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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Magical Thinking on I.Q.: By John Derbyshire |
| 2007-09-24 |
| 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. . . . 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 |