Stephen Pinker Responds to Malcolm Gladwell Thursday, Nov 19 2009
intelligence and IQ 8:10 pm
Here is the exchange of letters. Pinker’s response:
What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe” is what psychologists call “the mainstream.” In a 1997 editorial in the journal Intelligence, 52 signatories wrote, “I.Q. is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes.” Similar conclusions were affirmed in a unanimous blue-ribbon report by the American Psychological Association, and in recent studies (some focusing on outliers) by Dean Simonton, David Lubinski and others.
Gladwell is right, of course, to privilege peer-reviewed articles over blogs. But sports is a topic in which any academic must answer to an army of statistics-savvy amateurs, and in this instance, I judged, the bloggers were correct. They noted, among other things, that Berri and Simmons weakened their “weak correlation” (Gladwell described it in the New Yorker essay reprinted in “What the Dog Saw” as “no connection”) by omitting the lower-drafted quarterbacks who, unsurprisingly, turned out not to merit many plays. In any case, the relevance to teacher selection (the focus of the essay) remains tenuous.
Why is Gladwell so damn defensive in his response? On his blog, he went to call one of Pinker’s sources, Steve Sailer, a racist, while the issue at hand was the value of performance indicators for football players. It is because he knows that he is finally being called out in a big way, this time by someone who carries significantly more weight than Richard Posner (an earlier critic) in the scientific community — Pinker.
For some cringe-worthy profiles and interviews with Gladwell, see “Geek Pop Star” by New York magazine, “Author Malcolm Gladwell” at Time, a profile at Wired, and a review at The Guardian. A truly painful profile of Gladwell from Fast Company in 2007 is also available. Why do business people fall for this crap?
On the other side of the fence, the December 2009 issue of Vanity Fair has a mocking article on Gladwell. It is funny that Vanity Fair is one of the publications to see through his superficiality, whereas ostensibly more intelligent publications like TIME, Wired, and Fast Company fail terribly.
In the end, it is Gladwell that is on a lonely ice floe, and he knows it. He probably knows that the literature doesn’t back him up, but like so many others, is in denial about IQ because of its political incorrectness. I am optimistic, however. As we gain powerful new experimental tools over the coming decades, we will be able to investigate the brain and mind in much greater detail and the truth will become too obvious to ignore.
It looks like Gladwell didn’t pay attention to the eleventh virtue of rationality — scholarship. If he spent less time traveling around giving talks, attending parties, and reading fluffy fiction, he might get some actual studies done. I mean, if I were making $40,000 per talk, I might fall a bit behind on my studies too, but 9 years of it? You have enough to live, man — why not read an article from Intelligence once in a while?
Ok I’ll bite – What’s the URL for Intelligence?
(Re your last comment “why not read an article from Intelligence once in a while?”)
Thx!
I understand why you get worked up about this guy. But he’s nothing compared to the late Steven J. Gould – the master of the straw man holding a basket full of red herrings. Just ask Pinker himself about Gould. And Gould was a genuine academic who strove mightily to re-write the science of evolution. He failed and is already fading into obscurity.
As for Gladwell’s effect on powerful people in business and government, he is more of a symptom than a cause. His ideas resonate because of a pre-existing psychology which is almost immune to rationality. They wouldn’t be any different if Gladwell had never existed.
“Why do business people fall for this crap?”
[Sturgeon's Law enters mind] Because most people fall for this crap.
“the truth will become too obvious to ignore.”
As if it isn’t hyper-frikkin’-abundantly obvious enough to ignore already. It’s just that people can handle the reality where “if you’re ugly you can’t win a beauty contest” is obviously true but cannot handle it when it comes to intelligence. FWIW, I think my kids are about average intelligence or below and by the looks of their grades will never achieve anything remarkable.
Let’s increase equality by pretending it exists.
Politically correct phrase of the day: Beauty, like intelligence, is in the eye of the beholder.
While the biographical stories in Outliers were interesting, the conclusions drawn didn’t agree with my experiences of the world.
Gladwell entertains people and makes money. Good for him. Now, please, can we move on?
Only when he admits he’s wrong.
