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Magical Thinking on I.Q.: By John Derbyshire
I can never think about the topic of I.Q. without recalling the late Willard Espy’s immortal “I-ku haiku.” From memory:


I ku; you ku; he, she, or it ku;
We ku; you ku; they ku.
Than ku.

Espy’s lines don’t make much sense, but they make more sense than a lot of the stuff that gets written about I.Q. Case in point: David Brooks’s remarkably lame-brained piece in the New York Times the other day. I say “remarkably” because David is a very smart guy, and people that smart do not often sign their names to such unmitigated twaddle.

The wittiest comments on David’s piece came from the Anglosphere’s best living human-sciences journalist, Steve Sailer. Steve supplies the full text of the Brooks piece for good measure (with his comments at the end). Alex at the Gene Expression website conducted a point-by-point demolition of the Brooks piece, with linked bibliographical references — I counted 23. No doubt there have been other critiques around the web from people WHO ACTUALLY KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT PSYCHOMETRICS.

The Brooks piece caught my attention because I had just finished reading Michael Hart’s book Understanding Human History. Hart’s aim is to do for the history of our species what Lynn and Vanhanen did for economics: to bring forward intelligence — the different statistical profiles of different peoples on measures of cognitive function — as an important factor. Not the only factor, of course, but an important factor.
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The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. There is probably a sizable segment in any population that believes scientists should be rounded up and killed.
And, of course, the current academic system is very good at spotting/eliminating such troublemakes

Posted by: gromgoru 2007-09-24
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=200090