Why I Care About Malcolm Gladwell’s Igon Values
Why do I care so much about the Malcolm Gladwell issue? First is the matter of scientific integrity in journalism. Science-oriented folks care about it, and most everyone else doesn't. For instance, here is John Horgan from Slate:
Almost four years ago, an esteemed science journalist -- OK, it was me -- suggested that the days of truly momentous scientific discovery might be over. One symptom of science's plight, I predicted, would be that my fellow science writers would become increasingly desperate for and willing to invent "revolutionary" theories. To my delight, Malcolm Gladwell has provided the most spectacular confirmation of my hypothesis to date.
Compare this to the Columbia Journalism Review:
The answer to this charge is: Of course Gladwell lacks rigor – he’s a feature writer, not a brain scientist. Why some people – including the corporate titans who pay Gladwell’s speaking fees – seem confused about this I haven’t a clue. I can’t also help but wonder what would prompt the Times to haul out the heavy gun that is Pinker to shoot down a collection of magazine miscellany.
The reason why is that the way in which we think about probability and statistics determines the way we model the world, and the way we model the world profoundly effects the way we think, behave, and solve problems. A faulty map, like the kind that Gladwell spreads to millions of powerful and wealthy people, causes us to collectively trip and fall in the territory. The only problem is that the more of us use the faulty map, the easier it is to write off our faulty navigation based on uncontrolled external factors. This is groupthink on a stupendous scale. We have trouble identifying our mistakes if we all make them in the same way.
I am not a scientist. I didn't even attend college for more than a few classes. I don't pretend to be a scientist, but I do form science-based opinions based on the results reported by real scientists, whom I admire. But the real people with power in this world are journalists and politicians, not scientists. As an online journalist/intellectual type with more than 1,500 short popsci articles under my belt, I see my task as spreading scientific literacy to as many people as possible, and by extension the people in power, so they can make decisions based on empirical evidence and not folk theories. I see a responsibility to scientists and researchers to absorb as much of their material as I can and translate it into non-specialist language that any educated person can digest.
Malcolm Gladwell breaks that responsibility. Instead of trying to be interesting while being factual, he arbitrarily makes up counterintuitive ideas and then cherry-picks anecdotes and evidence to support them. This makes a mockery of science. I was shocked to see unscientific language being used in a review of What the Dog Saw (Gladwell's latest book) for my city's newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle:
The book - divided into three sections on minor geniuses, intriguing theories and personality analysis - is grounded on a bedrock of strong character portraits.
What the hell? A bedrock of... character portraits? Character portraits form a bedrock? This is a very low intellectual standard.
What is the alternative to character portraits? Well, studies that record the intelligence testing results of many tens of thousands of people and follow up on additional traits such as job performance, trainability, delinquency rates, vocabulary understanding, ability to deal with unexpected situations, identification of problems, dealing with orders, and a huge library of other g-loaded tasks, to give one example. Where does this wealth of information come from? To quote Gottfredson 1997:
Civil rights law and regulation have led many employers in recent decades to scrutinize more carefully the validity of their selection procedures (Sharf, 1988). They have also prompted a sometimes desperate search for less g-loaded selection procedures (procedures less highly correlated with intelligence) in order to reduce disparate impact of selection devices on minority hiring and thus employers’ vulnerability to employment discrimination lawsuits (Gottfredson & Sharf, 1988). As a result, there now exists a very large body of evidence concerning the predictive validity of various mental aptitudes, personality traits, and physical capabilities (e.g., see Gottfredson, 1986b; J. Hogan, 1991; R. Hogan, 1991; Landy, Shankster, & Kohler, 1994; Lubinski & Dawis, 1992; Schmidt, Ones, & Hunter, 1992; Stokes, Mumford, & Owens, 1994). Many of these data have been metaanalyzed.
This data is all there, yet Gladwell writes that it is impossible to determine how good of a teacher someone will be from their intelligence tests, or how well a starting quarterback will perform based on their draft position. Actually, you can use these metrics -- though the estimation will not be perfect, it's almost always better than guessing without information. Here's a couple more quotes on Gladwell from New York magazine's book review:
Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, has said, “What Gladwell is marketing is nothing but marketing—the marketer’s view of the world. But that view of the world is, I’m afraid, idiotic.†The judge and legal scholar Richard Posner, in a scathing review of Blink for TNR, complained that it was “written like a book intended for people who do not read books.â€
In a marketer's view of the world, science doesn't really matter. If it helps you sell something, great, otherwise, who cares?
