Episode #57： Ungifted With Scotty Barry Kaufman
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Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, we talk with cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman about his new book, Ungifted: How to Redefine Intelligence, and why we should stop measuring intelligence by IQ tests.
Transcript
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You probably, if you're like most people in America or in the West,
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you probably took some test when you're in elementary school that was used to determine
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And second, I mean, is that test really useful in determining future performance of a child
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Well, our guest today has been studying this for most of his career.
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And his most recent book is called Ungifted, Intelligence Redefined.
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And he takes a look at sort of America's, in particular, obsession with determining whether
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a child is gifted or whether an adult is gifted and our obsession with IQ exams.
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And, you know, he looks at what exactly are we measuring when we're taking IQ exams.
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And he also challenges the idea that, you know, we shouldn't just use IQ exams to determine
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It's particularly interesting if you're a dad, because you might have kids who are in that,
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who are taking those tests that you took when you were a kid.
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And whether they get into the gifted program or they stick with the average kid,
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that can have a profound effect on the rest of their life.
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Well, Scott Barry Kaufman, welcome back to the Art of Manliness podcast.
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I actually think you're the first like repeat guest we've had.
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For those of you, yeah, Scott, we had Scott on the show like last year, early last year
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wrote mating intelligence, the co-author book called Mating Intelligence about how to, what
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research says about what people find attractive in one another.
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But today we're going to not talk about love and sex.
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Just like, not just mating intelligence, like intelligence, like IQ stuff.
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Um, so Scott, that's, that's the question though.
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So yeah, Scott, your book is ungifted and the subtitle is redefining intelligence.
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The book, title of the book, ungifted subtitle.
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Um, so it's just, you take on this idea of intelligence, like what it is, how we measure
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Um, but I want to start off talking about, uh, your personal history because you enter,
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you know, you, you put that in, you inject that into the, the book throughout, right?
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And basically your personal history seems like it's a lot of it's with the impetus and
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what inspired the book and sort of your, uh, research and intelligence.
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Um, but it, let's start off like you're, you're, you have just an extremely impressive
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resume, uh, graduated from Carnegie Mellon fellowship at the university of Cambridge, PhD from
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You've written, you know, you started a book, uh, a successful website called the creativity
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Uh, so he's done all this in a short amount of time.
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Uh, well, just not a short amount of time, but just like very early in his life.
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Um, but what's funny is you talk about in your book is if someone looked at you when you
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were in elementary school or middle school or high school, they would probably wouldn't
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think, no, Scott's not going to do any of that stuff.
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He'll at best, you know, be working some sort of mindless corporate job at worst, maybe working
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Um, can you talk a bit about your childhood and adolescence in terms of, terms of schooling?
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And I would even go so far to say that even, even if you still measure me by traditional
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metrics, you would not be able to predict what I'm actually doing.
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So, um, it's, that's the paradox I've tried, been kind of like spending my whole life trying
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My early childhood, um, I had a lot of ear infections the first couple of years of my
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And I developed a learning disability called central auditory processing disorder, um,
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which made it very hard for me to process information, process auditory input in real
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I mean, I would just kind of like zone out in the daydream in the classroom.
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And, um, because it was hard for me to keep up to the auditory lectures.
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And of course, you know, from the outside that it looks like I was, um, dumb, right?
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I mean, it looks like I was not understanding anything.
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It was just very hard for me to, um, to process it in real time.
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And, um, I eventually outgrew or, or, or maybe, you know, maybe you never really outgrew these
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things, but you, and I don't even, how do you tell anymore, you know, but I compensated
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so much for these things that by fifth, sixth grade, um, I think that I was, I was yearning
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for more intellectual challenges, but I was still in special education and they wouldn't
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let me take more course challenging courses that I wanted to take.
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And, um, really a lot of my early childhood, I had to kind of fight to display to people
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Um, and, uh, and that was a lot of my early, early childhood.
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So how did you make that leap from, you know, being put in special ed and being seen as sort
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of on the slow track to doing all this impressive stuff?
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Was there a moment that like sort of things sort of shifted for you where someone saw like
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an adult saw, Hey, this person, this guy's, this kid's got potential.
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I don't know if, if they saw potential, but what they saw my frustration, there was one,
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I was, I was kept in special education all the way up to ninth grade.
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And I had to keep in mind, you know, I had a lot of catching up to do once I eventually,
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um, uh, left special education, but I was sitting there in ninth grade and a teacher who
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had not been there, um, prior to that day, I guess she was covering for the regular teacher.
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She saw that I was like, so quickly frustrated.
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I was like looking out the classroom across the hall, the biology class, they wouldn't let
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And I was supposed to be taking an untimed history test.
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And I clearly wasn't, wasn't paying too much attention to it.
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I was like, well, I have the rest of my life to take this test since it's untimed.
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And she really, she took me aside and she, she, after class outside the class, she said,
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Um, you, have you thought about, you know, get taking your, try, trying it, you know,
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without, out gifted, without, um, not gifted, without special education.
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And I was, and I was like, whoa, like no one's ever like questioned.
