RadixJournal - IQ and People Who Don't Think Good

00:00:00.000 ed welcome back how are you hello yes i'm okay yes i just went on a

00:00:24.720 a uh a retke they call it in finland a a walk in the forest where we then had a fire

00:00:32.180 with some family friends and uh cooked finnish sausages uh in celebration of my godson's 10th

00:00:39.980 birthday and um and yes and then went to a very gothic kind of scary wicker man looking bird

00:00:46.240 watching tower and uh looked out over the sea because all the birds have migrated although

00:00:51.160 i did see some swans flying overhead on the way home but um otherwise yes that's that was that

00:00:56.580 was today oh i went swimming with my son what have you been doing today well you just got up haven't

00:01:01.440 you i just woke up uh yes and i was uh working on some uh stuff i was drafting some kind of bigger

00:01:09.580 stuff i want to work on and i'm actually pretty pleased with what i drafted so i don't want to

00:01:13.840 tell anyone about it though no keep it keep it close to your chest for now yes i would say that

00:01:19.500 yeah no but you know there's something about magical about fires in the woods

00:01:23.020 it connect reconnects us yes reconnects us i was i was thinking when i was there

00:01:28.780 there's just something about it yeah the people of calaballa would have been doing that

00:01:33.540 yeah and uh and then my finnish friend was telling me that there were these

00:01:37.940 fins that migrated to america in the 19th century and ended up living on native american reservations

00:01:43.920 and known as findians and they have heard of that actually no i hadn't heard of it and these

00:01:49.040 native americans i don't know i think it's somewhere in michigan uh have maintained finnish

00:01:52.820 folk songs and sauna there's a tribe of finnish influenced native americans somewhere in michigan

00:01:59.580 so um now so connecting to the ancestors and also to the native americans that's what we were doing

00:02:06.560 today yeah yeah by by circuitous method yes all right um so i wanted to talk about iq

00:02:18.240 and uh i thought we could accomplish a couple of things here um first off because i follow your

00:02:26.520 work and jolly heretic and so on and i'm you know we're finishing up your book that includes a big

00:02:32.700 chapter in iq that um i thought i thought we could give an introduction to our viewers and listeners on

00:02:41.660 this subject on intelligence g etc uh but also again because i follow your work i've noticed that

00:02:48.640 there seems to have been a little renaissance of iq uh charitably call it criticism or denial

00:02:58.840 and and i i would say this i think there actually are a lot of good critiques you could make of

00:03:05.940 iq and and uh quantifying and psychometrics quantifying intelligence i think that's fine

00:03:11.680 to criticize it um but there seems to be a renaissance of what might be properly called

00:03:17.480 denial and uh i was reading some nasim talib recently and uh he's a he's a man who actually

00:03:27.320 has said many things that i agree with and um kind of an interesting uh public intellectual

00:03:34.460 on finance and culture and society but uh when i was reading uh his critique of intelligence i could

00:03:42.800 not make heads or tails of it uh to be frank that's not to be that's not surprising i mean i did i did do

00:03:51.380 a live stream a few weeks ago on on the jolly heretic on um uh on on on his uh critique of iq and

00:04:00.540 the thing is that i he he does seem to be to be i think it's reasonably charitable to him he does

00:04:06.360 seem to have some intelligent things to say about other things so i was looking at i was i was looking

00:04:10.920 to an interview that he did about religion so my immediate reaction when i read because people who

00:04:15.040 uh people were telling me i should read his essay iq is largely a scientific swindle

00:04:20.200 and um my immediate reaction was to think myself good god if he writes things like this then how could

00:04:25.140 you take him seriously on anything but perhaps it is the case that he is an intelligent and thoughtful

00:04:29.800 scholar but he just for some reason um has a particular blind spot on this subject and for

00:04:35.040 his own personal emotional reasons he just doesn't like it um and so if you say you can't make head

00:04:41.640 nor tail of it well that's kind of the point if a person doesn't like something for their own

00:04:46.020 emotional reasons um then there's no logical way of persuading people that it's uh it's not that

00:04:51.860 the concept is not credible and so the way you have to do so is through emotionally manipulative

00:04:56.260 means um through all kinds of fallacious arguments through verbiage through through appeal to sort of

00:05:03.360 sort of loquaciousness and uh uh lots and lots of big words and whatever obscuritism and basically trying

00:05:11.060 to back the reader down to persuade them that they're in the presence of a profound mind and that they

00:05:16.020 should accept what that profound mind has to say uh just lots of jargon and so it it follows that it

00:05:21.840 shouldn't make any sense and it doesn't make any sense i mean if you look at the way he he expresses

00:05:25.720 himself in the language he uses it's very very uh iq is a scale a stale test so that's appeal to

00:05:32.040 insult meant to measure mental capacity but in fact measures mostly extreme unintelligence in bold

00:05:37.280 learning difficulties as well as to a certain extent with a lot of noise uh a form of intelligence

00:05:41.920 so you've got these very long sentences these meandering sentences in which you're meant to get lost so

00:05:47.140 that you feel confused and feel stupid and all this kind of thing he then associated racists

00:05:51.240 and eugenicists he goes on about um and it's it's not meant to make sense that's not the point of it

00:05:57.200 it's meant to be obscure it's meant to be an appeal to verbosity and all of these techniques in order to

00:06:02.920 um emotionally persuade you that the profound thing to do is to think that iq is nonsense and if you

00:06:08.920 distill it down to its actual truth claims then there is a a researcher young fellow from denmark called

00:06:16.940 jonathan pallison who i've met um and uh he's the geneticist and and he's gone through every single

00:06:22.720 claim that has been made but in that article by uh uh taleb one by one and showing them all to be bogus

00:06:29.660 so i'm i i think it makes it is understandable that you're not meant it's not meant to make sense

00:06:35.900 right yes if i were to write something on jazz music or something i might do the same