There will probably always be marketers writing books on marketing. What is scary is when these marketing books acquire a vague scientific veneer that sends them screaming to the top of bestsellers lists. Most marketing books are complete, utter fluff -- the reason that Gladwell does better than his competitors is that non-scientists can understand his work and consider it scientifically informed on some level. Back to Janet Maslin's "Mr. Gladwell has a great penchant for quantifiable data."
The first issue, which I've just described, is a conflict between Gladwell and established science on intelligence. But what concerns me even more is deeper. It's a conflict between Gladwell and Bayesian reasoning itself. Instead of thinking about something and carefully considering all sides of an issue, Gladwell advocates making decisions in the time it takes to blink. This strategy can work alright for tasks like facial recognition, but in complex situations, it becomes worse than useless. Piles upon piles of scientific studies of human decision-making have determined that going with our "gut feeling" often leads straight down the rabbit hole to Fail-Land.
Reading Pinker's article, I figured that his main qualm with Gladwell -- also mine -- is that Gladwell urinates all over statistical analysis just because it's not perfect. (Implementing a true Bayesian rationalist would require infinite computing power.) Pinker's most important points are at the top of the second page of his review. The page that most clearly elucidates Pinker's motivation -- and sheds light on the entire article and what the conflict is really about, which I'd wager 90% of the commenters on the issue haven't realized yet because they think the issue is more about pretending you're an expert than using flawed statistical reasoning that rots the core of our society -- is a short piece published by the editors of the newspaper on how the idea for the review began:
Malcolm Gladwell recently said that if he were trying to break into journalism today, he would start by getting a master’s degree in statistics. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who reviews Gladwell’s “What the Dog Saw†on this week’s cover, might second this advice. Asked via e-mail what is the most important scientific concept that lay people fail to understand, he responded: “Statistical reasoning. A difficulty in grasping probability underlies fallacies from medical quackery and stock-market scams to misinterpreting sex differences and the theory of evolution.â€
Difficulty in grasping probability is another way of saying difficulty in following the axioms of probability theory, which is another way of saying difficulty in using Bayesian reasoning. The axioms of probability theory are here to stay. They seem even more fundamental than the laws of physics. Try to fight probability theory, and you will eventually lose.
There's a problem with probability theory: it's not sexy. Humans do not follow it at the conscious level very frequently because evolution is a lazy designer that follows a "good enough" philosophy of organism-making. So, there are two choices -- attempt to twist our minds into a configuration that follows probability theory more faithfully, or accept nonsense that makes us feel good. Most people who have this choice choose the latter. Twisting is difficult, but ultimately necessary, and with brain-computer interfacing it will eventually become much easier.
One of the fundamental ideas in Bayesian probability theory is that you assign prior probabilities to different possibilities based on prior knowledge. Gladwell is arguing that we throw away explicit priors and trust our gut, or assign all mutually exclusive future possibilities an equal probability weighting. Yet, that is just another type of prior -- one conveniently supplied at the subconscious level by our Bayesian brains. Now, it may be, in some cases, that the "hidden prior" that exists in our brains might be superior to a hastily assembled explicit prior, especially for tasks for which there was a strong selection pressure and evolution has a strong incentive for not messing up -- like facial recognition. For evolutionarily novel decision problems, such as judging the predictive value of IQ tests, forget it. We have to follow the data and see what it says, because our personal opinions are untrustworthy. Gladwell's habit of throwing away predictive indicators altogether will do us absolutely no good.
As we head into a dangerous period of technological development, it is more important than ever to be educated about statistical reasoning. Cognitive biases like scope neglect -- behaving the same way whether 1,000 or 1,000,000 lives are at sake -- will be our downfall if we aren't careful. Our "downfall" could be our literal extinction, from molecular nanotechnology, AI, or synthetic biology, as Bill Joy pointed out in his famous article.
The statistical ignorance that Pinker rails against ties in to why some people think that AI is straight-up impossible or implausibly difficult -- they view their own intelligence as a magical engine (the holistic view) rather than a large number of individually uninteresting but collectively powerful prediction and control algorithms (a reductionist view). Statistical analysis and decision theory still has a ways to go before creating AGI (in my view), but part of the reason why some people think that AGI is centuries off is that the achievements that these fields have already produced have gone under-recognized and unregarded by some of the best-selling authors of our time. Some of these authors will continue ignoring the power of statistical reasoning right up until the day a Bayesian AGI walks right up to them and shakes their hand.
The Problem is That Gladwell is Wrong, Not That He’s Popular, But the Latter Certainly Doesn’t Help
Malcolm Gladwell is acting slightly odd as the criticism of his thinking is reaching a "tipping point", to use the phrase he popularized. He posted a screenshot of the "igon value" section of his Taleb essay from the New Yorker, but the essay on his website still has the error, which is clearly not a casual spelling error as he claimed, but an idea error. If it were a spelling error, he wouldn't have made it two words.