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No, I mean, it's something I intuitively wanted, but you know, we spend a lot of time in our
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Accepting, you know, kind of like the judgment of others.
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And, and this was really a pivotal moment in my life.
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She really, um, caused me to question, um, whether or not I was capable of more that I,
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I too, we felt as though I was capable of more, but it kind of gave me, empowered me to,
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Um, I didn't report back and, uh, they let me out on a trial, trial basis.
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Um, but I went from like a CD student to straight A student and, um, you know, it's, it's amazing
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the power of having something to prove that can be a great motivating force in itself.
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And I was just like, so determined to prove that I, um, was, uh, could do something that,
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My grandfather was a famous cellist, um, and he was retired and he, I was like, well,
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And he taught me and I joined the school orchestra.
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I'm not going to say I was good at all these identities I tried, but the exciting thing is
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that I was just given that freedom to, um, to, to try different identities, which I didn't
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It was funny when, as I was reading that, like I related to that.
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And I'm sure there's a lot of people who read this and like, I relate to that.
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Um, you know, while I wasn't like placed in like special ed, I was just sort of like
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Because of the standardized test you take, you know, the Iowa test of basic skills or
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And I remember being really frustrated because I had friends who got to go to like enrichment
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And they had to like, they had to do cool stuff, like learn about Greek architecture.
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And I was like stuck, like color, you know, color by number stuff.
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And I remember like, just being so like frustrated about it.
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I'd go home and like, you know, research this stuff on my own.
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Cause I wanted to like, I wanted that experience, but because, you know, this test says I wasn't
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And like, it wasn't until like middle school that I had just an English teacher who said,
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you know, I think you should be like on the honors track.
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And if like, it weren't for her, like I would like it because of that lady, like I was like
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Like I was every class I got, I was honors and like things just really went up for me
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But it was just like, I just remember being just completely frustrated that I couldn't do
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We spent so much more time limiting children than offering them opportunities.
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That's a, that's, that's a, it came so clear to me in my childhood.
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And I don't think we're that, that far changed today.
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So based on your personal experience, as well as your, you know, your own research, as well
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as, you know, just years of research on the topic, you make the argument in your book
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Ungifted that how we define intelligence isn't very useful and that we need to redefine it.
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So what's wrong with how we typically look at intelligence?
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I think a lot, you know, even since this book has come out, my ideas have, have not changed,
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but have morphed and nuanced more ways, nuanced ways.
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The thing that I think that I want to emphasize, wanted to emphasize in Ungifted is I'm not
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trying to distort the idea of intelligence out of, you know, and completely redefine it
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You know, it's like, it's not like a personal vendetta to like, I define intelligence by the
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ability to do whatever Scott Barry Kaufman's good at.
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What I'm trying to really do is change the way we assess it or judge it.
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First of all, I would like to stop judging people's intelligence at any one moment in
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But if we absolutely must, what I argue in the book is that there's two conditions I
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So I don't think just administering an IQ test in a two hour, you know, give a two hour
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snapshot into a person's ability to, on the spot, come up with a problem solve in a very
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decontextualized, impersonal way that's not at all interesting to the test taker.
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I think at the very least, if you really want to judge what someone's capable of intellectually,
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you have to one, activate them or make sure that they're activated, make sure that they're
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You have their full attention, their full brain power.
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And second of all, you need to give them a heck of a lot more than two hours to display
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You know, you need an extended period of acquiring expertise, acquiring mastery, and really cultivating
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I think that it's a very superficial, narrow way of judging someone's intelligence in a
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But I actually, I don't, I don't think we need to distort the idea.
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I think intelligence intuitively means something to people.
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And I think it's an uphill battle trying to just completely say, no, intelligence means
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something completely different than you ever thought it meant.
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I don't think that's the best strategy moving forward.
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I think we can think of, you know, intelligence as the, as sort of the capacity or the ability
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to learn, the ability to learn, to, to have knowledge, to acquire, the ability to acquire
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You know, these are things we truly think of as intelligence.
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But I think that, that so many more people are capable of displaying those capacities, those
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abilities in much more extraordinary ways than we give them credit.
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And that kind of leads me to my next question, because it's about the history of IQ testing
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Because that's, you devote a lot of the book to that.
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And part of the problem, I, what I gather the problem with how we look at intelligence
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It's with IQ test and like, it's just a really fascinating history, how IQ tests, how they
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got their start and how they become sort of almost this, it's almost like they, we treat
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Like you can take this test and it's like, this is going to define you and predict how
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you're going to do in life for the rest of your life.
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Um, but you know, are IQ tests really that useful?
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Um, cause that, that was, I found that very interesting.
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Like, you know, what are, what are we, what are we measuring when we, when we take an IQ
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And I, and I've been, you know, part of my scientific research in the past 10 years has
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been really trying to understand what exactly is IQ measuring these, or these tests measuring.
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I really want to pinpoint narrow down exactly and kind of put limits around it.
