Is there such a thing as intelligence?

On dailykos, Nonlinear asks: Is There Such A Thing As Intelligence?

Writing about himself,

As I moved forward in school a pattern began to emerge. I am what is known as a three tier learner. There are subjects in which I express severe learning disabilities. ....Then there is a second tier, subjects where I am right around average. In school this was things like Social Studies, English, Art, Chemistry, Biology, Auto Mechanics, Wood Working, Drafting, Literature and Physics. I was a B student in all these things.

Then there were the things I was gifted in which included  Math, Metal Work, Music and Physical Education. And once I got into an enriched High School you can add Agriculture, Ag Mechanics, Home Ec, Electronics, Plumbing, and Economics. In these I was an A+ student

....
....

But depending which IQ test you administer and how you administer it I go off the conventional scoring table (over 200) or am far below average and profoundly disabled at 69. You can manipulate the test you give me to get a result anywhere in between. The smartest move I have ever made was refusing to allow them to write about me in journals and turn me into a circus freak. I am a human calculator. I honestly can’t understand why people can’t just multiply and divide large numbers in their head. I also calendar calculate. And yes I have been called an Idiot Savant, for a while that was my diagnosis.

But being a freak has lead to me being fascinated by intelligence and how it works. I have come to conclude that there is no such thing as general intelligence. All mental activity is situational. 

Nonlinear then takes up the case of animal whisperers of which he is one to make his point.

American obsession with IQ - v3

I'll conclude this series on IQ with three pages' worth from Scott Barry Kaufman.  Remember he was "classified" at school via IQ test.  His IQ score predicted he was unlikely to finish high school.  This following is about four years after he was so classified.

Continue below the fold.

NNT revised draft

On medium.com, IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

Binet Betrayed

Here's the way Scott Barry Kaufman tells the story of Alfred Binet, the inventor of the modern IQ test.

As the nineteenth century came to an end, business and civic leaders across a number of West European and North American countries united to promote compulsory universal public education.  But this posed a serious problem: how should a diverse population of children be educated?
....
The opportunity of a lifetime {for Binet} came in October 1904, when Joseph Chaumie, the {French} minister of public instruciton, established a commission to create a way to identify students in need of alternative education.....Binet and {Theodore} Simon immediately went to work.
....
Binet and Simon made clear the purpose of their test:

Our purpose is to be able to measure the intellectual capacity of a child who is brought to us in order to know whether he is normal or retarded.  We should, therefore, study his condition at that time and that time only.   We have nothing to do either with his past history or his future; consequently we shall neglect his etiology, and we shall make no attempt to distinguish between acquired and congenital idiocy...we do not attempt to establish or prepare a prognosis and we leave unanswered the question of whether this retardation is curable, or even improbable.   We shall limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth about his present mental state.

....
Along with their test, they also published a number of caveats.  First, they made it clear that their test does not measure a person's absolute level of intelligence.   They warned that their test couldn't possibly offer precise measurement like inches as measured by a ruler.   Instead, a score on their test was simply a classification entirely relative to that of other children of the same age. ....
....
Binet and Simon also acknowledged that many others than intellectual ability could influence performance on their tests, such as the unnaturalness of the testing situation and the potential for the test to intimidate children.   They also mentioned longer term influences, such as background, upbringing, health and effort.   Due to these other potential influences, they stressed the need to compare any person's test results only with those of comparable backgrounds.  Finally, they noted the importance of constant retesting, pointing out that individuals' intellectual development progresses at variable rates, due to different rates of maturation as well as differences in intellectual experiences.
....
It's noteworthy that the Binet-Simon scale never yielded an intelligence quotient (IQ).  In fact, long after Binet's death, Simon indicated that the use of a summary IQ score was a betrayal of the purpose of their test.  While Binet and Simon's purpose was noble, let's be absolutely clear: most people in France just wanted to weed out the intellectually disabled os that the "normal" students would not be slowed down.
....
Alas, Binet's efforts, caveats and cautions were almost completely ignored by the French establishment...Binet and Simon's efforts were wasted in their native France.  Binet personally felt as though he was a failure.