00:06:42.620 you know utilize the same tricks and lots of verbosity and uh basically appeal to uh moral

00:06:50.020 shaming and so on in order to convince people that jazz music is it's not good

00:06:54.400 let's uh uh let's go back to that issue because this is the issue that really bothers everyone

00:07:06.120 and when the bell curve was released um i guess it's 30 years ago now or um it's really uh 1994 i believe

00:07:15.460 um uh or thereabouts and um the argument is that this is a justification for uh eugenics and colonialism

00:07:26.940 uh maybe also classism uh although i i guess that has a certain bit of truth when we're talking about

00:07:34.860 murray and hernstein um but what i have discovered by looking at just the the history of psychometrics

00:07:43.540 is that actually the opposite is the case um in just as many incidents as um it is a tool of capitalist

00:07:54.380 or a tool of eugenicist uh or so on uh that the so it was it was basically binet in france who

00:08:04.300 developed the first iq test uh am i correct on that oh well yeah i suppose the first yeah the first

00:08:10.800 yeah first sort of commonly recognized one yeah right let's talk about the history of the iq test

00:08:16.160 and then we'll kind of let that lead us into intelligence um so the challenge at the turn of

00:08:23.260 the 20th century was that we were moving to a so-called meritocratic classless society and that

00:08:32.160 there had to be at some level some kind of standard for assessing national populations in order to

00:08:40.200 bring them into universities or i guess in the in the case of the iq test in the united states

00:08:45.840 it was used um uh tremendously by the army uh during the first world war we have a huge you know pile of

00:08:56.200 data that emerged from that um but there the other what i also looked at you know kind of researching

00:09:03.780 this uh is that the sat too had kind of an egalitarian vibe about it because if you think

00:09:13.520 about how it used to be that you in england for example how it used to be that you would you would

00:09:17.880 become an officer in the army you became an officer in the army for much of the 19th century by

00:09:23.020 having the right connections uh or literally by purchasing a commission that's how you became

00:09:28.820 an officer in the army and it was and therefore you get all kinds of upper class incompetence that

00:09:33.320 would the second sons or whatever that weren't going to inherit the land that would their fathers

00:09:37.740 would purchase them a commission in the army and they would do stupid things so it was clearly

00:09:41.700 egalitarian perspective if you accept that intelligence is a real thing and has real consequences

00:09:47.740 which it clearly does um i mean we can look at that if you have you want and if you accept the

00:09:54.380 iq measures intelligence which it clearly does then the egalitarian thing to do is just to say okay

00:10:00.140 well we're going to assess how clever you are by how well you do at school and there's all kinds of

00:10:05.220 variation in the the nature of the school you go to and all this sort of thing in world war one if

00:10:09.800 you had been to a public school that is to say a very prestigious private school like eden or harrow

00:10:13.940 then they would automatically make you an officer um and the iq test gets around that by

00:10:19.880 obviating that problem to a certain extent and assessing your intelligence your raw intelligence

00:10:26.860 independent of these cultural factors and it's true that yes the early iq tests were culturally biased

00:10:33.420 uh because they would ask questions which working class people wouldn't be expected to know

00:10:37.500 or the people that work in class would have less exposure to vocabulary and books and they'd have

00:10:42.060 a lower vocabulary so they'd do less well in the vocabulary component of the iq test and so the

00:10:47.100 way they got round that was by gradually honing the iq test so that it was more and more and more g

00:10:51.480 loaded more and more tapping in to the essence of intelligence and was less and less and less

00:10:56.020 culturally biased um and interestingly what you find is then the prediction becomes oh well

00:11:01.060 certain races are going to do badly on these tests because they're culturally biased or certain classes

00:11:05.760 will do badly because they're culturally biased in fact the opposite is true um these people do the

00:11:10.980 best on the most culturally biased components of the test and the worst on the least culturally biased

00:11:17.580 components because there is a relationship between for example socioeconomic status of origin of origin

00:11:23.820 um and and uh and how intelligent you are but still it it's it's egalitarian in the sense that it allows

00:11:31.240 for example for children who are born to working class families sit not in england sit an iq test at the

00:11:36.140 age of 11 now okay you can debate whether 11's the right age because uh the older you get then the

00:11:41.700 more the heritability of your intelligence sort of comes through and also you get late developers so

00:11:46.880 11 might be too young maybe they should sit at 14 but they sit this at this test at 11 and um and it's

00:11:52.740 an iq test and it predicts and and on that basis they got the cleverer ones gets would go to grammar

00:11:58.040 school and then you would find all of these people that were the products of grammar school but were

00:12:01.720 from modest backgrounds like margaret thatcher and enoch powell and jim callaghan and howard wilson

00:12:07.720 all these prime ministers uh and people like that in the 20th century and now that's they got rid of

00:12:12.040 the grammar schools and now that's gone that method of social mobility is gone and we have a situation

00:12:17.160 now in britain where all three of the party leaders have been to private schools um they were all

00:12:22.620 photographed together at some stupid party a couple of the ones that were photographed together when

00:12:30.600 they were at oxford yeah that's right yeah so the the iq test is um much maligned people don't like it

00:12:38.160 for their own personal and emotional reasons they don't like it because they don't like the idea that

00:12:42.100 people are unequal people are unequal they don't like it because they don't if people weren't unequal

00:12:47.480 them if you were in an airplane and that airplane was crashing um and you both the pilots were dead

00:12:53.800 and there was no trained pilot on board then you would just pick someone at random and say okay go and

00:12:59.280 pilot the plane if that wasn't the case then you would want someone that was more intelligent

00:13:03.060 to go and pilot the plane of course you would of course we would expect a person who is a

00:13:07.620 either a qualified engineer or doctor or something to be able to work out more quickly what they have to

00:13:12.320 do um and so so it's uh it's just pretentious nonsense so there's no such thing as intelligence