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And what I basically come to the conclusion is that they are measuring, um, a set of intellectual
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functions that are things that we would reasonably want to consider in the intellectual domain
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I mean, if, as you grow older, you know, you, you, you have to admit that your memory declines,
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You can't like, you can't be in denial about reality.
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Like this is something that is important for our lives, you know, short-term memory, working
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memory, your ability to simultaneously hold various things in your head and process and
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try to integrate them to come up with a, make an inference, right?
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Human reasoning on the spot requires the, um, a working memory capacity to, um, be able
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Um, your ability to, um, uh, vocabulary, you know, what is your vocabulary?
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Can you read things quickly and then, um, understand the gist of what you're reading and understand?
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So all these, these cognitive functions, um, I think we can admit belong in the domain
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But I think that the problem is when we use these tests to, um, judge what someone's capable
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of achieving intellectually or what they're, um, when we use it as a measure of potential,
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So, um, Alan Kaufman, I'm not related to, but we have the same last name.
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And in 1979, the same year I was born again, probably, probably pure coincidence, um, wrote
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this seminal book that I feel has been grossly underappreciated called Intelligent Testing,
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Um, it, he was a, uh, student of, um, David Weschler who created the, uh, you know, the Weschler
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Um, and he, he argued that we need to use these tests in a, in a, we can use these as
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a tool, um, to understand a student's patterns of cognitive strengths and weaknesses.
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You know, oh, the student clearly is a much better reasoner when it comes to spatial information
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than verbal information or much better, you know, at, um, verbal analogies than, um, uh,
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than, so than other, the other things that were than short-term memory, uh, things like
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that nature, but he argues that they should be used for that purpose, not the purpose
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of measuring some sort of innate intelligence, but using the testing to inform some sort of
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Like, oh, maybe this person is, um, is not performing well in school.
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You know, you know, if a student comes in, you know, and you're a school psychologist and
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the student is, um, doing poorly in school, there's a whole bunch of reasons that that could
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Um, and one of the reasons may, may be that the child is under challenged and is, um, not
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being given a chance to accelerate at the, at the pace that they require, or, um, um, as
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And I think that an IQ test battery can be used among a lot of other indicators, uh, like,
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um, school back, you know, uh, family background, the environment, the child grows up in the teacher
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I argue for a holistic assessment of intelligence.
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That's really what I'm arguing for is, um, a holistic assessment that takes into account
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so many factors in the, in the problem solving process.
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And I guess I imagine why we haven't like, as in the West or in America, haven't done
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that is it's pretty complicated to do a holistic view of a person.
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I mean, it's pretty easy to use a test to say, okay, this is this person's potential.
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So we'll, we'll use this as some sort of filtering.
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Cause that's what we use the IQ test or different types of IQ testing is the filtering device.
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Like I guess an example from my personal life, like I guess the LSAT, right.
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For gender into law school is sort of an IQ test.
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It's testing for reasoning, a specific type of reasoning with IQ, the global IQ score, like
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Um, yeah, but I, I remember like that's used as a sorting device.
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And like, if you don't score like universities, law schools use that, if you score within a
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certain range, like you're not going to get into that law school.
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Um, but what's interesting though, is that I've known students who'd like did very poorly
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on the LSAT, not very poorly, but like just bad enough or good enough.
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They can get in, but they went on to have very successful careers in the law because maybe
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they weren't great at taking the LSAT, but they were good at other aspects or, you know,
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other aspects of the law that's, I guess, more important.
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Like, I don't, I don't know if this is even related, but you know, there's been, I just
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read this, that there's studies that show that IQ tests in America have been going up.
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Like, there's like, yeah, it's called the Flynn effect.
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So I, it turns out that like, if our great, great, great, great grandparents were alive
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today and took an IQ test, their IQ, uh, would, if their exact score would have a very
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different meaning, um, today than it would have when they first took that test, it would
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And you have to understand the way IQ is, and to understand the, to understand what I really
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mean by that, you have to understand how IQ is calculated.
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There's no, you know, it, it, it's an arbitrary number.
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It's a number that's purely relative to other people in the population.
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So if you're alone on a desert island, your IQ, you have the highest IQ in the world, as
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Um, so what you do is you go out there and you, you measure your, um, IQ, you, you measure,
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um, you, you administer a test to like thousands, thousands of people.
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And then your particular IQ score is how well you did, um, in comparison to all these other
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And it's turned, it's, see, it looks like over the course of the 20th century, people
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have been getting, been performing better on these tests.
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The standard has risen on this test so that, uh, that, that, that what would earn you an
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IQ of, let's say 120 in 1900 would now, you know, be like in the, the mentally disabled
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range and that's the paradox that, that is, is, does that mean that our great, great,
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great, great grandparents were mentally, all mentally disabled?
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So, so then the, the natural question is, well, then, then, then are these tests even meaningful?
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So there's, it, it raises the whole host of questions.
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Um, all right, here's the question, like for me, and I think other people will be interested
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because like, as I was, as I was reading this section, I was having a hard time getting
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my mind around it, but like you talk about general intelligence.