Even the earliest commenters are confused about what point he is trying to make:
Not sure why my initial post is gone. Also not sure what your point is here. The image you posted is clearly from a computer screen, and all it shows is that the New Yorker finally cleaned up after you. The original article used "Igon", as does the version of the article hosted on your own website. (Readers can check the cached version of the article, in case Gladwell edits the current version without fessing up.)
Even his advocates know this:
Perhaps the point he is making is that the New Yorker has noted the spelling error caught by Pinker and done due diligence in fixing it -- like any good paper or magazine should.
Yet, it really looks like the point he is trying to make is that he never made the mistake to begin with(?) He admitted that he did a couple posts earlier. Is it somehow profound that the New Yorker eventually fixed his error?
The Atlantic Wire has a good roundup of several negative Gladwell reviews, and claims that it's because the reviewers are jealous without addressing or even mentioning their specific claims directly. Are object-level discussions out of style these days?
The Columbia Journalism Review makes excuses that he is a feature writer, not a brain scientist. Actually, according to Wikipedia, he's a "pop psychologist", and is extremely influential. Many people, including powerful businessmen who could benefit the world more if their views were scientific, take his ideas as well-supported. A commenter at the CJR says:
"Being popular" correlates with being influential. That Malcolm is a tireless and influential proponent of wrong ideas is a problem. There are two potential solutions for that problem: either Malcolm becomes less influential or less wrong. I would prefer the latter solution, but Malcolm seems hellbent on the former.
Is that so complicated?
The notion that anyone can do anything if they put their mind to it discourages the use of interventions to prevent cognitive deficiencies. For instance, the effort to put iodine in water and iron in bread in Africa, like it is throughout the developed world, is being slowed due to political correctness around the issue of intelligence and IQ. To imply that they need chemicals to make themselves smarter is to imply that they're stupid, and we don't want that. People in Africa and many other developing areas could benefit greatly if more powerful men and women realized that lower national IQ actually means something and that strategies to ameliorate it are worthwhile.
There is endless chatter on this available via Google News, if you want to jump into the debate in other venues. For a classic article by our friend John Horgan on Gladwell, see here.
Pinker on Gladwell, with Cameos by Sailer and Madrigal
In The New York Times, Steven Pinker takes the time to look at Malcolm Gladwell and his latest book of anecdotal curiosities coupled with feel-good populist platitudes. Gladwell is a poster boy for IQ denialism, which bores academics familiar with the mainstream science on intelligence, like Pinker. Here is an excerpt from the end of the review:
The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarterÂback’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliersâ€) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.
The reasoning in “Outliers,†which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. Fortunately for “What the Dog Saw,†the essay format is a better showcase for Gladwell’s talents, because the constraints of length and editors yield a higher ratio of fact to fancy. Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.
Congratulations to Pinker, who put in the effort to stomach Gladwell and his igon values for long enough to write a review. Meanwhile, in another review, Janet Maslin is falling for him head over heels:
The essay’s general point was that we know more about early success than about the kind that comes late in life. Its more startling and original idea — and it is vital to Mr. Gladwell’s success that he can reliably produce at least one such lightning bolt per discussion — was that the success of the late bloomer, like Cézanne or Mr. Fountain, is dependent on the help of others, like Zola or Mr. Fountain’s wife, Sharon. The effect of “Late Bloomers†has been quantifiable, which is good, because Mr. Gladwell has a great penchant for quantifiable data.
Mr. Gladwell has a great penchant for cherry-picked anecdotes that entertain and fool non-scientific literary critics like Mrs. Maslin.
Here is Gladwell's response on his website. Steve Sailer makes an appearance in the comments, where he definitively presents the data for there being a correlation between QB draft rank and pro performance, and Gladwell solves the problem by calling him a racist, misrepresenting Sailer's views, and refusing to respond to the data Sailer presents. Good job, Gladwell.
I also just noticed that Alexis Madrigal, one of the authors of Wired Science, has inserted a vapid contribution to the comments section:
Pinker's review was jocular, cruel and intended to embarrass instead of enlighten.
Part of it is: haters gon' hate. People like your work, so you've become an easy-as-Al-Gore target for those who deem popularity itself a crime.
The other part is: you get famous and simple mistakes people regularly make become inexcusable. Not to be too nice — after all, lack of humanity is a key attribute for an intellectual — but I want to say, "You know, Malcolm Gladwell goes out and comes into work overtired sometimes, too.