00:13:18.420 this intelligence is composed for people of our viewers that aren't familiar with it you have these um

00:13:23.900 you can think of it as a kind of pyramid at the bottom of the pyramid you have all these these

00:13:28.840 little abilities we call them intelligence abilities thing tying your shoelaces and learning

00:13:34.160 to drive a car and whatever yeah um which very weakly are associated with intelligence but are

00:13:39.560 also predicted by other things above that you have the three main kinds that we're familiar with

00:13:43.880 verbal intelligence spatial intelligence mathematical intelligence and they all intercorrelate although

00:13:48.340 you get some that are higher in one than the other or whatever and above that you have the thing

00:13:52.840 that underpins them all which is g general intelligence the heritability of this is very high it's

00:13:58.120 about 0.8 heritability basically about 80 to do with genes so it's overwhelmingly inherited though

00:14:05.360 there's a 20 environmental component which is to do with the how intellectually stimulating your

00:14:11.900 environment is mainly things like that which is why that her the heritability of intelligence is quite

00:14:16.520 low in childhood it's about 0.2 because the environment is created by your parents and they might be

00:14:22.340 cleverer or stupider than you but as you grow older you create your own environment which is reflective of

00:14:27.520 your own innate iq and therefore the genes come through and we have by adulthood 0.8 uh heritability

00:14:34.840 though there is a variation um and it predicts i mean how well you how intelligent you are predict

00:14:41.320 and is how well you do an iq test as a measure of this uh predicts so so first of all iq tests are

00:14:47.460 they measuring intelligence well they correlate strongly with other intuitive measures of intelligence

00:14:52.300 such as how well you do in school exams or how quickly you catch on to things or what we mean by

00:14:58.680 intelligence is the ability to solve problems and solve them quickly so yes they are measuring it

00:15:03.540 because they correlate strongly with other measures of the same thing and then they also the iq test scores

00:15:09.040 correlate significantly and robustly with numerous uh this is a book i did add on wit's end i mean

00:15:15.200 this is the same table that i'm consulting here is in the book that i'm uh where uh washington summit's

00:15:20.480 about to publish on on race um it correlates with achievement motivation with altruism with analytic

00:15:26.660 star with how artistic you are with how creative you are with being healthy educational attainment

00:15:32.320 emotional sensitivity height sense of humor uh linguistic abilities motor skills and also it correlates

00:15:39.960 negatively with criminality and so it's clearly important in all cultures and it correlates with

00:15:44.840 objective things such as reaction times how fast your reaction time correlates with it says objective

00:15:50.800 thing correlates with brain size this is an objective thing so um and then people say well there's other

00:15:57.700 kinds of intelligence like emotional intelligence and things like that but that actually correlates at

00:16:02.800 point that's like solving social problems or empathizing with other people but that actually

00:16:07.360 correlates at point three with g so it's basically just a manifestation of the same thing so i can see

00:16:14.180 no good arguments whatsoever against against intelligence like i go through them all in this book and i go

00:16:20.460 through them all in the book that we're about to publish and what it ultimately seems to come down to

00:16:24.980 the the argument is you know there's different kinds of intelligence well that can be dealt that can be

00:16:28.960 that can be uh uh dealt with um that there's uh uh it tells me different things in different cultures no it

00:16:36.680 doesn't um we're talking about the solving cognitive problems that's the same everywhere um uh we don't

00:16:43.420 know what the genes behind intelligence we're just speculating well that's no argument we didn't know

00:16:47.620 what genes were until the sort of the you know 150 70 years ago so that's really no argument at all um

00:16:56.100 that intelligence is a very western concept is one that i've heard well a no it isn't there are similar

00:17:01.820 terms in all kinds of societies b we only started using the word intelligence in the way we now use

00:17:07.660 it about 1912 does that mean we can't talk about people before 1912 being intelligent or not

00:17:13.180 intelligent i mean do we have to and and c do we have to use the concept of the society if that's the

00:17:19.000 case should we not be able to talk about things happening in france in english i mean it's insane

00:17:23.160 and the final argument intelligence makes you feel uncomfortable it's very dangerous well

00:17:28.200 the counter argument to that is whether you feel uncomfortable so what basically and um

00:17:33.600 as it's very dangerous you could similarly argue that denying it is very dangerous because if you

00:17:38.680 deny that the intelligence differences exist then you're going to just appoint people to jobs at

00:17:42.600 random and we know from the past when well they weren't appointed at random but they were appointed

00:17:47.560 according to their social class that that can have bad consequences so there's no argument and the

00:17:52.900 thing that talib presented was a series of different arguments as i say and we can look at them if you

00:17:57.340 want but they're all wrong we don't have to i i want to talk more about the subject a little bit you

00:18:03.660 you just put forth a very uh very good uh summation of these things and i kind of want to go into all of

00:18:10.480 those um points uh in the american context there was a similar class system uh with basically east coast

00:18:19.060 prep schools being feeders to the ivy leagues and so on and i believe i'm i'm forgetting his name i believe

00:18:25.720 it starts with a b but um one of the presidents of harvard was enthusiastic about the sat as a pure

00:18:32.480 intelligence test and it had the motive of finding very smart people in nebraska say uh or texas or

00:18:41.100 wyoming who would otherwise not be going to harvard or princeton uh or yale and they're actually if there is

00:18:49.640 a form of affirmative action that still that still exists and that kind of supports white people

00:18:56.900 uh it is that you are more likely to get into a top tier school coming out of montana than you are

00:19:05.520 coming out of uh new york or new jersey uh so there there actually is a little bit of that legacy

00:19:12.080 uh but again it was part of uh attempting to create a meritocratic society but then i i think

00:19:20.320 that's kind of where the controversy comes in because we have all of these people the iq deniers

00:19:27.400 are um credentialist kind of meritocratic snobs in a way like they're you know you don't get a lot