Soon his test would spread like wildfire across the globe-- particularly in America-- and to his horror, his test was used for purposes he never intended.   Toward the very end of his life, in response to statements that children with low test scores would never achieve certain things, he wrote in exasperation: "Never! What a strong word!  A few modern philosphers seem to lend their moral support to the these deplorable verdicts when they assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased.   We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism.  We shall attempt to prove that it is without foundation... With practice, training , and above all method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before."

Binet even developed various "mental orthopedics" -- intellectual exercises -- to show the potential for remediation.  But it was too late.  On October 28, 1911, Binet suffered a stroke and passed away at the young age of 54.   The mass testing movement in America had just begun, with the testing proponents carrying with them a completely different conceptualization of human intelligence.

American obsession with IQ v2

Book-ends:  Perhaps it is karma that a nation obsessed with IQ finally got a President that it deserves - self-proclaimed, not simply smart, "but genius....and a very stable genius at that!"

When our intelligence scales have become more accurate and the laws governing IQ changes have been more definitively established it will then be possible to say that there is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ, except possibly his morals; that the greatest educational problem is to determine the kind of education best suited to each IQ level; that the first concern of a nation should be the average IQ of its citizens, and the eugenic and dysgenic influences which are capable of raising or lowering that level; that the great test problem of democracy is how to adjust itself to the large IQ differences which can be demonstrated to exist among the members of any race or nationality group.  — Lewis M. Terman (1922)

"Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don't feel so stupid or insecure,it's not your fault" (Donald J. Trump, May 8, 2013)

Take that, you libtard!

I hate the impudence of a claim that in fifty minutes you can judge and classify a human being’s predestined fitness in life. I hate the pretentiousness of that claim. I hate the abuse of scientific method which it involves. I hate the sense of superiority which it creates, and the sense of inferiority which it imposes. Walter Lippmann (1923)                

Some definitions of intelligence

Scott Barry Kaufman, in "Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined" has a graphic itself based on J.D. Wasserman "A History of Intelligence Assessment: The Unfinished Tapestry", which is available online. 

Some few tie intelligence to adaptability.  Definitions below the fold.

Genes and IQ

The Scientific American reports a new idea on what triggers Alzheimer's.

This paragraph triggered me, however:

But at start of the 21st century, researchers uncovered a harbinger for GR {gene recombination}. We discovered that DNA sequences vary from cell to cell, meaning that our brains are a vast mosaic of distinct genomes, a phenomenon aptly referred to as “genomic mosaicism.” These changes are distinct from epigenetic changes that do not directly affect DNA sequences. Scientists have now identified multiple sequence changes that are quite varied and seemingly random, consisting—in order of decreasing size—of entire chromosomes (aneuploidies), smaller copy number variations, even smaller LINE1 retrotransposon repeat elements and “single nucleotide variations that alter individual nucleotides.

How genes determine IQ becomes a bit mysterious if "our brains are a vast mosaic of distinct genomes".   One question presumably would be that are these "vast mosaic of distinct genomes in the brain" the same in some statistical sense in identical twins raised together and those raised separately?

America's obsession

Scott Barry Kaufman notes that when David Wechsler came up with his tests (for the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale) around 1939,

"The test publishers were skeptical.  Why take so much time to measure a person's intelligence? This was antithetical to America's obsession with a fast, cheap and efficient way to categorize the totality of a person".

 This leads to the question, why is America so obsessed?  Is it a by-product of the ideology of capitalism?

Scott Barry Kaufman defies his IQ score

This article in The Atlantic, 2013, titled "The Perils of Giving Kids IQ Tests" doesn't say that IQ testing is useless.

We classify learning disabilities because children with dyslexia require very different academic support than children with Asperger's. In order to help these very different children, we must identify and understand their deficits and the resources those children will need. I have sat in on many meetings in which we - teams of psychologists, teachers, parents, learning specialists, and administrators - work to find the ideal combination of resources for kids with learning challenges. I have even recommended intelligence testing for students who, despite their persistence, diligence and effort, are not succeeding in school. I've seen testing lead to real academic and cognitive improvement, thanks to individualized education plans and access to learning resource professionals.

But the article does say that IQ test results are not destiny, via the story of Scott Barry Kaufman.