Alexis, it's disturbing that you side with a journalist/essayist over a scientist on the question of whether future performance can be predicted by past performance, or over whether interesting anecdotes are an appropriate substitute for double-blind scientific studies. It is absolutely true, as Pinker points out, that Gladwell "never zeroes in on the essence of a statistical problem and instead overinterprets some of its trappings". Pinker also makes several coherent critiques about Gladwell's beliefs about decision-making and its inherent tradeoffs, and it is quite ridiculous that Gladwell believes that an entire year of evaluation is necessary for determining whether someone is a good teacher. These are not small mistakes. Gladwell's writing is meant to make everyone feel good about themselves by ignoring decades of scientific results that cognitive performance on arbitrary tasks is statistically predictive of performance on future tasks.
I love Alexis' posts at Wired Science, but I am honestly shocked that he sides with Gladwell over Pinker. I guess that popularity and trendiness is just cooler to Madrigal than the truth shown by decades of intelligence research and articulated by 51 expert intelligence researchers. No amount of peer-reviewed research can best a fluff book that is written solely to make everyone and anyone feel good about themselves.
Another Intelligence-Enhanced Rodent, Hobbie-J
From ScienceDaily:
Over-expressing a gene that lets brain cells communicate just a fraction of a second longer makes a smarter rat, report researchers from the Medical College of Georgia and East China Normal University.
Dubbed Hobbie-J after a smart rat that stars in a Chinese cartoon book, the transgenic rat was able to remember novel objects, such as a toy she played with, three times longer than the average Long Evans female rat, which is considered the smartest rat strain. Hobbie-J was much better at more complex tasks as well, such as remembering which path she last traveled to find a chocolate treat.
One simple modification, three times longer memory plus a problem-solving ability boost. People underestimate the potential value of intelligence enhancement in humans because what they expect are just smarter humans, not humans that are smarter than any human that ever lived. Because the potential range of technological modifications is much larger than the range of natural variations, it's likely we'll eventually get smarter-than-human intelligence without even really trying, as long as we try out enough options.
Erythropoietin Boosts Brainpower
From PhysOrg:
Healthy young mice treated with erythropoietin show lasting improved performance in learning and other higher brain functions. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology tested the cognitive effects of the growth factor, finding that it improved the sequential learning and memory components of a complex long-term cognitive task.
Hannelore Ehrenreich led a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine in Göttingen, Germany, who studied the mice. She said, "Erythropoietin has been in clinical use for over 20 years to treat patients with anemic conditions, ranging from renal failure to cancer. It has recently received attention for its apparent ability to improve cognitive function in people with schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis. Here, we sought to investigate erythropoietin's effects in healthy mice".
Good job, Max Planck Institute.
Ebay version: A+++!!! Would read again!!!!
10-Year-Old Piano Prodigy Learned How to Play Complex Pieces in “About Two Days”
Meh, here's a video of a piano prodigy on CNN. My crude way of imagining a substantially enhanced human intelligence is to imagine a person who qualifies as a prodigy in practically every area.
BPS Research Digest: The Influence of Genes on Exceptional Cognitive Ability
From the British Psychological Association Research Digest blog:
We know a great deal about the relative genetic and environmental influences on average intelligence and on learning disabilities, but far less about the role of genes in exceptional cognitive ability – in lay terms, what we might call genius or innate talent.
A new "mega-analysis" of 11,000 twin pairs, aged between 6 and 71, has helped to plug that gap. The results suggest that genes exert a significant influence on exceptional cognitive ability, similar in magnitude to their influence on the normal range of intelligence. The findings challenge versions of the "discontinuity hypothesis" – the idea that the relative contribution of nature and nurture changes for exceptional ability.
Claire Haworth and colleagues, of the newly-established Genetics of High Cognitive Abilities (GHCA) consortium, combined data from six studies, involving twins from four countries – the UK, Netherlands, Australia and United States. Combining so much data altogether allowed them to restrict their analyses to participants in the top 15 per cent for intelligence performance, whilst still maintaining enough power for statistical tests.
By comparing intelligence differences between pairs of identical twins (who share all their genes) and non-identical twins (who share half their genes like normal siblings), the study showed that genetic differences explained approximately half the variation found in high intelligence, whilst shared environmental factors - those experienced by both twins in a pair, such as education and parenting style - explained just 28 per cent of the variation. The remaining influence is down to unique environmental influences (experienced by one twin but not the other) and other unknown factors.
The difficulty lies in reliably measuring any IQ over approximately 140. Above a certain range, IQ tests lose their reliability and repeatability. For a result to be scientifically sound, it must be repeatable.
