious, persevering, self-disciplined personality requires to be demonstrated in actual practice. The modern educational system has, inadvertently, evolved in the direction of requiring higher levels of Conscientiousness [20]. The main factor in this evolution has been the progressive lengthening of the educational process (in the UK the modal average age for leaving formal education has increased from 16 to about 21 in the space of 30 years), but educational evaluations have also become less IQ-orientated (less g-loaded) and more dependent upon the ability of students frequently and punctually to complete neat and regular course work assignments [20] and [21].

However, the modern educational system is not explicitly aware that it is measuring Conscientiousness – the changes have been an accidental by-product of other trends, and there was not a deliberate attempt to enhance Conscientiousness-selectivity as a matter of policy. Because the educational system is blind to the consequences of its own actions, there are counter-pressures to make course work easier and more-interesting and to offer more choices – when in fact it would be a more efficient and accurate measure of Conscientiousness to have students complete compulsory, dull and irrelevant tasks which required a great deal of toil and effort!

However, it may be socially-preferable to have students prove their Conscientiousness in the realm of economic employment rather than by setting them pointless and grinding work in a formal educational context. There are plenty of dull and demanding but necessary jobs, the successful and sufficiently-prolonged accomplishment of which could serve as a valid and accurate reliable signal of Conscientiousness. So it would be more useful for people to prove their level of Conscientiousness in the arena of paid work, than by having this measurement task done by formal educational institutions.

An alternative suggestion for evaluating Conscientiousness comes from Geoffrey Miller, who advocates using broad surveys of opinion from families, peers, employers or any reliable and informed person who is in prolonged social contact with the subject [2].

Conclusions

I have previously written about the extraordinary way in which knowledge of IQ in particular, and psychometrics in general, is ‘hidden in plain sight’ in modern culture [17]. The basic facts about IQ are accessible, abundant and convincing for those who take the trouble to look; but modern mainstream intellectual culture has for around half a decade ‘immunized’ most educated people against looking-at or learning about IQ by multiple forms of misinformation and denigration [22] and [23].

The recent books of Murray and Miller marshal more strongly than before the evidence that one major reason for its taboo status is that IQ knowledge has extremely damaging implications for the vast and expanding system of formal education which employs many intellectuals directly, and which provides almost all other intellectuals with the credentials upon which their status and employability depend. Miller’s phrase is worth repeating: “they do not want their expensive IQ-warranties to suffer competition from cheap, fast IQ tests which would commodify the intelligence-display market and drive down costs” [2].

Murray argues that a properly-demanding 4 year, general and core knowledge-based, ‘liberal arts’ degree would be valuable as a pre-specialization education for the high IQ intellectual elite [1]. Perhaps because I am a product of the (now disappeared) traditional English system of early educational specialization, I am unconvinced about the systematic benefits of general education at a college level. I suspect that the most efficient pattern of higher education would be to specialize at age 16 (or earlier for the highest IQ individuals) on completion of the standard core knowledge program; and that liberal arts should mainly be seen as an avocation (done for reasons of personal fulfilment) rather than a vocation (done as a job).

In other words, a liberal arts education beyond core knowledge could, and perhaps should, be optional and provided by the market, rather than being included in the educational ‘system’. For example, in the UK such an education is universally available without any residential requirement at a reasonable price and high quality via the Open University (www3.open.ac.uk/about).

But in a system where objective IQ and personality evaluations were available as signals of aptitude, it could be left to ‘the market’ to decide whether the possession of a rigorous 4 year general liberal arts degree opened more doors; or attracted any extra premium of status, salary or conditions compared with a specialized, early vocational degree such as medicine, law, architecture, engineering, or one of the sciences. (There would presumably also be some specialist arts and humanities degrees, mainly vocationally-orientated towards training high-level school and college teachers – as was the traditional English practice until about 40 years ago [3].)

In summary, modern societies are currently vastly over-provided with formal education, and this education has the wrong emphasis. In particular, the job of sorting people by their general aptitude could be done more accurately, cheaply and quickly by using psychometrics to measure IQ and Conscientiousness. This would free-up time and energy for early training in key skills such as reading, writing and mathematics; and to focus on a core knowledge curriculum.

However, for reasons related to self-interest, the intellectual class do not want people to know the basic facts about IQ; and since the intellectual class provide the information upon which the rest of society depends for their understanding – consequently most people do not know the basic facts about IQ. And lacking knowledge of IQ, people are not able to understand the education system and what it actually does.