Gladwell vs. Pinker: Our differences owe less to what can be found via scientific literature than on Google http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2009/11/pinker-on-what-the-dog-saw.html
“Why do business people fall for this crap?”
Most of the people who “believe” Gladwell don’t actually change their behavior based on this “belief”- they just mindlessly repeat back whatever he says, because he’s a high status person. Changing your behavior based on your explicit verbal beliefs is very unusual. Eg., look at how many people believe in “God” versus how many people actually take actions that are even slightly consistent with *really* believing in God.
As Palin is to Sullivan, Gladwell is to Anissimov.
Political correctness is a non-falsifiable faith..
I wonder if one reason saying that there are intelligence differences is politically incorrect is that intelligence is sometimes used as though it is a key to metaphysical merit of some kind. While I will agree less intelligent people may tend to have worse character in some ways, there are dumb honest people and I’d rate a dumb honest person over a smart crook, even though I admit the smart crook might do better in the world.
I wish intelligence was seen more like athletic talent, good to have but metaphysically meaningless. If that were the case differences in intelligence might be more readily acknowledged.
Strongly agreed. (See also Michael Vassar on the subject.)
“Only when he admits he’s wrong.”
Admitting you’re wrong and making money… not a good combo. Like nearly any public figure, Gladwell has obviously sold his profit-maximizer brain to the Almighty $, and that’s that, end of story. He’s been proven wrong, he is wrong, and if a bunch of people don’t realize that … not exactly news. Can we move on?
Just curious, to any Bias and Logical Fallacy experts here: does Gladwell exhibit some known bias or fallacy here? What is this type of mind-flatulence called?
What about the millions of African children who are suffering because the world is more than a decade behind on the effort to add iodine to their water and iron to bread, due to political correctness about IQ and intelligence rather than a scientific view? Can they just “move on”?
I would say that Gladwell has a bias in favor of narrative structures. (This is an empirically supported bias but I don’t feel like digging up references now.) He likes making nice, optimistic stories, whether they’re true or not. Adults like complex lies to make them feel better, while children use simple lies. The threshold complexity of the most popular lies at any given time is interesting, because it shows the level of complexity that most of the population likes to deal with at any given time. The lie has to be complex enough to be believed and not dismissed easily. If it’s too complex, it will not be understood. Gladwell’s writing lies right in the middle.
If the bias/fallacy could be pointed out as explicitly, simply and incontrovertibly as, say, a strawman or ad hominem, it would be easier to convince the nice-lies-believing-population (the Matrix comes to mind) that they’re being had – lied to – for monetary gain.
This is, no doubt, a common pattern of successful behavior that Gladwell engages in, with similar cases in history (shamans and other “spiritual” “healers” come to mind – success and respect with zero evidence – how can you resist such a sweet deal?).
Perhaps it would be worth digging up some of that empirical support and put Gladwell in the company he has chosen and belongs to.
The truth is a valuable thing, perhaps the most valuable (“the universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest”), but, looking at the incomes of the truth-valuing scholars and money-valuing Gladwells, humans value a nice, complex, absurd yet truthy enough lie quite a bit more ([invisible being] needs your money – lots of it); the conmen still nearly invariably win the support of the masses despite the mountains of evidence science can provide to squash them like the insignificant, though bothersome, critters they are.
Your IQ fetish is funny but has almost no likeness to reality. General intelligence is just plain wrong. People do not use 100% of their brain all the time because it is not very general. The wiring become set and cannot instantly change. Sure, there is a genetic factor, pre-wiring if you will.
The problem with IQ is it lumps memory and intelligence together. IQ also tends to be highly correlated with access time. How fast you can access and use information to leap to a judgment. Thus, IQ rewards snap decisions.
IQ is a test of memory + memory access time + the underlying algorithm. The algorithm most likely varies and changes just like a neural network. The memory accumulates errors. What of the access time you ask that is most likely genetic and thus fixed.
Frankly, I wonder about your IQ being an English major it cannot be very high.
Eablair, Gould was full of it, it’s true. Good thing he is fading fast, as you say. Let Pinker replace him.
Jimmy Dean,
Hello! Please read this.
What an accusation… I am a college dropout! My mother was an English major.