00:19:36.560 of iq denial from people who work at the lumberyard or the gas station they kind of say oh yeah he's

00:19:43.980 really smart he's good at he's good at this kind of stuff like that that's a pretty clear concept for

00:19:49.120 them uh where you get the uh iq denial is kind of ironically among these credentialist people who have

00:19:56.700 uh you know degrees from fancy places and who have basically lived their whole life on the basis of

00:20:03.060 the triumph of the resume uh so it's fairly ironic and you have to ask them like is there

00:20:09.960 you know there must be some do you believe in something like intelligence do you believe that

00:20:15.880 you are you are smarter than uh some other person who is not in your position uh whether as a public

00:20:24.100 intellectual or academic uh or so on and uh i think they would ultimately say yes they don't want to

00:20:32.200 see themselves as just the beneficiaries of class privilege or something like this so the question

00:20:37.700 is there there has to if there is this intelligence out there g um and however kind of multivariate it

00:20:45.520 might be there must be a way in which intelligence is expressed in some in some way whether it's a test

00:20:53.600 whether it's a painting a painting whether it's organizing your sock drawer or whether it's coaching

00:21:00.980 a football team or whatever there there has to be a a means of intelligence being expressed in the

00:21:08.900 world and it's kind of curious that they they accept that in all other fields however when it comes to

00:21:15.900 one test they want to deny it no it's it's it's interesting that that's that's the case and it makes

00:21:22.980 it kind of makes sense that it's the case because of course you it's the fact that it's the fact that

00:21:27.180 the iq test um very clearly uh uh rank orders people in terms of sort of a number then so does

00:21:35.760 so do school exams those school exams also do this but with school exams they kind of say oh well the

00:21:41.440 difference is the person's intelligent really but it's just because they didn't have the opportunity

00:21:45.100 or whatever you know but with but with the thing is with iq test is that they they take away these

00:21:50.120 excuses what they are what they are okay there's there's differences you do get some people that are just

00:21:55.060 that can be intelligent but can be bad iq test it's just rare um but what they what they have

00:21:59.800 basically imbibed is is this as as the people that are the most intelligent uh this correlates with

00:22:05.200 being uh conformist basically with socially being socially conformist um with wanting to um uh

00:22:10.860 manipulate having the ability and the self-control and the effortful control to force yourself to think

00:22:16.860 in a way that that is the most conducive to uh rising up and staying at the top of the social

00:22:22.840 hierarchy right that's why people that are highly that are intelligent not necessarily highly intelligent

00:22:27.300 people that intelligence predicts um conforming to the dominant worldview um and being able to

00:22:35.760 see what the dominant worldview is understanding the benefits of conforming to it having the self-control

00:22:42.580 to basically lie to yourself and force yourself to conform to it uh and and then so um competing

00:22:48.980 in a status hierarchy within that conformity by pushing it a little bit more you know in the in

00:22:55.540 the in the socially appropriate direction and that's how you get these uh these slippery slopes whereby

00:23:00.260 things get pushed in never more sort of left-wing anti-intelligence anti-iq direction whereas people

00:23:05.360 that are less intelligent are the people you refer to working in the lumber yard they're not like this

00:23:09.920 at all and so i think this helps to explain why it is that it's the one thing that lower iq people

00:23:15.940 get right empirically more than higher is the issue of intelligence because the issue of intelligence

00:23:22.020 is wrapped up in this in this current equalitarianism ideology which the less intelligent people are less

00:23:29.040 perceptive of uh less able to understand less willing to embrace um and so that therefore that's the one

00:23:35.600 thing that intelligence is uh negatively associated this one truth that intelligence is negatively associated

00:23:42.520 with accepting so that's what i think why people that are more intelligent tend to ironically reject

00:23:47.440 intelligence i suppose another reason as you say the triumph of the resume i like that that could

00:23:52.220 be relevant in so much as iq the the way they've got where they are is through working hard at school

00:23:58.200 and all this kind of thing and so the way they see it is that they deserve it because they say that

00:24:02.740 they're credentialists they're not just often these people that are of that social class not just

00:24:07.080 intelligent they're high in conscientiousness they're high in uh to a certain extent agreeableness

00:24:12.320 um and so and they everything to do with them it's rule for you the way you get somewhere in life they

00:24:18.560 can't think in an original way because they're rule bound they're rule following they're uncreative

00:24:24.420 they're conformist and that kind of way of being allows you to get on in a world that is technocratic

00:24:31.260 that as you say the triumph of the resume that is credentialist and so what's scary for people like

00:24:38.000 that is the idea that somebody could be completely the opposite kind of personality that basically high

00:24:43.080 in psychopathic traits and mega intelligent yes and and and that person i you know that non-midwit

00:24:49.860 type person that genius type person they are like the head girl these kinds of people these are the

00:24:56.280 kind of male geniuses that are the opposite can kind of get around their whole their whole system

00:25:00.960 their whole system of diligence and all this stuff and come up with some kind of brilliant idea and

00:25:05.960 they can't comprehend people like that because they can't think creatively as far as they're concerned

00:25:11.040 do you know about science if you know about science you must have a degree in science and about a

00:25:16.980 master's in science or a doctorate in science it's impossible for somebody who has no qualifications in

00:25:21.800 science who left school at 15 and got a job working in a lumberyard and just reads about science on the

00:25:26.840 internet in their spare time it's impossible for them to make any contribution of originality to science

00:25:31.420 right and they i remember a debate uh and i and i'm not saying this to defend uh sam harris who's

00:25:40.480 the famous atheist um but i i am not a defender of his ideas but he was in this debate with uh this

00:25:47.480 man named reza aslan uh about um basic i think it was about muslims and uh genital mutilation um and

00:25:56.360 terrorism or something and he was just kind of laying out some facts and although i'm not a

00:26:01.420 sam harris fan i i'm not going to dispute his facts um and reza his basically his counter argument