I can point to myself as a prime example of the way in which ignorance of IQ leads to a distorted understanding of education. Before I knew about the basic facts of IQ, I had articulated what seemed to be a rational and coherent set of beliefs about education. But since discovering the facts about IQ several of my convictions have undergone what amounts to a U-turn.

Acknowledgements

“A Farewell to Alms: a brief economic history of the world” by Gregory Clark (Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, USA, 2007) was the book of economic history which first stimulated my (belated) engagement with the scientific literature of intelligence and personality. The web pages of Steve Sailer have since provided both an invaluable introduction and also a higher education in the subject (e.g. www.isteve.com/Articles_IQ.htm).

References

[1] C. Murray, Real education: four simple truths for bringing America’s schools back to reality, Crown Forum, New York (2008).

[2] G. Miller, Spent: sex, evolution and consumer behaviour, Viking, New York (2009).

[3] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, Auditing as a tool of public policy – the misuse of quality assurance techniques in the UK university expansion, Eur Polit Sci 2 (2002), pp. 24–35.

[4] B.G. Charlton, Science as a general education: conceptual science should constitute the compulsory core of multi-disciplinary undergraduate degrees, Med Hypotheses 66 (2006), pp. 451–453.

[5] Charlton BG, Andras P. The educational function and implications for teaching of multi-disciplinary modular (MDM) undergraduate degrees. OxCHEPS Occasional Paper No. 12; 2003. http://oxcheps.new.ox.ac.uk

[6] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, Universities and social progress in modernizing societies: how educational expansion has replaced socialism as an instrument of political reform, CQ (Crit Quart) 47 (2005), pp. 30–39.

[7] N.J. Mackintosh, IQ and human intelligence, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1998).

[8] A.R. Jensen, The g factor: the science of mental ability, Praeger, Westport, CT, USA (1988).

[9] U. Neisser et al., Intelligence: knowns and unknowns, Am Psychol 51 (1996), pp. 77–101.

[10] I.J. Deary, Intelligence: a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2001).

[11] J.R. Harris, The nurture assumption: why children turn out the way they do, Bloomsbury, London (1998).

[12] D. Nettle, Personality: what makes you the way you are, Oxford University Press (2007).

[13] P.T. Costa and R.R. McCrae, Stability and change in personality from adolescence through adulthood. In: C.F. Halverson Jr., G.A. Kohnstamm and R.P. Martin, Editors, The developing structure of temperament and personality from infancy to adulthood, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, USA (1994), pp. 139–150.

[14] G.D. Batty, I.J. Deary and L.S. Gottfredson, Pre-morbid (early life) IQ and later mortality risk: systematic review, Ann Epidemiol 17 (2007), pp. 278–288.

[15] Caplan B. Mixed signals: Why Becker, Cowen, and Kling should reconsider the signaling model of education. . Accessed 06.04.09.


[16] R.J. Herrnstein and C. Murray, The bell curve: intelligence and class structure in American life, Forbes, New York (1994).

[17] B.G. Charlton, Pioneering studies of IQ by G.H. Thomson and J.F. Duff – an example of established knowledge subsequently ‘hidden in plain sight’, Med Hypotheses 71 (2008), pp. 625–628.

[18] L.S. Gottfredson, Implications of cognitive differences for schooling within diverse societies. In: C.L. Frisby and C.R. Reynolds, Editors, Comprehensive handbook of multicultural school psychology, Wiley, New York (2005), pp. 517–554.

[19] Spitz HH. The raising of intelligence: a selected history of attempts to raise retarded intelligence. Hillsdale, NJ, USA: Erlbaum; 1986.

[20] B.G. Charlton, Why are modern scientists so dull? How science selects for perseverance and sociability at the expense of intelligence and creativity, Med Hypotheses 72 (2009), pp. 237–243.

[21] Charlton BG. Sex ratios in the most-selective elite undergraduate US colleges and universities are consistent with the hypothesis that modern educational systems increasingly select for conscientious personality compared with intelligence. Med Hypotheses; in press, doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2009.03.016.

[22] A. Wooldridge, Measuring the mind: education and psychology in England, c.1860–c.1990, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK (1994).

[23] L.S. Gottfredson, Logical fallacies used to dismiss the evidence on intelligence testing. In: R. Phelps, Editor, Correcting fallacies about educational and psychological testing, American Psychological Association, Washington, DC (2009), pp. 11–65.
 
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