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In a very like, um, easy to understand way you can, you know, IQ, which is just an average
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score of among, amongst a whole wide range of different, uh, cognitive functions, um, is,
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is, is almost perfectly correlated with general and the general intelligence factor.
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Uh, so you can just think of general intelligence as IQ.
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Um, general intelligence itself is, it's a, it's a statistical, um, method, you know,
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that is, is actually quite sophisticated requiring something called factor analysis, where you
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look at, um, the correlate, how do all these tests relate to one another?
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And you see that people who are good at one test tend to be good at the other kinds of
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And people who are do poorly on one test tend to do poorly on other types of tests.
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And you can, um, kind of figure out statistically what, um, what's, what, what's in common,
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how much, you know, is in common across all these different tests and then rank people
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on how well they are in what's in common across all the tests.
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But that's a very sophisticated way of just saying it's a, it's, it's, it's a rough, you
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know, estimate of, uh, of, of the average efficiency among a whole bunch of different,
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of these cognitive tests, very similar to the physical fitness tests you take in high
00:23:30.980
You can come up with a general fitness factor, general fitness factor, which is just basically
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your, your basic, um, average, um, efficiency, uh, across all sorts of things like putting
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your chin up on the, the, you're running the 500 meter down.
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You take all that, you put them through the hoops in 10 different ways.
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And then you just rank people in one dimension, um, which is their average efficiency across
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And that's all the general intelligence factor is, but, but it is complicated.
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I mean, it is, it's hard to describe that general audience because it is, it doesn't
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involve quite sophisticated statistics and there's so many debates.
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Like when I was reading it, it was like, yeah, a lot of statistics, which I never took in
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Um, so, um, but okay, that, that, that helped kind of clear things up for me.
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I mean, I mean, maybe this goes to whether IQ tests are useful or not.
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I'm that's, I'm familiar with that because that had a big effect on my life.
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Um, when I, I remember when I first took my first practice exam, like I scored like a
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one 42, which would not get you into law school.
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This is, this is when I have never, this is like the first time I ever took the LSAT.
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But then like, after like three months of intensive practice and, and study, like I was able
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to get that score up to like one 65, which could get you into some really, uh, fantastic,
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you know, some really, uh, high ranking law schools.
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And I ended up scoring like a one 60 when I actually took the exam.
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Like I, I improved my, I guess, IQ in that, that reasoning, that area.
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But like, I know if I, if I were to take the, the, the LSAT today, I don't think I would
00:25:06.860
Cause like, I've been out of, like, I haven't really, I'm out of practice.
00:25:10.060
Like, so, I mean, can you like, I mean, is IQ testing, can you sort of like practice
00:25:14.820
those skills and then like do well for that IQ test, but later on in life, you know what
00:25:23.140
I mean, that's a very, it's a very contentious field is how much can you train IQ versus the
00:25:29.960
specific, um, abilities that are measured by IQ tests.
00:25:34.020
So, and that's a very contentious hot field right now.
00:25:38.360
Um, there's, um, you know, I told you like on IQ tests, there's like seven or eight different
00:25:45.120
general, like specific abilities that are measured from like reading comprehension to spatial
00:25:50.740
visualization ability to a bunch of cognitive abilities.
00:25:56.840
Well, it looks like it's a lot harder to, and IQ, the IQ itself does, um, fluctuate across
00:26:03.660
So it can change, um, it can change, but, but it really is fairly stable, relatively stable
00:26:13.240
What, what is, what, what we can, it seems to be much more amenable to change are those
00:26:17.620
specific abilities that, um, that you, that, that involve practice.
00:26:22.420
So, you know, luminosity has, you know, uh, or, uh, cog mid, right.
00:26:28.000
They, they train specific functions like working memory and you, it's, there's evidence seems
00:26:33.440
to be much more clear that working memory can be improved than that general global efficiency.
00:26:39.820
Now with the LSAT, that's a very interesting point because there is a recent study that
00:26:45.540
came out where they, um, looked at the effect of LSAT training on the brain, um, over the
00:26:52.240
And they found, first of all, they found that people on average jumped from like the 40th
00:26:59.220
So, so clearly that training, um, helped a lot, but also their, uh, brain connectivity
00:27:05.460
between, um, the, what's called the, the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe, which, which we
00:27:10.920
know is really important for attention and focus and executive functioning.
00:27:15.120
Um, that connectivity was much stronger after that practice.
00:27:18.620
So this practice has measurable effects on the connectivity of key regions of our brain.
00:27:24.140
And I think that it's just like going to the gym.
00:27:26.220
Like if you don't practice it, um, those, you know, you're, it's, you're going to atrophy.
00:27:33.140
Um, if you go back and tried it right now, you probably, you're right.
00:27:37.100
But if we gave you, um, another four month booster session or something, um, you could
00:27:43.740
So these things are, um, are both relatively stable, but are also amenable to, um, change.
00:27:51.560
We're going to take a quick break for you, words from our sponsors.
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00:28:38.800
And yeah, you bring up brain training because that's kind of controversial too.