00:26:09.960 was i have a degree in muslim studies so i understand the context of what you're talking

00:26:18.520 about and then he just stopped talking and went off into another subject so it's it's just this like

00:26:23.600 waving a degree in front of someone's face and it's a it's it's obviously it's appeal it's the

00:26:30.000 appeal it's no it's a obvious authority yeah obvious policy appeal to authority and so maybe

00:26:35.520 his degree should be withdrawn because he's obviously shouldn't have got it because he

00:26:38.560 doesn't understand basic logic i think ironically he doesn't have a degree he has a degree in creative

00:26:43.520 writing or some weird thing that's regardless i heard i heard a case of a friend of mine who was a

00:26:48.360 chef uh and that friend uh is uh very well read he's quite sort of well read and interested in

00:26:54.920 things quite open-minded and you know and he was arguing with somebody and some friend of his

00:26:59.420 turned around and said why how do you know about this you're only a chef and i'm like right shut up

00:27:03.880 so what so what and and so but that but that's how they see the world they see the world in terms of

00:27:09.720 the the fins kind of in mind you see things a bit like this compared to the english it's it's

00:27:13.520 credentials and so and so this is worrying but they can't understand these people and also it's

00:27:18.760 worrying it's kind of almost undermines what makes what gives them what they have um you could just

00:27:24.860 cut away all that and you could and just say um well i don't care what qualifications you've got i

00:27:29.700 don't i don't give a damn sit an iq test and i'll assess you accordingly i'll deal with you well you get

00:27:34.060 it as well because you have a you actually have a degree in religious studies and you've although you

00:27:39.240 talk about religion quite a bit and i'm and i'm sure your background in that helps you think about

00:27:43.640 these issues uh you have moved on into other fields and that that's what that's what people

00:27:49.320 that are i mean i don't know about me but that's what in general as a rule that's what people that

00:27:52.620 are reasonably creative do they they see what do you have a degree in english literature or something

00:27:59.240 yeah i've studied english literature and philosophy and and and so on but um yes right so but people

00:28:06.200 you know you talk about other things people are talking about physics last night yeah i wouldn't

00:28:11.580 talk about that would be a bit above my head but but but i certainly couldn't talk about computer

00:28:17.560 science but but certainly i don't do that either no you see the connection if you're creative what

00:28:23.800 original ideas manifest any any level of originality at all even any is that you see the connections

00:28:30.600 between different things exactly domains and that's how you come up with something new

00:28:35.800 and these people that are highly these credentialists the they are the they are um

00:28:41.740 they're incrementalists they can't really see the connection between different things they don't come

00:28:46.880 up with new they don't think like that it's like boom boom boom boom in this kind of intuitive way

00:28:50.620 where you see yeah it's it's it's i'll do this and i'll add a little bit on the end yeah and that's

00:28:56.340 how and so they find these people and therefore in that sense intelligence um could be seen as um

00:29:01.360 as threatening and also i suppose you could argue that yeah what they are they are a manifestation

00:29:06.540 often these kinds of people of class of class privilege they've got where they've got not

00:29:10.520 through doing well in intelligence tests because that means of getting into a high social status

00:29:16.380 situation has gradually declined now in england um for example uh you know past new 11 plus or

00:29:22.420 whatever that's that's gone um they've got there often through just privilege but i think the main

00:29:27.980 the main thing is is it's just ideological you're more intelligent and you you signal you want to

00:29:32.720 signal your intelligence how do you signal your intelligence by seeming profound how do you seem

00:29:38.040 profound you you you you don't adopt you don't hold things which are considered old-fashioned what is

00:29:44.740 considered old-fashioned intelligence testing and it's not just old-fashioned it's considered

00:29:49.040 immoral in some way and not very nice and you want to signal that you're left-wing and kind

00:29:53.880 in the qualitarium and so you can signal all those things and also the obscurity of it that they'll

00:29:59.220 say is like oh what do we mean by intelligence how do you define intelligence where do you draw the

00:30:03.940 um and so it's sort of pseudo profundity which you can signal by doubting intelligence and iq and so

00:30:10.220 that's what they that's what they do but intelligence is at some basic level problem solving uh it was a

00:30:17.440 you know our ancestors um you know 10 000 years ago uh they were uh caught in some uh they fell down in

00:30:27.760 the forest and they broke their leg and they had to figure out how to get out and that is a problem

00:30:33.780 solving where that's literally life or death and the smart ones figured out a way to get out of there

00:30:40.520 maybe through medical advances maybe through somehow signaling someone to come help them maybe somehow

00:30:46.440 hunting in a clever way that they could do even though they were injured so they could eat and

00:30:50.460 survive another day that is the intelligence test precisely but they all they also evolved other traits

00:30:56.700 such as the desire to conform socially such as uh and and it's the conflict between these which is why

00:31:03.180 you get this right people are up for intelligence are the ones that just are people that believe it

00:31:08.020 are into it in my experience of doing research with these kinds of people are basically highly intelligent

00:31:13.560 autistics and what they're interested in is the truth and that's it and systematizing and that's

00:31:18.920 it whereas the people that are going to deny it are more the kind of humanities types they're less

00:31:23.600 intelligent um firstly but secondly they're less kind of autistic they're higher in sort of social

00:31:29.760 skill and let's go let's go into this so intelligence co-evolved let's say it co-evolves

00:31:37.380 with other mental traits that are valuable um like empathy uh like uh which is kind of like i the way

00:31:48.480 you described it which i i found insightful was the theory of mind where you can kind of understand

00:31:53.660 what someone else is thinking you can put yourself in their shoes uh cooperation uh rule following and

00:32:00.940 so on that these are these are things that kind of are related to intelligence they're not quite

00:32:06.340 intelligence uh but that they they co-evolved together to create a more cooperative and group

00:32:14.500 oriented society and so what we're talking about with a midwit and we're you know maybe we shouldn't