Kaufman, writing of his experience in Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined. The Truth About Talent, Practice, Creativity, and the Many Paths to Greatness, may have thought he knew what was at stake when he visited that school psychologist for testing, but he would not fully grasp the influence that afternoon of testing would have on the trajectory of his life until much later. The psychologist who tested Kaufman concluded that he had a relatively low IQ, a score low enough to earn him the label "seriously learning disabled."

Kaufman narrates:

After school I dash off to the local library and find a book about human intelligence. I flip through the pages and come face to face with a terrifying chart. At the top is listed the average IQ of PhDs. I am way lower than that number. Tentatively, I go down the list. College graduate? Closer, but still no cigar. My blood pressure is rising. Semiskilled laborer? In my dreams. After some time, I finally find my range: "Lucky to graduate high school," it says.

 But Kaufman "ripped up his label, held on tight to his growth mindset and his well-honed skills of grit, diligence, and persistence, and rode that potential all the way to a Ph.D from Yale."

---
So that makes three - Feynman,  Boyd and Kaufman.  But how many children have fallen victim to IQ humbug?

Cosmo Shalizi takes on IQ

IQ

Because You Really Wished I'd Write More About Books

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, August 2008

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, June 2008

Last Words on Saletan

Reading Skills

In Which I Demand That Slate Refund My Subscription

Uncle Fritz Explains How It Feels to Argue about Intelligence Tests

g, a Statistical Myth

Yet More on the Heritability and Malleability of IQ

Those Voices Again

...In Different Voices

On the Superiority of Sociology to String Theory

PS:

Q: So the analogy suggests that IQ scores are...?

A: A proxy for the skills and habits encouraged by a bureaucratic society; skills and habits which can be at once highly heritable (because of strong transmission through family and neighbors) and highly learned (within the scope of what it is biologically possible for humans to learn and internalize). Innate ability needn't enter into it at all. The implications for democracy would be nearly nil.

Q: And the famous g?

A: Is a statistical artifact, or better yet a myth; but that is another story for another time.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb tweets about IQ

The twitter thread is here.  Please refer to the thread on twitter for full detail.

FYI: IYI = The IYI class: Intellectual-Yet-Idiot
One of the key take aways: "the only robust measure of "rationality" & "intelligence" is survival, avoidance of ruin/left tail/absorbing barrier, (ergodicity). Nothing that does not account for ability to survive counts as a measure of "intelligence".

Sorry for the poor formatting.  Will try to fix.

PS: Also found this:

“I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George
W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.”

― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

"IQ" THREAD

"IQ" measures an inferior form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects, meant to select paper shufflers, obedient IYIs.

IQ humbug

The weekly email from "Learning How to Learn" contained this:

Book of the Year

Our very favorite, most highly recommended book this year is Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. This book ranks among our favorite biographies ever. Boyd was a genius level iconoclast (with a measured IQ of 90), and a rebel of the first order, who changed the military’s approach to war and saved countless lives while he was at it. Boyd took on idiocy where ever he found it, whether with bombastic Pentagon generals who were happy to fake important tests, or those who thought they could outgun him in the air. Boyd was so witty, engaging, and fearless in tackling new approaches, and the research behind this extraordinary biography is so artfully done, that it’s a “can’t miss” book for anyone who loves rebels and reading. OODA away!

The highlighted phrase caught my eye.  Wiki has an extensive article on Boyd; but (without reading the book), the best I can do is from a review of this book:

Coram pushes on quickly through Boyd's early school years, covering seemingly inconsequential tidbits such as Boyd's being gifted in math but being pegged with an IQ of only 90. Although the test was suspect, Boyd refused to retake the test and later Boyd used this score to humiliate those who challenged him in a battle of wits.
...
...

USA: Is a Bachelor's degree the new IQ test?

People like to point to IQ as a predictor of success (often based on studies done in the US military)  often failing to note that the IQ test serves as the filter at the very entry into the career.

Now, it seems that the Bachelor's Degree is serving a similar role, per my reading of this article in The Atlantic.

The employers who can’t seem to fill the United States’s roughly 6 million vacant jobs are at a loss for what to do. Qualified candidates are seemingly nowhere to be found.

More indications that g is a myth

One indication that Spearman's g (upon which IQ is based) is an artifact of positive correlations among various intelligence test measures than a real thing is that there are subpopulations among which these measures do not correlate in the same way as among the general public.

