{"id":344,"date":"2002-05-01T12:18:41","date_gmt":"2002-05-01T20:18:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ogre.nu\/wp\/?p=344"},"modified":"2022-10-24T13:06:39","modified_gmt":"2022-10-24T21:06:39","slug":"exegesis-of-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=344","title":{"rendered":"exegesis of intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen Jay Gould, in one of his Natural History<\/i> essays, wrote:<\/p>\n

\nI believe that any solution to this key puzzle in Darwinian biography must begin with a proper exegesis of intelligence \u2013 one that rejects Charles Spearman’s old notion of a single scalar quantity recording overall mental might (called g<\/i> or general intelligence, and recently revived by Murray and Hernnstein as the central fallacy of their specious book, The Bell Curve<\/i> \u2013 see the second edition of my book The Mismeasure of Man<\/i>). Instead, we need a concept of intelligence defined as a substantial set of largely independent attributes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(I have read neither of the books mentioned, but when does that stop anyone?)<\/p>\n

The thesis of The Bell Curve<\/i>, I gather, is that the races (whatever that means) have different distributions of g<\/i>, though these differences are dwarfed by the variation within<\/i> each race: the area under any two such bell curves overlaps except at the fringes.<\/p>\n

Current enlightened thought says that intelligence is a composite of several uncorrelated talents, and \u2018general intelligence\u2019 is about as meaningful as the sum of your age and your shoe size. But is that a fatal fallacy? If \u2018average sum of age and shoe size\u2019 is found to differ between two groups, isn’t that a sign that their ages and\/or their shoe sizes differ? At most we might find that if the components were weighted differently (say by using European rather than American shoe sizes) the ranking would change.<\/p>\n

If g<\/i> is a composite, I’d expect the gaps to be bigger (though not all in one direction) if the components are measured separately \u2013 rather than vanish, as I assume TBC<\/i>‘s denouncers want us to think.* But Gould says it’s fallacious to measure g<\/i> at all; implying that g<\/i> is not even a composite, but measures something completely meaningless.<\/p>\n

What gives? <whine><\/i> Do I gotta read another book? <\/whine><\/i><\/p>\n

*This sentence rewritten after discussion with an old friend<\/a>. The original version implied that all the spreads are in the same direction, i.e. that the median White is much brighter than the median Black in each<\/i> of the seven-or-so ways.
\n<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen Jay Gould, in one of his Natural History essays, wrote: I believe that any solution to this key puzzle in Darwinian biography must begin with a proper exegesis of intelligence \u2013 one that rejects Charles Spearman’s old notion of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,18,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities","category-psychology","category-sciences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=344"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4409,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions\/4409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}