Note for some algorithms memory access time is the determining factor. However, they tend to be in jobs like the military or working as a computer (in the original meaning of the word someone who does math).
““Intelligence is important in social life.” Few claims in the social sciences are
backed by such massive evidence but remain so hotly contested in public discourse.
One obvious reason for such dispute is that many Americans are unsettled
by the possible social ramifications of the claim, accurate or not. Another reason
is that intelligence remains for many people an abstraction unconnected to their
personal experience-a mere “black box” that they can fill with any imagining.”
Let me tell you a little store from my life. After I finish my degree at an ivory league school I might add, I joined the military and was sent to officer training school. In boot camp, you have to memorize certain things. When I say memorize I mean word for word no substituting. They want you to memorize a few things, such as the code of conduct, general order of a sentry, marine hymn etc.
I was incapable of reciting these perfectly no matter how hard I tried. I would either draw a blank about what any given order was. Mix up order x and x + 1 or mess up a word or two all the time. For a long time I thought I was just stupid despite my academic achievements. Dumb football player types where easily able to do this simple task.
Have never gone to a public school in my life. I had never really had to take a standardized test. I did all right on the GRE scoring in the 75% percentile and eventually applied to graduate school. At another Ivy League school, I was surprise to find that they did not care about my test score enough to even request them so I never sent them in and I was accepted.
Public school are designed for one thing to make people ready for a job as a factory worker or in the military. Standardized testing is a filter. One that has never really been applied to me or to anyone from a certain social class. If it had, I would likely be a ditch digger, rather than a computer scientist.
You can think of me as the opposite of an idiot savant. The military don’t care about anything but memorization they would love a t-800
“Your IQ fetish is funny but has almost no likeness to reality. General intelligence is just plain wrong.”
Um, let me tell you a little story:
I was 10-12. I noticed something different about me and my pals. They seemed dumb, slow, and a bit too irritable for my taste, even violent – which is about the time me and my pals parted.
During the following decades, I’ve time and again seen them continue to make dumb choices, talking dumb, eating dumb, drinking dumb, working dumb, marrying dumb – the low IQ unfolding, bearing bitter fruit.
A high IQ child can tell that dumbness exists and matters – a LOT. It’s as obvious as fugliness and drop-dead-gorgeous beauty … or perhaps beauty or the lack of it isn’t (as) obvious to ugly people (as to the beautiful)?
I, on the other hand, have made choices that didn’t have that characteristic which they don’t and apparently can’t notice; if you’re dumb you don’t and can’t know that, or you wouldn’t be dumb.
Well, what do ya know, I’m much better positioned than they are. Oh well…
I am sure that some of your big angry pals where far better positioned then you for certain tasks. Bashing heads for example. They were smart enough to kick your ass. Some of the most highly paid people you would most likely call dumb. Your optimization function must be wrong.
These dummies make more then you and at least accounting to social darwinism are thus more evolutionarily fit. They are better adapted to whatever task that they are doing. Look at CEO vs a physicist vs a construction worker. Whom do you want fixing your plumbing? You have mostly never been placed in a position where you could appreciate this fact modern society is rather tame.
See my view is even less politically correct. I do not think people are equal in quantity or quality. People who believe in general intelligence only believe that quantity varies among individuals and that all people deep down inside think the same, foolish indeed and widely discredited especially among serious ai researchers. Psychologists and philosophers are kind of useless.
Oh and Michael that article is slightly humorous it suggest that IQ. Has a positive correlation to military bearing. Aka how good you are a polishing your boots, matching and acting tuff. Is that really what your view of intelligence is???
Michael @14, I seriously doubt that delays in dealing with iodine deficiency in Africa can be attributed to PC fear of IQ. By that logic, the medical profession in the developed countries too should have difficulty acknowledging iodine deficiency disorders, but they do not.
Brian at MGoBlog had an interesting response to Gladwell. Brian is one of the most well-respected sports bloggers out there.
http://mgoblog.com/content/unverified-voracity-unexpectedly-feisty
Scroll down to the giant block-quote proceeded by ‘Is this a shark?’ in bold. It’s just a few paragraphs but he sums it up well in the last sentence:
“Just because two guys have a lot of complicated metrics that say one thing doesn’t mean much to me when they’ve got the track record they do.”