00:32:20.360 even say midwit as someone with 100 iq like joe average those people are sometimes more maybe

00:32:25.920 redeemable uh they're watching football yeah the midwit is almost the guy with 115 yeah that's worse

00:32:34.320 yeah he's not as smart as he thinks he is uh but uh they uh they they also have a lot of those

00:32:43.880 generally positive social traits i mean you cannot have a functioning society with a bunch of geniuses

00:32:51.500 if everyone had i mean this is this is the kind of limit of iq you could say uh if everyone had a 140

00:32:57.980 iq uh no one i mean who would clean the roads who would build the houses who would make the food

00:33:05.140 who would pick the crops i mean it's we would all be sitting around you know contemplating the heavenly

00:33:11.080 spheres and nothing would get done and so it actually is a bit of a problem i'm not 100 sure about that

00:33:17.940 because you could you could have an iq of 104 yeah kind of you're right i mean as you as the iq gets higher

00:33:23.280 there's some evidence that autistic treats become higher as iq gets higher there is some evidence

00:33:27.920 that openness becomes higher that's true yeah you're an ambition for something else yeah right

00:33:32.600 exactly and as iq gets higher there is some evidence that the positive manifold between the

00:33:37.020 different components of iq becomes weaker and so at the extreme you get more of these kind of

00:33:41.160 sheldon cooper type weirdos that are obsessive but are useless at everyday things so yeah you are

00:33:45.060 right right i think it does bring in a an inbuilt limit on iq that said i would suspect that the

00:33:51.460 average iq uh by modern standards the average intelligence uh 150 years ago was probably about

00:33:57.800 130 i think oh wow that high yeah well it was it was definitely 20 points higher if we take the

00:34:05.660 100 of now 100 now then in the 100 in the year 2000 so the average in the year 2000 it was 20 points

00:34:12.180 higher than that in about 1870 so when you think about it yeah i mean it's funny when you think about

00:34:19.660 these things because i i've i've i've often used this comparison but if you go back to say the globe

00:34:24.760 theater you had a situation where what what we know milton apparently attended the premiere of

00:34:31.640 hamlet i mean at least this is a speculation anecdote um but so life was much harsher and crueler

00:34:38.500 i mean in in a in the globe theater they would often engage in bear baiting uh before or after the

00:34:44.600 plays that is sick dogs on bears and you could wager at how many dogs it would take to kill the bear

00:34:49.640 uh macbeth actually references this at one point in his speech on you know i'm at the stake

00:34:54.780 surrounded by uh by dogs and so on so life was crueler and harsher death was more present it was part

00:35:03.420 of life than it is today um but at the same time you know the uh the the just level of intellect i mean

00:35:12.840 we're we're kind of distanced from shakespeare's english now doing a doctoral thesis now let's say

00:35:19.340 you've got the internet you've got access to all the literature you could possibly want right yeah

00:35:23.040 and you think how much harder it was to write a doctoral thesis in 1990 oh my gosh and the standard

00:35:29.640 the standard has probably gone down anyway because of the growth of the industry but but even so even

00:35:35.620 if it hadn't think how much harder and how much therefore to get to the same standard how much more work

00:35:40.840 and more intelligence would be required in 1990 before the internet before even having a pc

00:35:45.260 and you have to write it out than now so and so then if you think about the building of huge cathedrals

00:35:51.760 without the engineering capacities that we have now how intelligent you'd have to be to ensure that they

00:35:57.360 didn't fall down right um and so i think that they were um very very significantly cleverer than us

00:36:04.940 but they were living in this different environment as well so that it would militate against these

00:36:09.180 autistic tendencies because they would all have be so under stress and fearing death

00:36:13.220 but they would be religious and so it would bring in those kinds of instincts which perhaps

00:36:18.940 do not hit in so they wouldn't it wouldn't a person with 140 iq living now would not be the same person

00:36:25.940 as a person with 140 iq living in an environment with 50 child mortality that person would be more religious

00:36:31.880 that person would be more pro-social because of the nature of his environment

00:36:35.220 so um i don't think it's that bizarre but i think you are right that there's probably an inbuilt uh an inbuilt

00:36:41.580 ceiling on intelligence because if we get too intelligent and we create a society that is too

00:36:48.180 luxurious uh then eventually we all stop believing in god and we stop wanting to have children we don't

00:36:53.260 have children we die out right right um and the other inbuilt thing is that as you become

00:36:58.520 the society is reliant on a certain resource whether it's iron or whether it is uh bronze or

00:37:06.840 and uh whether it's oil and the ability to extract it uh and as you become more intelligent you extract

00:37:14.000 it more efficiently and whatever and you realize there could be problems extracting it and so you

00:37:18.500 you you you you you you would you diversify but eventually inevitably uh you you weaken the darwinian

00:37:25.440 conditions you become less intelligent you stop planning for the future and you're you kind of

00:37:30.000 run out of the resource or you run out of the ability to efficiently attain the resource because

00:37:34.260 you're not thinking about the future enough to do something about it right um that's when i think

00:37:39.880 betty betty megas her name is betty she was an archaeologist american archaeologist and she referred to

00:37:46.620 how basically civilizations grow because of an increase in energy resources the ability to extract energy

00:37:52.480 more efficiently and then eventually as that ability decreases civilization shrink uh right to a level

00:37:58.420 that can be sustained by the energy they can extract well i i think we're still i mean you you put a lot

00:38:03.620 of emphasis in your work on the industrial revolution and i i i don't disagree with that but i i think that

00:38:08.740 big energy resource that civilization is is running on are actually twofold it's fossil fuels and then

00:38:16.480 debt uh the creation of debt on the levels that we have it today is is absolutely incredible and what

00:38:25.000 we're actually seeing as well is the um we're getting less and less gdp growth from more and more debt

00:38:31.940 uh so i i heard the other day that um uh 80 percent of the dollars that have ever existed and were