00:28:43.940
Yeah, you can improve working memory, but like, you know, like basically the argument
00:28:49.460
that seems like, yeah, you can do these games and you'll get better at that game, but does
00:28:56.820
And, and, and the question is, so if you view IQ as smarts, which, you know, I, I don't
00:29:03.720
Um, but if you do, which a lot of intelligence researchers do, then they'll say, you're just
00:29:14.720
I think that it, you know, say that to a lot of people who, um, suffer from their inability
00:29:21.760
And if you show them, uh, go through training and you show them benefits and their ability
00:29:26.280
to concentrate in their daily life, that's a very meaningful improvement in itself, you
00:29:33.180
Their intelligence wasn't improved just because their IQ scored in budge, you know,
00:29:36.480
in, in, in, in certain, in certain ways, I would count that as a, an improvement of
00:29:49.660
You know, one problem you talk about in the book, um, with IQ tests is that they can off
00:29:54.340
what they end up doing is they label people as either gifted or ungifted.
00:29:59.800
And, and when these labels are applied in youth, they can, you know, basically they
00:30:06.520
And, and I think we all, you know, intuitively understand, okay, if you're labeled ungifted,
00:30:11.000
But you also make an argument in your book that being labeled gifted can hurt as well.
00:30:18.080
I don't know if anyone's actually labeled, I don't know if, uh, ungifted is an official
00:30:28.160
No, there is, there is a term that is official that is used called slow learner, which I find
00:30:35.900
Um, and, um, and the slow learners are considered beyond hope.
00:30:41.160
So they, they're not low enough in IQ to warrant a diagnosis of mental disability, but they're
0.52
00:30:47.120
not high enough where, uh, we say that they are capable of remediation.
00:30:53.720
That's the, like, you know, the 80 to 90 or the 70 to 80 IQ range is they're slow learners.
00:31:00.140
So that's the closest thing I would say to ungifted.
00:31:06.880
I think it sets up an unrealistic expectation of what it takes to succeed in life and what
00:31:11.900
it takes to, um, particularly when you get to a point where you're going to face challenges,
00:31:16.500
it sets up this, um, expectation that you were somehow born with this special sauce that's
00:31:26.760
going to get you through the hard times in life.
00:31:31.200
That's going to be able to allow you to achieve no matter what.
00:31:39.760
You know, there are clearly people, kids that are, um, developmentally ahead of others,
00:31:46.900
just as though, just as there are kids who are developmentally, um, slower than others
00:31:52.500
at any moment in time and the, the resources they, they require, um, it does involve giving
00:31:59.140
them more accelerated, you know, cause I'm a, I'm a, I'm a fan of acceleration, but beyond
00:32:04.420
to that, I think it's dangerous to set up for them expectations that, um, that, that they
00:32:09.700
hold around their head, this sort of fixed notion of ability as you're either gifted
00:32:14.800
or you're not gifted because the reality is far more complicated than that.
00:32:18.640
So I guess they, uh, one does, I guess, uh, not, uh, what, where am I, what am I trying
00:32:27.660
I mean, you, you sort of lose that on those opportunities of like learning grit and, uh,
00:32:32.760
cause you, you sort of like, it's sort of learned helplessness, right?
00:32:35.220
It's like, okay, if I can't get it right off the bat, then it's no, I can't even, I shouldn't
00:32:44.840
I mean, kids, I mean, that's a very common finding most kids in, in special education
00:32:49.240
is they, they, um, they acquire learned helplessness and that's, that's a, that's a, that's a shame.
00:32:56.460
Um, in the, in the, there's a lot of debate, a lot of debate, uh, amongst the gifted
00:33:01.420
community about what the purpose of gifted education should be.
00:33:06.220
And, and I think that, um, that's far from settled, you know, is giftedness who you are
00:33:16.460
And if you believe giftedness is who you are, um, then, uh, then, then nothing you do
00:33:27.660
Um, if you, you know, if, if giftedness is who you are and say, I'm gifted and then
00:33:31.700
you fail at something, well, that can have a traumatic impact on a person's self-esteem
00:33:36.720
and, um, and, uh, motivation to, to keep going because they'll say, oh, I guess I wasn't
00:33:47.940
So, so do you think we should just drop the labels completely?
00:33:52.780
I just wrote a, uh, uh, op-ed that we just submitted in the New York times.
00:33:57.060
We'll see what happens with, um, some other researchers who wrote a very thoughtful book
00:34:04.760
And, you know, we argue that the gifted, gifted education shouldn't be about identifying the
00:34:17.800
It should be about, it should be more about the gifted curriculum and not the gifted person.
00:34:22.480
So, um, we think it does a, it gets in the way of the, the, the everyday practical needs
00:34:28.280
of the child in the classroom, the giftedness concept and label, I feel gets in the way of
00:34:34.500
the real issues, which is the individual needs of each child in that classroom.