My childhood pals are probably doing “just fine” as long as you have low enough expectations for what ‘fine’ means. Their lives amount to nothing but being disposable, somewhat poorly functioning cogs in a machine. They also require way too much maintenance; automation would and eventually will do a better job. It’s a sad fact that low intelligence just doesn’t get you more out of life. Intelligence sets the hard limit, the unbreachable ceiling on the achievement potential of a sentience.
About some dumber people making more money than me, you can’t be sure, can you? Anyway, because we have this type of gambling economy, income is a useless metric for success or any kind of fitness. Some hedge fund guy can get hundreds of millions per deal. Exceptional personal performance?
“They were smart enough to kick your ass.”
Since when does violence require being smart? I can go to any third world country and I can trust there to be a billion people smart enough to kick my ass.
The ultra-successful people, who stand lightyears tall, who make the most positive difference in the world, advancing humanity, are invariably intelligent, some on the order of having VY Canis Majoris Minds compared to the rest of us.
Why would one have an IQ fetish, as you call it? Because intelligence is the greatest most important thing humans – or any sentience for that matter – have, and it is the greatest single power in the universe. So if anything deserves to be a fetish, why not intelligence?
I’m not really sure what you’re trying to say.
I would love to see an anthropologist’s take on the responses here as well as the initial controversy. I find that perspective on IQ tests by far the most enlightening. Science runs into major problems when investigating human beings. There’s no way to prevent culture from affecting both researchers and subjects.
Brain Inside™
You’ll find multitasking of demanding applications, like scratching your butt and picking your nose a breeze with its 100 billion cores! Try it and you’ll never think the same again about not thinking. It’s fun for the whole civilization!
I don’t know what IQ test are exactly measuring but it’s not “intelligence” it’s more the ability to perform well in tests.
Some people perform well under stress and a test is also measuring how well your perform under the pressure of the test itself.
One day we might have the technology to measure “intelligence in general” emotional intelligence etc..
I think the result will be a lot more subtle result than a simple number that obviously doesn’t mean much.
For instance Einstein had a high IQ but nothing extraordinary, a lot of ordinary people have a higher IQ than he did.
If we take a group of people we train them for 3 months only do to IQ test they would perform a lot better at IQ test after, does it mean they are more intelligent after 3 months ? I don’t think so.
I bet most of the people who believe IQ test measure intelligence scored well in those test, am I wrong ? maybe the opposite is true too than it mean I probably have a low IQ I never took a proper IQ test so I don’t know.
ben951 an standardized test is basically a IQ test. IQ tests had to get a rename after all the bad press, in the 1970′s.
I know lots of Phd who are very good at math, yet piss poor in other areas. The idea that you can have some kind of general IQ is just untenable with today’s knowledge. It seems to be a fetish of the liberal arts. These fools want to think they could be engineers etc if they only put their minds to it. They are also the people writing the test so go figure.
1: If all intelligence is the same you should be able to use 100% of your brain at an given time. Obviously, this is false although you do use most of your brain over the course of a day, brain scans show that different parts are activated when you think about different things, IQ should die right here.
2: IQ ignores that fact that some people have very good memories and some very poor, Idiot savant vs. absent-minded professor. Memory errors and total size of the available storage play a role here.
3: Memory access time: some people are able to make quit discussions while others need more time to think. IQ is highly biased to snap decisions because of the time limits on the test. The opposite is also true some people are better in writing memories into long-term storage. Interestingly some individuals have no long-term storage, which as you may have guessed is a medical condition.
4: Quality of the decision how good someone’s judgment is varies greatly. Otherwise, intelligent people often take drugs, smoke and drink. People who believe in general intelligence only believe that quantity varies among individuals and that all people deep down inside think the same, foolish indeed and widely discredited especially among serious ai researchers. Psychologists and philosophers are useless. They could not program their way out of a paper bag. As one of my professors would say, you do not really know something until you can teach it to a computer.