Stray Dogs in Moscow Master the Subway
Here's the story. Animal intelligence is interesting. Dogs most of all because they've been selectively bred so much.
I've also been checking out the website for the Center for Avian Cognition recently. There are several other places where researchers study avian cognition.
I like to think that avian cognition studies give us a little window into how dinosaurs may have thought. They would both share similar limitations relative to mammals.
Intelligence Enhancement in Dogs via Selective Breeding
See this CNN article on dog intelligence. Apparently some breeds are approximately as smart as 2 1/2 year olds.
Garett Jones on IQ as a Social Multiplier
Roko, author of Transhuman Goodness, who I just met in person for the first time at the 2009 Singularity Institute Summer Intern Program in Santa Clara, pointed me to an interesting economist, Garett Jones, assistant professor at George Mason University and colleague of Robin Hanson. His work is quite provocative:
As a macroeconomist, I investigate both long-term economic growth and short-term business cycles. My current research explores why IQ and other cognitive skills appear to matter more for nations than for individuals.
For example: A two standard deviation rise in an individual person’s IQ predicts only about a 30% increase in her wage. But the same rise in a country’s average IQ score predicts a 700% increase in the average wage in that country. I want to understand why IQ appears to have such a large social multiplier.
The story is much the same for math and science scores: A person’s individual score predicts little about how she’ll do in the job market, but the richest and fastest-growing countries in the world tend to do much better on math and science tests. If the IQ multiplier is even half as large as it appears to be, then health, nutrition, and education policies in developing countries should be targeted at raising the brain health of the world’s poorest citizens.
An even more important implication of my research is that low-skilled immigrants should be allowed to migrate to the world’s richest countries: Low-skilled immigrants have little or no net effect on the wages of the citizens of rich countries, but their lives massively improve when they immigrate to these countries.
In the past, I’ve worked on Capitol Hill and I’ve studied the monetary transmission mechanism. I speak on policy topics regularly via Mercatus’s Capitol Hill Campus program and in other forums. Recent media include Forbes.com, Fortune.com, Wisconsin Public Radio, and CNN.com.
I've heard the idea before that improving IQ among the world's poorest might be the best way to improve their lot in life, but it's nice to see an economist primarily focused on the concept. For starters, we need to encourage the addition of iodine to salt and iron to bread in developing countries, as has been done in developed countries since WWII. According to the WHO, in 2007, nearly 2 billion individuals had insufficient iodine intake, a third being of school age. The numbers are similar for iron deficiency. Implementing these relatively cheap measures would be easy, if it weren't for the controversy of acknowledging that IQ exists and can be improved.
IA vs. AI, Again
My work was recently cited by Rémi Sussan at the Greek online journal Re-public, in an article "Transhumanism and Hermetism". The relevant passage says:
Are there any cybermarcionists? We watch them being erased in various currents about “singularity†who suspect that the real birth of transhumanity will occur with the creation of an intelligence, superior to the human being. This superior intelligence could be a mutant human being but for some,[10] the human brain is structurally too defective to allow the passage to a superior level. Only an artificial intelligence, maximized from the beginning, can allow this “singularityâ€.
The citation, [10], refers to a footnote that says, "See, for example, Michael Anissimov, â€Forecasting Superintelligence: the Technological Singularityâ€. I want to point out that nowhere in my article do I say that "the human brain is structurally too defective to allow the passage to a superior level". That claim is completely false. I only say that it seems likely that AI will cross the line into superintelligence before intelligence amplification (IA) does, for various reasons that are listed in the article. I absolutely do think that the structure of the human brain is amenable to intelligence enhancement, but it seems like enhancing the incredibly complex biological brain is a difficult challenge that would be most easily and safely approached with the assistance of strong AI.
I would further like to add that I believe there is a very strong bias that leads people to exaggerate the potential of IA over AI in their minds, because IA is 1) more personal, 2) has greater positive affect, 3) is more easily imaginable, 4) more flattering to humanity, and 5) featured more heavily in science fiction, to name a few reasons. I consider it possible that IA will lead to superintelligence before AI, and I am in favor of ethically cautious IA research, but it seems (to me, anyway) like seed AI is more likely to lead to strong superintelligence before any IA technologies.
Let me also point out, though, that there may be people in favor of IA over AI that have successfully sidestepped the above biases. Such people should feel free to share their arguments.
Neuroenhancement Talk from Utrecht University Medical Center
Apparently there is a link between brain connectivity and IQ, which might be exploited to create intelligence enhancement neuroceuticals. Sounds reminiscent of recent research that I wrote about in h+ magazine.