00:38:41.620 actually created in the past year because we've just been the united states the we you know again

00:38:46.680 it's fiat currency you can create credit you're basically inflating the money supply you're creating

00:38:52.320 uh debt you're not necessarily inflating the prices um which hasn't happened but uh basically we are

00:38:59.580 getting less and less bang for our buck we're creating debt at outrageous levels um yet the actual

00:39:07.400 increase in standard of living and um uh and an increase in just measurable gdp growth which is

00:39:14.660 a flawed statistic is going down and down we seem to be kind of hitting the end of this resource and i

00:39:21.100 think we're also kind of getting limited returns diminishing returns um from fossil fuel growth

00:39:26.960 sorry excuse my ignorance because i don't really understand much about this but isn't isn't it isn't

00:39:32.140 debt it's basically just a confidence issue isn't it we're talking about it is a confidence

00:39:36.480 no no okay the fact that we can use fiat currency is a confidence game no question i mean yeah if the

00:39:47.060 confidence ever goes the kind of weimar disaster that would occur would be spectacular uh and i'm not

00:39:55.380 sure i want to live through that uh and also there there's a kind of political element to it in the sense

00:40:00.460 that the united states has military bases around the world um you know it's kind of like do you

00:40:06.400 really want to fuck with uncle sam you know you maybe you should continue to use the currency and

00:40:11.840 kind of stay in the system and there's all of these incentives to stay in the system because

00:40:16.040 you know there's a human desire not to lose what we have but what i but what i am saying is that

00:40:22.380 this mega debt financial system that we've created is hitting diminishing returns we're creating

00:40:30.340 trillions and getting almost maybe millions in growth what you would prognosticate on that basis

00:40:36.980 is as we become less intelligent you you can conceive of the industrial revolution as i've written about

00:40:42.500 this before as as my guys took my colleagues bruce charlton's metaphor as rather like capital so you so

00:40:48.620 it's you have the person who i know the very the genius whatever and he comes up with this brilliant

00:40:52.620 idea he makes loads of money and in order to for that to make interest uh all you have to do is

00:40:58.200 tinkering is minor minor innovation and so the son of his who's not particularly intelligent you know

00:41:03.860 he has he has this money he just tinkers with it he's not as intelligent but he just tinkers with it

00:41:08.000 and he continues to make money and eventually as as the grandson is less intelligent he's not

00:41:13.360 tinkering with it at all and eventually it's it stops making money and then you start you start

00:41:18.960 eating into the capital right that would be the equivalent of us not being able we're doing right

00:41:24.620 now i think you used to be able to do yeah which is so it's like it's innovation not just stops and

00:41:31.600 then innovation goes backwards and because where where we are at now is we're not doing many major

00:41:36.160 per capita innovations anymore that's we've got down the same level of per capita innovation that we had

00:41:40.960 in about 1600 but we are doing these minor innovations which kind of keep it keep it ticking over

00:41:47.820 for a while eventually the minor innovations will dry up um and so that then you'll have stagnation

00:41:53.700 um and then you find you you predict that you you will cease to be able to do the things you used to

00:41:58.980 be able to do because as intelligence goes down every generation the top level boils off every

00:42:04.060 generation so you get the genius who invents the car and then you get the sort of semi-genius who can

00:42:09.360 make major innovations for the car and then so on all the way down to the person that can drive the car

00:42:13.920 only and then the person that can't even drive the car and i think we're in the hunter biden stage

00:42:20.180 of world civilization in fact um all of the capital was the hunter biden stage all of the capital

00:42:27.360 was created by our fathers and we're now basically using drugs and banging prostitutes

00:42:34.300 yeah i think that's a good analogy you know that's a good analogy i like that yeah we are we the

00:42:40.240 the industrial the industrial revolution was the joe biden that was the joe biden phase of

00:42:44.660 civilization and then the we are now at all and then yeah we are now at the hunter biden stage

00:42:50.380 i did a god bless once after the hunter biden stage right we'll we'll belong for the civilized

00:42:56.300 tendencies of hunter biden once we reach the next stage yeah

00:42:59.960 yeah to buy his laptops and that's and that's and that's when you that's when you really are

00:43:07.680 you know going backwards so um yeah what we would expect it always happens i mean the the idea that

00:43:14.480 the hubris thing that's not going to happen it always happens and the thing is that you could argue

00:43:19.180 as well the bigger they are the harder they fall so what you have in rome what what percentage of

00:43:23.380 people in the roman empire were farming it was probably about half i don't know exactly but

00:43:28.200 yeah even in the total roman oh yeah easily right whereas in modern western societies about four

00:43:36.260 percent of people exactly yeah and so that means that when the massive mega collapse happens four

00:43:42.080 percent of the population have immediately useful skills yeah um and and and everybody else is going

00:43:49.440 to be left in this chaos which is going to will hit in uh which did when the roman empire collapsed

00:43:54.480 suddenly people are fleeing the cities the cities are being capitalized for the interest useful

00:43:59.720 materials um the people that are highly intelligent they don't want to have children anyway but they've

00:44:04.580 got they've got very little very little offer in terms of surviving so they die off you saw this in

00:44:09.040 north korea in the famine it was people that were doctors and whatever just die they had no ability

00:44:14.640 to survive people that were reasonably intelligent and had some sort of skill that they could use they

00:44:19.280 would they were the ones that thrive um as capitalism reasserted itself um and also those that had access

00:44:26.060 to the immediate sources of food yeah and so you'll you'll get it would be something like that that you

00:44:31.780 would uh what you would predict that would happen i i think really i mean we've got to this as i said

00:44:37.040 based on the current um direction of things from that paper by who is called huberner um we will be back

00:44:44.440 100 years from now same level of per capita innovation that we were at at 10 100 so at the

00:44:49.400 or 1100 so right so what he would what i and i i read this paper as well um while i was working on

