As a teacher, thank you for writing this. We continually produce generations of students who don’t value themselves based on the recall-memory standards.
I hope it is okay to borrow parts of this in discussion with my students?
Glad you enjoyed it! And absolutely. Feel free to use anything from here.
I'm fortunate that my son is excelling in school. He's only 13 and in National Junior Honor Society, gets straight As and all that. But who knows if that will continue. Either way, I don't want him to base his worth or intelligence off of these things. From a young age, I've tried to teach him that the effort matters a lot more than the results.
Fantastic piece. It reminds me that I want to write about the networking aspect of higher education. I don't know if you've ever read the book Pedigree, but it discusses how the elite have an advantage getting better jobs even when people from the lower class manage to make it.
Also, you write a TON. I love it. I've subscribed and look forward to checking out some more of your work. I was starting to get into the daily writing habit, but I'm in the process of starting my YouTube channel back up, and it's taking way more time setting up my office as a studio than I planned lol
"Are the any people considered public intellectuals who are onboard with the idea that IQ is a good gauge of intelligence?"
I don't know about public intellectuals but after the publication of "The Bell Curve", the American Psychological Association felt the need to issue a consensus statement reflecting expert opinion on the matter. It's called "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" and is readily available with a Google Scholar search. It summarizes a large body of evidence to conclude that IQ tests consistently measure something, that what they measure is consistent with commonsense definitions of "intelligence", that what they measure is strongly associated with success in school, that what they measure is more weakly but substantially correlated with other types of success, and that the measured differences between groups reflect actual differences between groups rather than problems with the tests.
Pretty much everyone hates these answers, which is why you don't hear about them much. Still, reality has been defined as that which doesn't go away when you ignore it.
"success in school" is where this runs into an issue. It comes back to educationism. We're saying that IQ tests predict outcomes in school, but why are we using school as a measure of intelligence? As mentioned in this piece, a lot of school is memorizing facts. That's a measure of memory. Are we saying memory = intelligence?
If we said IQ means better jobs, that's also a poor measure because higher paying jobs are also correlated with getting a degree.
The whole thing crumbles when you start questioning it and the arbitrary reasons we use these measures.
Your question was answered by the above statement that IQ was "more weakly but substantially correlated with other types of success". I'll refer you to a paper titled "IQ in the Ramsey Model: A Naïve Calibration" (easily searchable) which claims that between 1/4 and 1/2 of the global difference in income between countries is due to IQ differences in the populations. This is one of many studies reaching similar conclusions; the replication crisis isn't a huge problem in psychometrics. An effect that shows up globally probably isn't caused by the specifics of our culture (Americans are only ~5% of the global population).
I see "education" as an umbrella term for two things. One is the development of actual, useful skills. This "real education" is what produces surgeons, engineers, pharmaceutical chemists, chip designers, and other people who have the difficult skills that keep civilization running*. The bad news is that it's really hard and most people can't get very far with it.
The second is what I think you mean by educationism, a cargo-cult like practice that sits kids in desks for a specific number of hours and then gives them a piece of paper. It has the form of real education but not the content, and is primarily a signaling mechanism that says "I can sit in your desk all day and do something kind of like work".
*I'll even include the sorts of humanities majors who have skills like reading hieroglyphics.
I'm curious about the IQ debate. I'm sure Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris would disagree. Are the public intellectuals, or pseudo intellectuals? I'm not sure. Harris basically got cancelled by the elite left to talking to the author of the Bell Curve. That debate was painful to listen to as it was my first time listening to Ezra Klein who at the time I found insufferable. But he did convince me to read up more about the history of IQ and how it tied into Eugenics and I was promptly horrified.
But the fact the military uses it as a filter probably means something. In my own experience there was no denying IQ tests measured book smarts...but that doesn't conflict with what you are saying about overvaluing book smarts when many a plumber and contractor clearly can handle complex problems. I'm one of those book smart people that lack common sense. Anyway, always interested in hearing both sides of this.
If you're curious about the IQ debate, the paper I mentioned above, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns", is probably the best place to start. It was specifically written to address those issues and the American Psychological Association is about as credible a source as you could hope for on psychometrics.
It's a little old, which isn't a problem (the science is settled well enough that it doesn't change from year to year or even decade to decade) but should be kept in mind when reading all the disclaimers that say things might be trending toward improvement. Future people that we are, we know that they didn't.
1. Many people would benefit from watching The Wizard of Oz. The Scarecrow wants brains, but all he gets from the Wizard is a diploma.
2. John W. Gardner is quoted to have said, “The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing not good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”
As a teacher, thank you for writing this. We continually produce generations of students who don’t value themselves based on the recall-memory standards.