00:34:39.940
And you are going to have some students in any classroom that at any moment in time require
00:34:44.680
more advanced academics, but, um, sticking the giftedness label, I think, um, gets in
00:34:52.500
the way of, um, of, of how to actually help them with what, with, with this, what they
00:34:57.240
need most, which is normally just advanced academics within a particular domain, not in
00:35:01.760
general, not in every single, um, in every single way possible, but usually in very specific
00:35:07.020
ways, you know, the kid who, who's, who's a math whiz, um, and needs more math curriculum,
00:35:12.740
you know, like let's give them advanced academics and math.
00:35:16.040
But, um, I'm a very, I'm very more, uh, an advocate of, um, very, very practical approach,
00:35:22.280
a very needs-based approach, but not getting tripped up in, um, these fixed labels.
00:35:28.840
I'm curious if things like, uh, Khan Academy and online education will make that practical
00:35:36.020
because I'm sure like right now people are like, it's easier just to like segment these
00:35:42.220
Um, but I guess with online education, you, you don't have to do that so much.
00:35:51.300
And, you know, the giftedness concept is all about, is all about how fast do you get
00:35:56.520
You know, if you're getting there faster than others, you're gifted.
00:35:58.860
If you're getting there slower than others, you're ungifted.
00:36:00.460
But, you know, I think that really is not, um, thinking about it the right way.
00:36:04.560
It's not really conducive to, to, uh, getting the best out of these kids.
00:36:08.480
Um, if there's an emphasis instead, if we had more of a, uh, an emphasis or a school
00:36:12.820
culture on the process and, um, and, and not so much on how fast you get there, but
00:36:18.340
the quality of what you're producing, if there's more of an emphasis on that, I think
00:36:23.340
you'd be getting a lot more performance, better performance out of all the students.
00:36:28.140
So another big theme in, in your book is this idea of greatness, like achieving
00:36:34.560
Um, and that's, I guess the first question would be like, how do you define greatness?
00:36:40.240
Cause that's a, I mean, I'm sure like it's going to be different for every person, right?
00:36:52.720
Um, you know, the greatness is, it's such a loaded word.
00:36:56.340
I, I, you know, other, other people have used other words that, um, I, basically what
00:37:01.460
I'm talking about, there's about world-class expertise.
00:37:05.200
I'm talking about, you know, high achievement at a level in which you, um, clearly, uh, have,
00:37:14.720
And, and maybe you even like, you kind of sit on top of it.
00:37:19.100
You're kind of like, um, you kind of change it or see it in, in, in, in, in new ways or,
00:37:28.040
To me, I, I think that's what, what greatness really is, is your ability to, um, kind of
00:37:33.380
pull, pull a whole field or pull a whole, um, kind of, you know, uh, where people are
00:37:41.600
Um, but it does require a certain amount of expertise to do that.
00:37:48.220
I know that you've, uh, you've, you've, uh, excerpted, I think one of Robert Greene's
00:37:55.060
Um, you know, I, I, I think that he, um, what he calls mastery might be what I'm calling
00:38:01.180
You know, but it is, there is no objective definition of what greatness is.
00:38:06.840
Everyone, everyone, I think, thinks of greatness in a different way, probably.
00:38:11.180
I mean, well, after you read, after I read your book, I was like, oh, that's a great,
00:38:16.800
Um, but, uh, yeah, I mean, to me, greatness is like being excellent in some aspect of your
00:38:26.740
Um, whether that's sports or music or relationships, I'm not talking just about picking up chicks,
00:38:34.560
but like, just like being, having that social intelligence, being adept at that.
00:38:44.540
I don't want to get, I, I, you don't want to get too tripped up on, on the, on the terms.
00:38:50.640
Um, but there's clearly, there clearly is a characteristic, you know, you kind of like
00:38:59.480
Or, or, or, you know, when you've achieved it, like, you know, that you've, you've kind
00:39:03.000
of gotten to a level that's top of the curve, like top 1% compared to other people in
00:39:09.180
that field or in that, whatever you're interested in.
00:39:12.180
So, I mean, to achieve, you know, greatness or excellence, whatever you want to call it.
00:39:19.640
I mean, I, I'd imagine there's other attributes you need.
00:39:24.560
You can be very, I mean, I know extremely smart people who've just have wasted their
00:39:29.660
smart, you know, their smarts, uh, because they lack certain, you know, certain attributes
00:39:34.320
that would allow them to take advantage of that.
00:39:38.180
That's why I like to think of greatness as a multiplicative, multiplicative function of
00:39:43.440
a wide range of characteristics, not an additive function.
00:39:47.460
So if, if greatness was just the sum of grit and, and IQ and, um, curiosity, and, you know,
00:39:57.320
then that wouldn't allow for, um, for your ability to compensate in various ways to reach
00:40:02.620
the same goal, because you would just add, add these things, add these values up and your
00:40:07.160
total value, um, would be the summation of them.
00:40:09.680
But instead I see them more as a multiplicative function.
00:40:12.800
So a very high, um, a very high level of certain characteristic, um, can give you a higher total
00:40:20.720
product value than, um, than, than another one, because these things multiply, um, among
00:40:27.700
And, uh, in the book, I, I outline a lot of different characteristics that you can bring
00:40:32.100
to the table, um, that we should be considering as potential contributors to greatness.
