Accelerating Future

Malcolm Gladwell calls those who accept the Mainstream Science on Intelligence statement “IQ fundamentalists”, but the reality of g and the predictive validity of intelligence tests are widely accepted as consensus science by intelligence researchers, with some caveats. Reading Eurekalert and PhysOrg, I see press releases practically every day that analyze the correlation of intelligence with a variety of genetic and environmental factors. Here’s one from yesterday:

Fit teenage boys are smarter
But muscle strength isn’t the secret, study shows

In the first study to demonstrate a clear positive association between adolescent fitness and adult cognitive performance, Nancy Pedersen of the University of Southern California and colleagues in Sweden find that better cardiovascular health among teenage boys correlates to higher scores on a range of intelligence tests – and more education and income later in life.

“During early adolescence and adulthood, the central nervous system displays considerable plasticity,” said Pedersen, research professor of psychology at the USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences. “Yet, the effect of exercise on cognition remains poorly understood.”

Pedersen, lead author Maria Åberg of the University of Gothenburg and the research team looked at data for all 1.2 million Swedish men born between 1950 and 1976 who enlisted for mandatory military service at the age of 18.

In every measure of cognitive functioning they analyzed – from verbal ability to logical performance to geometric perception to mechanical skills – average test scores increased according to aerobic fitness.

However, scores on intelligence tests did not increase along with muscle strength, the researchers found.

“Positive associations with intelligence scores were restricted to cardiovascular fitness, not muscular strength,” Pedersen explained, “supporting the notion that aerobic exercise improved cognition through the circulatory system influencing brain plasticity.”

I support the consensus science on intelligence for the sake of promoting truth, but I also must admit that it especially concerns me that the modern denial of the reality of different intelligence levels will cause ethicists and the public to ignore the risks from human-equivalent artificial intelligence. After all, if all human beings are on the same general level of intelligence, plus or minus a few assorted strengths and weaknesses, then it becomes easy to deny that superintelligence is even theoretically possible.

Some people are just more intelligent than others in every possible way. (Though most people have strengths that others don’t, such as through learning and talent.) This sounds unfair and politically incorrect, but that’s what we see in the data. The modern neo-mystical pseudoscientific folk view of intelligence seems to indicate that if someone seems genuinely more intelligent at first, that intelligence must surely be accompanied by some major flaws, to “balance it out” on the cosmic scale. This may be true sometimes — for instance, nerds tend to have poorer social skills than average — but it doesn’t always apply. Some people are just better at everything. This sort of talk is often considered forgivable when people mention it casually in real life in relation to a specific circumstance, but for some reason when it is put down in text in general terms, would-be egalitarians try to shoot holes in it with unscientific theories like Gardner’s multiple intelligences concept.

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As somewhat of an aside, Mr. Lynch criticized my critique of Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences” as “irreverent”. This is extremely unfair. All I said was that his theory is “something that doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny.” I criticize an ad hoc, unscientific theory that has practically no empirical evidence to support it, and the popular appeal of which derives entirely from its egalitarian and inclusive political flavor, and get called irreverent.

Calling Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences unscientific is not even nearly the most irreverent thing I’ve said, by a long shot. It shouldn’t even be considered irreverent, period. Theories of this sort, which have great popular appeal to the public and practically zero appeal to cognitive psychologists, should be regarded as guilty before proven innocent. Skepticism should be our default mode. Rain on as many unscientific parades as you can.

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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?

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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.”

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.”

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.

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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.

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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 quarter­back’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 “Outliers”) 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.

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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.

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