5: People seem to be confused about what IQ is it is a general single value used to describe all activities. People with the same IQ are not interchangeable another blow to IQ. Let me ask you when was the last time an employer asked you what your IQ was. You will be asked specific field related questions testing your knowledge and aptitude in that area. The only area that IQ type testing remains important is in landing a jobs go in our most inefficient sector the military / government.
6: If you have ever read Vernor Vinge “A Deepness in the Sky.” You will know that the author is an opponent of general intelligence. The focused are hardly generalists. Vernor Vinge for those who do not know is the real brain behind the singularity ;) his opinion matters, moreover, he a math professor. As you may have guessed, he is a very slow writer.
jimmy I understand your point and it makes perfect sense to me, it should be possible at some point in the future though to quantify those different type of intelligence.
Linguistic,Logical,Spatial,emotional,social etc..
Measuring the output of a black box is hard. What we really need to do is not measure the output but understand the under lying algorithms. The algorithms themselves likely vary among individuals.
Both due to nature and nurture, before I joined the military I was mild mannered even passive afterwards it was as if I had been injected with shark adrenalin. The algorithms may not really be changing at all merely the weight (probability) of the nodes. It is possible that the algorithms vary as well to some degree over time.
My own thinking it that we should not be trying to classify intellect. From the output of the algorithms but rather understand the algorithms themselves. Science should not be regression / data mining. Correlation does not imply causation. Unfortunately, psychology going back to Freud has been repeatedly unscientific. Psychology seems more philosophy then science.
At least multiple IQs is a step in the right direction. However, it is likely that the algorithms themselves have some flexibility / overlap. I believe that this approach leads to an exponential increasing count of IQ types. I fear that you will miss the underlying algorithms itself and mix the algorithms inputs (data, memory, knowledge etc) with its outputs (actions, perceptions).
Jimmy, there’s nothing right or wrong about IQ tests. Like ANY test, they do their job; predict.
IQ tests are arbitrary tests that just have this unique ability to measure something about human capabilities that can be – and is, successfully – used for predicting behavior and success in a broad range of tasks and environments. It’s no surprise because IQ – the one we measure with the tests, anyway, if not the “real” IQ many say it doesn’t measure – is a universal “tool” and if you possess it, you can do well universally (though you may not choose to do – many intelligent people screw up bad).
Another test, though a narrower one in its predictive power, would be singing pitch accuracy measurement, like you have in karaoke games these days: the closer you get to the correct pitches, and the sooner you do so, can be used, I argue, to predict your chances of succeeding as a singer.
Of course you couldn’t tell whether the person would be a good fixed pitch instrument player, but you could be pretty sure that as a violinist, with its free pitch that you gotta find every time you make a sound, you would fail if you sing out of tune.
Every test gives us different kind of predictive power, but IQ tests give the broadest ones. High IQ scores also correlate with success as a musician.
I’d like to know what Nate Silver thinks of all this.
Nate’s busy thinking about game stats, I guess. Nate should join Team Singularity.
Predictive Power the future lies with specialist not generalist.
IQ tells you nothing about intelligence. If you believe in the IQ perspective, the brain is purely a black box to be measured and a monolithic one at that.
Not only that but IQ is a poor predictor of performance according to a lot of studies. I am sure your mind is already made up.
IQ was state of the art in 1950 it has not aged well. You likely have a few studies that agree with your viewpoint. The methodology of some of these studies is very poor, people with low IQ tend to not return questionnaire or lie. Fortunately, science is based on theories not correlation. Monolithic brain theory is false. IQ, which is a measurement device for this theory, must also be false. IQ at this point is an artifact of high school culture.
Jimmy, if you were an employer would the IQ score of the applicants matter to you? Say, you get a 1000 job applications, but you only need 10 people. About half of them have below average IQ, about half of them above average, and 10 of them are way up, far above the rest, and 10 are at the bottom. Would you be more interested in the top scoring individuals, or would you consider them equally to the lowest scoring 10? Would you expect their job performance to differ at all based on their IQ? Would you waste time checking out all 1000 applications or would you just interview the top 10 first, and then the next highest scoring ones, or start from the bottom and work your way up?
I still don’t see the basis on which you deny IQ and I don’t know where you get your data from. According to which studies? Care to name a few?