00:40:37.220
Um, things like, uh, growth mindset, self-regulation, deliberate practice, which is sure, certainly
00:40:46.880
That's sort of the quality or the way that you learn, um, active learning strategies, um,
00:40:52.400
not becoming, not being a passive learner, but, but, but actively, um, seeking out mentors,
00:40:58.840
actively seeking out knowledge and, um, and sort of, uh, making that a very active learning
00:41:04.420
process, um, talk about, um, I think openness to experience is very important, um, intellectual
00:41:11.380
I've distinguished intellectual curiosity in my own research from IQ.
00:41:16.600
So you can be a very fast information processor and, um, not have much curiosity and the other
00:41:23.580
And I think these things, the thing, the point I want to make is that you could mix and match
00:41:27.760
all of these characteristics in unique ways to kind of give you your own brand of intelligence,
00:41:33.120
your own unique, um, your unique aspect of intelligence that you bring to the table that you wouldn't
00:41:39.180
appreciate if we just solely stuck to the standardized model.
00:41:44.240
You know, if we just took one, one of these characters, like IQ and said, you know, the
00:41:48.440
extent to which you deviate from this number is the extent to which you deviate from intelligence
00:41:52.260
or the extent to which you, you, the extent to which you deviate from your ability to be
00:41:57.040
You know, I don't think that's the right way of thinking about it.
00:42:00.920
So what, what I'm understanding is like, you could be, you could score low on an IQ
00:42:05.600
test or be considered a slow learner, but if you have these other attributes or some
00:42:10.180
of them or a mixture of them, um, you could, you might not, might take you a little bit
00:42:15.300
longer to get that point, but you could eventually get there if you stick to it.
00:42:19.040
Is that, yeah, there's no, there's no God didn't put any, uh, limits that saying like,
00:42:25.360
Oh, you must have IQ above this number to be great in life.
00:42:30.300
You know, there's no commandments from above like that.
00:42:32.780
Um, a lot of time we put our own, we self-impose limitations and, and our own perceived limitations
00:42:40.700
And I think that's what I, you know, that's just what I noticed in myself, um, so clearly
00:42:46.820
is just how many limiting notions I had about that.
00:42:50.560
I was being fed all these notions about how intelligent I was.
00:42:54.100
And once I kind of tested those limits, I realized just how wrong they were.
00:42:59.020
And I think, um, you know, more people need to be doing that with themselves.
00:43:05.060
Um, I think we're running out of time here, but I got, I got one last question for you.
00:43:12.140
Well, I mean, it's just really, it's fascinating stuff.
00:43:16.480
Um, you talk about, you devoted a chapter to deliberate practice, right?
00:43:19.600
You talk about, that's one of those attributes you need to achieve mastery or greatness.
00:43:25.060
I think people are kind of pretty familiar with it now.
00:43:27.280
This whole idea of like, you know, Malcolm Gladwell's the 10,000 hour rule and you need it, whatever.
00:43:33.100
Um, but you sort of take a nuanced view on it, uh, conception of it.
00:43:36.860
I mean, can you explain where your ideas like differ from the typical idea of deliberate
00:43:44.260
I don't think that I, I differ too much from, from the traditional notions.
00:43:48.780
Um, what, why were you thinking I differ from the, you mean like Erickson's notion?
00:43:53.300
It was just, it seemed like it was a little more nuanced.
00:43:55.100
Cause like, I think we, you, I think the popular idea of deliberate practice out there is like,
00:43:58.900
okay, if you just devote 10,000 hours, 10,000 hours to this.
00:44:01.960
Or like, then like, you're going to become a golf pro, which.
00:44:07.460
So there, um, the, the, the rule, the 10,000 hour rule, I think is, is we have to understand
00:44:14.440
There are people that get there in two years and there are those that takes 20 years.
00:44:19.120
We let's not, you know, let's get away from the, the rule idea.
00:44:22.040
Um, the kind of practice you put into it, you know, that what's called what Anders
00:44:27.100
Erickson has called deliberate practice is, is a sort of quality of practice, which is
00:44:32.880
clearly important, but that kind of practice interacts.
00:44:37.300
I think, I believe it interacts with a lot of a wide range of other variables, like your
00:44:42.320
levels of motivation, your, um, the extent to which you're, um, at the appropriate challenging
00:44:48.160
yourself so that you can enter that flow state, um, the, um, environmental support, how much
00:44:55.780
How much are people, do you believe, like, do you feel as though you're in a supportive,
00:45:02.380
Um, I, I see deliberate practice as something that, you know, it, it, it, the, the rate at
00:45:07.640
which you, you go up that curve, the rate at which you learn things differs, um, from
00:45:13.640
different people, um, and, and what, and the amount of time it takes you to get there, you
00:45:18.480
know, differs greatly, but it differs depending on a wide range of personal characteristics
00:45:24.560
So I think we just need to be careful of just saying 10,000 hour rule because it really is,
00:45:29.380
it really is not a rule and there is no magic number to this.