An example is here: (note, my interpretation of their findings):

Psychol Sci. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 Jan 8.

Published in final edited form as:

Psychol Sci. 2007 Aug; 18(8): 657–662.

doi:  10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01954.x

PMCID: PMC4287210

NIHMSID: NIHMS653064

The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence

Michelle Dawson,¹ Isabelle Soulières,^1,2 Morton Ann Gernsbacher,³ and Laurent Mottron^1,2

To quote:

For example, no autistic child scored in the “high intelligence” range on the WISC-III, whereas a third of the autistic children scored at or above the 90th percentile on the Raven’s Matrices. Only a minority of the autistic children scored in the “average intelligence” range or higher on the WISC-III, whereas the majority scored at or above the 50th percentile on the Raven’s Matrices. Whereas a third of the autistic children would be called “low functioning” (i.e., in the range of mental retardation) according to the WISC-III, only 5% would be so judged according to the Raven’s Matrices.

In striking contrast to the autistic children, the nonautistic control children did not show a significant difference between their Raven’s Matrices scores and their WISC-III Full Scale, Verbal Scale, or Performance Scale scores .

So, if there was a real thing X corresponding to Spearman's g that represented the intelligence of a human brain, then the general positive correlation in the general population between WISC and Raven's Matrices is not measuring this thing X.  But it is these kinds of positive correlations among the various tests' results that is supposed to be measuring this real thing that is approximated by Spearman's g.

g - a Statistical Myth

A nice essay from 2007.

One of the best parts: "How to make 2766 independent abilities look like one g factor".

The meaning of "smart"

neuroguy on dailykos, in an article that argues that Dr. Ben Carson is not smart, gives this description of  smart that I want to preserve:

“Smart” is a multifaceted cognitive feature composed of excellent analytical skills, possession of an extensive knowledge base that is easily and frequently augmented, possession of a good memory, and being readily curious about the world and willing, even eager, to reject previously accepted notions in the face of new data. Being smart includes having the ability to analyze new data for validity and, thinking creatively, draw new insights from existing common knowledge.

What IQ Tests Test

This paper (PDF) by Ken Richardson is worth a read.

My favorite passage:

Intelligence and how to get it

From CIP's blog I learned of R.E. Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It.  The library had a copy. I'm still in the thick of it.  Of course, I like it because it confirms all my prejudices.   Nisbett makes out a strong case that almost all population differences in IQ can be explained by environmental and developmental differences, and has little to do with genes.  "Can be explained" is different from "is explained" but then that is about as far as we can get with the "soft" sciences.

One of the strongest indications that IQ is mutable and not genetically determined is the IQ increase observed in different cohorts of the same population.  This is known as the Flynn effect. IQ tests are normed for a cohort, i.e., by definition, the 21-25 age group of white Americans have a normally distributed IQ with a mean IQ of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, and by definition the 45-49 age group of white Americans had the same distribution when they were 21-25.  But since the two groups  might have done exactly the same test, it is possible to compare absolute scores on the test, and by that token today's 21-25 year olds are significantly IQ-smarter than the 45-49 age group was at the same age. 

The good news is that IQ can be developed - by better parenting, better teaching methods at school, better environments for children to grow up in, and so on.

The bad news is that IQ is, IMO, somewhat meaningless.  Note the Flynn effect mentioned above. Such has been the increase in IQ raw test scores that by today's standards, the great-grandparents of today's young adult were barely intelligent enough (in IQ terms) to deal with the world. Since that is absurd, it is more likely that people have become much more proficient at taking tests.  IQ in my opinion, is like rank in a school classroom.  It has some predictive properties; is difficult to compare class ranks across a generation or even sometimes across schools.

The bad news also is that for a country like the US, improving the IQ of the population will take some heavy lifting.  Devising effective programs is difficult. For a country like India with a long way to go with respect to literacy, school enrollment, public health, nutrition, etc., big gains in the IQ of the general population are possible because effective programs to remedy these problems can be devised (e.g., simply increase the measures that contribute to the Human Development Index).   If we assume that IQ measures some quality that is of value in coping with the world, then IQ development is essential for the welfare of the people.