00:44:56.900 your book and i i found it quite interesting but um what he's doing is per capita innovation and and of

00:45:03.900 course it's imperfect you know how you quantify you know major innovations and inventions and so on

00:45:10.180 uh but but but but i think it is reasonable uh reasonably well done and what he's looking at

00:45:16.120 is per capita innovation so beginning you know post dark ages let's let's say beginning around the 16th

00:45:23.060 century or something um we start to have this parabolic rise in the tremendous innovations that are

00:45:31.360 occurring per the world population and this basically peaks in the 19th century where we're you know

00:45:39.960 making major innovations in medicine we're inventing the bicycle and then the automobile

00:45:44.840 uh there's even like the kind of basics of computer science that are that are going you know just this

00:45:50.340 this tremendous renaissance of of thought um obviously the i think you know newtonian uh mechanics was

00:45:58.420 was you know perhaps the greatest uh explosion of intellect that that led to all sorts of things

00:46:05.400 uh here so if you look at this this is for capital innovation and look at this outlier here that's

00:46:12.920 newton that's newton yeah yeah exactly yeah and so but we're now going down and there was a little

00:46:19.500 bit of an uptick i think around the age of computer science uh basically in the mid 20th century uh but

00:46:26.160 world population is increasing tremendously uh we're at seven and a half billion or whatever but the

00:46:34.320 actual inventions are going down and so i think this also belies this kind of happy talk there was a

00:46:41.000 study which found that how quickly you can double the speed of technology with the same number of

00:46:47.720 people involved that's great you need more people to do right that's what you said about the the mid

00:46:53.780 20th century rise so look at this that goes down down down down down down up right century down so

00:47:02.120 right so yes and so remember all this like when i remember in when i was in college uh during the

00:47:08.640 late 90s and there was all of this happy talk about the new economy technology the internet is going to

00:47:15.240 change everything and and it and it has to a to a certain degree uh but so much of that happy talk

00:47:22.540 derived from again debt financing of purchasing stocks and debt finance lifestyle we were increasing debt

00:47:30.280 but the technology really wasn't increasing to that level and so yeah a new iphone comes out every

00:47:37.000 year but in terms of groundbreaking inventions that are really going to change uh the status quo improve

00:47:45.360 lifestyle styles for all create new paradigms it's simply not happening and in hubner was was arguing for

00:47:52.700 kind of a limit a technological limit in that paper where it's i mean and again i i agree with him to a

00:47:59.360 a certain degree i think there are other factors but there's kind of a a limit to technology we

00:48:03.680 haven't had that great genius who's opened up a new world for us he doesn't look at is that why did

00:48:09.660 we come so far this time and i think one of the reasons for that is that the conditions were so harsh

00:48:16.320 the more than minimum you know it was so cold creating such enormous group conflict creating such

00:48:23.420 enormous selection for genius on the one hand and groups with high levels per capita of genius

00:48:28.800 and also um with selecting for very high levels of religiousness and i think that's the key factor

00:48:35.080 so it's once they reach a certain level of luxury and not they don't feel very stressed and so they

00:48:40.420 stop being religious and then they stop the people that like that who tends to be more intelligent

00:48:44.260 stop having children and they stop believing gods and they become decadent and and society

00:48:49.060 goes backwards in very predictable ways less patriarchal more immigration blah blah it's always the same

00:48:55.060 um but in our case we had we were so high in religiousness that we had to be at a very

00:49:00.640 relatively speaking very very low level of stress yeah to stop to stop to stop this instinct of

00:49:07.240 believing in in religion to hit in because we were genetically so high in it so that's why we got

00:49:11.900 part of the industrial revolution that's why we didn't stop becoming strongly irreligious until really

00:49:16.740 about 1900 if not later we got past industrial revolution and the correlation the negative correlation

00:49:23.180 between religion and intelligence happened after rather than just on the cusp of as had always

00:49:27.780 previously been the case um and in industrial uh revolution so and so i think that's why but but

00:49:33.740 then it leads to the nature of the collapse and so the nature of the i know that the late bronze age

00:49:39.640 collapse which occurred about 1300 bc or something um was in places like i don't know canaan let's say

00:49:47.820 was that you go from being an agriculturalist to to being a partialist well that's not much of a hit

00:49:54.940 i mean people are going to die because the land can sustain fewer people but that's not much of a hit

00:49:59.460 and once you've got to a situation where you collapse on the cusp of an industrial revolution

00:50:03.620 well then you're going to collapse from let's say an english population of eight million down to an

00:50:08.460 english population of four million something like that or five million something like that might happen

00:50:12.700 which did happen those kind of things did happen um what we're talking about is a collapse of about

00:50:18.080 90 percent um of the population because that that's what would be alive it would be 10 10 of the

00:50:26.680 population would be around right industrial conditions and so if those conditions go then and

00:50:31.780 then think what happens then is there's a period of chaos where there's basically selection of absolute

00:50:37.640 chaos where there is selection for intelligence to some extent because intelligence helps you survive

00:50:42.040 to chaos but it's only weak right weak because intelligence also correlates with other with

00:50:46.580 like being conscientious and with right following and conformism and it's actually going to be the

00:50:51.420 sort of violent impulsive brutal type yeah psychos that are going to be more likely to survive in

00:50:57.360 absolute our strategist in absolute chaos or at the very least they'll get all the girls right

00:51:02.820 well yeah they get all the girls in the future yeah so so then you're gonna have a period where

00:51:08.780 you just get this collapse um i hope i'm not around that although i'm i'm increasingly believing

00:51:14.620 i might be around them i for one embrace our coming uh chaotic uh strongman bronze age universe

00:51:32.820 you

00:51:34.880 you

00:51:35.880 you

00:51:37.880 you

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00:51:41.880 you

RadixJournal - November 13, 2020

IQ and People Who Don't Think Good

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