00:45:32.280
And I think that when you get rid of the magic number idea, it allows you to acknowledge
00:45:37.400
there are prodigies and there are also late bloomers and that's okay.
00:45:40.880
You know, the world has lots of different kinds of people and I'm okay with embracing
00:45:45.180
that messiness and embracing that, um, it's not messiness.
00:45:52.680
Very well, the 10,000 hour rule that sells books.
00:46:04.620
As a dad and I know there's a lot of dads or soon to be dads out there, their parents
00:46:09.320
and like a lot of modern dads are, they're much more involved in their kid's life.
00:46:14.060
Are there specific things that we can be doing with our kids to encourage these, these skills
00:46:19.720
and attributes that are necessary to achieve greatness in their own way, whatever that
00:46:26.040
At the end of the day, that's, that's where my whole research is going.
00:46:28.980
That's what really I'm passionate about the most is how can we as, as teachers and parents
00:46:36.040
Cause I think it's all we can ask for at the end of the day, you know, we get tripped
00:46:38.700
up with all these words and we're afraid, Oh, Johnny's not progressing as fast as Jimmy
00:46:45.760
You know, if we just stop with the comparisons, stop with that whole, um, paradigm of individual
00:46:52.540
differences where we say, Oh, he, my child's not progressing as fast a rate as that child.
00:46:57.860
Um, stay at a very local, um, stay at a very like, um, needs based.
00:47:04.920
Um, and there are things that you can do to bring out the best in that child to make them
00:47:08.780
You can, um, I think we could, we should listen to their daydreams, listen to their own, um,
00:47:15.800
What are their, um, you know, that gives us clues to their passions and their proclivities.
00:47:20.260
Um, I think we should instill in our children, um, the value of hard work, um, instill in
00:47:26.720
them the idea that, that they will see results if they put in that work, that there is, um,
00:47:32.140
this sort of, uh, uh, Carol Dweck calls it a growth mindset that there's value to, um,
00:47:38.400
learning from feedback and, um, and, um, and, and there's no state labeled failure, you know,
00:47:44.280
don't ever say to your child, like you failed, you know, in this moment, you know, really
00:47:48.380
try to instill in them this, this growth mindset, um, set up the conditions to allow them to
00:47:54.640
play, set up the conditions to allow them to question authority.
00:47:57.760
And I would say ultimately the thing I've learned the most about my whole, my whole life, um,
00:48:03.380
is the importance of being your own self advocate.
00:48:06.320
And what I mean by being your own self advocate is insulating yourself from the expectations
00:48:11.500
of others, kind of creating the bubble around that so that you are totally operating with
00:48:19.160
And, um, that's probably the, the number one thing I see among those who do reach greatness
00:48:22.800
is that they've done a really good job, um, following their own internal compass, um, and
00:48:27.820
kind of ignoring that, um, sort of that outside, uh, expectations and influences.
00:48:34.100
Um, what about, what about guys who are like in their twenties or thirties, or I mean, even
00:48:38.460
if they're fifties, like they, they feel like they haven't, they've sort of like missed out,
00:48:42.980
They, they, they, they're not on that path there.
00:48:47.320
I mean, are you, if you haven't started this now, are you doomed to a life of mediocrity?
00:48:54.780
Like I, um, I did this profile, I did this piece on late bloomers for psychology today
00:48:58.820
a couple of years ago, and I had the, the great privilege of interviewing, um, a bunch
00:49:02.760
of late bloomers in their fifties, sixties, and seventies who, um, completely changed careers.
00:49:08.640
And what I, what struck me about that is that they were able to, um, use that their age
00:49:16.260
So it actually, sometimes it is, it's to your benefit to be a late bloomer because you can
00:49:22.800
bypass all the games people play all the bullshit, you know, the competition and everything amongst
0.88
00:49:30.140
You can just glide right over it all and get your own unique niche in the marketplace.
00:49:36.300
I've seen that in this, this guy who'd be got on Broadway at age 50, I think.
00:49:40.720
Um, and, and, you know, he just served, you know, all these kids that are vying for the
00:49:44.820
same spots for outside of drama school at age like 22, when they just graduate, he just
00:49:51.280
Um, or, um, and you can see it in, in lots of different fields.
00:49:57.800
And I would, I would, I would try to think strategically of ways of using it to your
00:50:04.160
Well, Scott, this, as always fascinating discussion, a book, a great book.
00:50:12.300
Even if you're not a dad, highly recommend you'll get it.
00:50:14.920
I got something out of it, um, for my own life.
00:50:17.700
So thanks again for taking the time to talk to us.
00:50:26.840
Scott is the author of the book, Ungifted Intelligence Redefined, and you can find
00:50:34.520
Well, that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast.
00:50:37.980
For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the art of manliness website
00:50:42.720
And if you enjoy this free podcast, we would really appreciate it if you take the time to
00:50:47.260
give it a rating on whatever service you use to listen to podcasts, be it iTunes or