I hope it is okay to borrow parts of this in discussion with my students?
Glad you enjoyed it! And absolutely. Feel free to use anything from here.
I'm fortunate that my son is excelling in school. He's only 13 and in National Junior Honor Society, gets straight As and all that. But who knows if that will continue. Either way, I don't want him to base his worth or intelligence off of these things. From a young age, I've tried to teach him that the effort matters a lot more than the results.
Does this sound like something that would be better for you?
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/white-paper-for-network-based-higher
Fantastic piece. It reminds me that I want to write about the networking aspect of higher education. I don't know if you've ever read the book Pedigree, but it discusses how the elite have an advantage getting better jobs even when people from the lower class manage to make it.
Also, you write a TON. I love it. I've subscribed and look forward to checking out some more of your work. I was starting to get into the daily writing habit, but I'm in the process of starting my YouTube channel back up, and it's taking way more time setting up my office as a studio than I planned lol
"Are the any people considered public intellectuals who are onboard with the idea that IQ is a good gauge of intelligence?"
I don't know about public intellectuals but after the publication of "The Bell Curve", the American Psychological Association felt the need to issue a consensus statement reflecting expert opinion on the matter. It's called "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" and is readily available with a Google Scholar search. It summarizes a large body of evidence to conclude that IQ tests consistently measure something, that what they measure is consistent with commonsense definitions of "intelligence", that what they measure is strongly associated with success in school, that what they measure is more weakly but substantially correlated with other types of success, and that the measured differences between groups reflect actual differences between groups rather than problems with the tests.
Pretty much everyone hates these answers, which is why you don't hear about them much. Still, reality has been defined as that which doesn't go away when you ignore it.
"success in school" is where this runs into an issue. It comes back to educationism. We're saying that IQ tests predict outcomes in school, but why are we using school as a measure of intelligence? As mentioned in this piece, a lot of school is memorizing facts. That's a measure of memory. Are we saying memory = intelligence?
If we said IQ means better jobs, that's also a poor measure because higher paying jobs are also correlated with getting a degree.
The whole thing crumbles when you start questioning it and the arbitrary reasons we use these measures.
Your question was answered by the above statement that IQ was "more weakly but substantially correlated with other types of success". I'll refer you to a paper titled "IQ in the Ramsey Model: A Naïve Calibration" (easily searchable) which claims that between 1/4 and 1/2 of the global difference in income between countries is due to IQ differences in the populations. This is one of many studies reaching similar conclusions; the replication crisis isn't a huge problem in psychometrics. An effect that shows up globally probably isn't caused by the specifics of our culture (Americans are only ~5% of the global population).
I see "education" as an umbrella term for two things. One is the development of actual, useful skills. This "real education" is what produces surgeons, engineers, pharmaceutical chemists, chip designers, and other people who have the difficult skills that keep civilization running*. The bad news is that it's really hard and most people can't get very far with it.
The second is what I think you mean by educationism, a cargo-cult like practice that sits kids in desks for a specific number of hours and then gives them a piece of paper. It has the form of real education but not the content, and is primarily a signaling mechanism that says "I can sit in your desk all day and do something kind of like work".
*I'll even include the sorts of humanities majors who have skills like reading hieroglyphics.
I'm curious about the IQ debate. I'm sure Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris would disagree. Are the public intellectuals, or pseudo intellectuals? I'm not sure. Harris basically got cancelled by the elite left to talking to the author of the Bell Curve. That debate was painful to listen to as it was my first time listening to Ezra Klein who at the time I found insufferable. But he did convince me to read up more about the history of IQ and how it tied into Eugenics and I was promptly horrified.
But the fact the military uses it as a filter probably means something. In my own experience there was no denying IQ tests measured book smarts...but that doesn't conflict with what you are saying about overvaluing book smarts when many a plumber and contractor clearly can handle complex problems. I'm one of those book smart people that lack common sense. Anyway, always interested in hearing both sides of this.
If you're curious about the IQ debate, the paper I mentioned above, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns", is probably the best place to start. It was specifically written to address those issues and the American Psychological Association is about as credible a source as you could hope for on psychometrics.
It's a little old, which isn't a problem (the science is settled well enough that it doesn't change from year to year or even decade to decade) but should be kept in mind when reading all the disclaimers that say things might be trending toward improvement. Future people that we are, we know that they didn't.
Two things come to mind after reading this:
1. Many people would benefit from watching The Wizard of Oz. The Scarecrow wants brains, but all he gets from the Wizard is a diploma.
2. John W. Gardner is quoted to have said, “The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing not good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”