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Against the IQ-boosters
🕑 Added 2024-04-09 19:09:13 +0000 UTCI want to briefly make a case against the proponents of IQ. Notice that I don't say that I am making a case against the scientific concept of the Intelligence Quotient--although I should note that I am highly skeptical, and would be very interested to investigate any evidence against it. But I simply haven't looked at the IQ criticisms in detail.
I should probably just be up front about the nature of my IQ skepticism, and then go on to make my entirely separate case against IQ-advocacy. You're probably familiar with the controversy over IQ, in particular becuase of the book The Bell Curve, which has to do with measured differences in intelligence between races and genders. Since our society is obsessed with race and gender, this is the extent of the controversy.
If you have an egalitarian view of these matters (i.e. are progressive or left-wing), you are skeptical of IQ, because the results seem to indicate the presence of an innate hierarchy. If you tend to look more favorably on natural hierarchies (i.e. are conservative or right-wing) you will be more attracted to IQ as a confirmation of your worldview.
My skepticism springs from different concerns. I believe in the existence natural hierarchies, to an extent. But I also believe that nature is in flux. I believe it is "evolving," and yet I am also highly skeptical of Darwinism (we will not open that can of worms here).
Let's put it this way. Suppose the Romans had stumbled upon the idea of measurable "intelligence." Say you used a time machine and gave them the idea, which they would have to understand with their own language and cultural references and technology, and then they had set upon studying the barbarian tribes that they knew. How do you think the Germans would fare, IQ-wise? Probably pretty poorly. Maybe there are good Darwinian reasons to think that the ancient Germans were actually much lower IQ than modern Germans. I buy that.
But do you think it would be easy to convince someone who's passed through the cursus honorum that these drunken war-bands from the deep dark forests would one day produce Kant and Hegel and Beethoven and Schopenhauer and Wagner?
Something to think about.
My objection is less like the typical progressive, "It's racist and sexist, so it must be wrong," (by the way, the reason these types get so damn mad about stuff like The Bell Curve isn't because they don't believe in it, but because they really do), and more resembles the right-brained, touchy-feely, "IQ is all math and logic, and doesn't capture all types of intelligence."
Lots of people (men) on the Right like to think of themselves as "tough-minded," and "hard science" is tough-minded. They need to be hard and tough. Hyperborean. Armed with cold hard facts that don't care about your feelings. Numbers, ideally. Words are too close to feelings. Truth should not change like a woman's mind.
Of course there are always mystics and artist types on the Right too, who may be aware of Rene Guenon's notion of "the Reign of Quantity." It doesn't get more quantified than IQ.
In fact one could could make the case against IQ on anti-egalitarian grounds, since numbers create equalities just as much as they create inequalities. Two things with the same numerical value are equal in quantitative terms, even if they are entirely qualitiatively different.
I believe in a spiritual world. This is controversial. That is, there are things that are not material and cannot be studied by a scientific method with materialist assumptions (e.g. the principle of causal closure). But there is a communication between the spiritual and material world. This interaction may be studied in a rational (scientific in a broad sense) way, such as I am doing with my study of symbols. But it may also be directly intuited. I don't know what causes people to have such intuition, but I don't believe it has any corollation whatsoever with what is measured on an IQ test. There are spiritually-gifted geniuses and spiritually-gifted retards. As with intellectual gifts, the distribution is not fair. It is what it is.
My wife has demonstrated telepathic ability to me countless times. Prophetic dreams also. I am convinced that she is pulling data from the spirit world. My father has a similar ability. I believe Rudolf Steiner was a spiritual genius, as was Philip K. Dick (except that PKD was psychologically tortured and also had the artistic penchant for "tall tales" and these factors scrambled the signal in some weird and fascinating ways). I view myself as a spiritual midwit, for sure. Intellectually as well.
Now, if one is able to pull true information from an invisible realm, what else could this be but "intelligence"? In a military sense, that is exactly what it is.
OK, now that I've weeded out the redditors I can make my case against the IQ advocates (henceforth IQers). What I mean by IQ-advocacy is the idea that IQ ought to be a highly salient political problem. When it comes to politics, IQ either isn't a problem worth caring about, or it's a problem we can't solve. Either way.
I will rely on no statistical studies of any kind, merely ordinary reasoning, observation of everyday life, and perhaps a little rhetoric for the purposes of entertainment.
As far as I can tell, there are two claims coming from the IQers, or two beliefs that IQers seem to have. They may not both be made by the same poeple, and almost never at the same time, probably because if they ever were, the contradiction between them would be obvious.
1) IQ scores are highly positively-correlated with "positive life outcomes." This means that the higher your IQ is (everything else being equal), the more money you will earn, and the more prominent will be your social status. Health, wealth, and happiness: almost all good things flow from IQ.+
2) Many or most of the problems in our society come from the influence of low IQ people, their disastrous incompetence, as well as (this second part may influence the first) a silent conspiracy among many high IQ people to deny the existence of natural difference in IQ.
"The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must." I think that's Thucidydes. Sounds about right. "The strong rule the weak; the clever manipulate the strong." Can't quite remember where I heard that, but I think it was Boyd Rice. Plausible. Who believes that the stupid rule the smart?*
If scenario 1 is correct, we need not worry about any political advocacy on behalf of the high IQ. They are doing fine, and they will continue to dominate and thrive. IQers would like us to thank IQ for all the wonderful inventions we lesser brains enjoy today, and I for the most part unironically do. However, they never seem to want to blame these naturally-dominant brains for all the problems that also clearly exist in our advanced society. It can only be the the stupid that are dragging us down. But that almost seems like they want us to believe that the stupid are ruling the smart, which is not only implausible, but contradictory.
And that is why I added the second clause to point #2. If the dumb masses are causing everything to go to shit, then it has to be in some measure because (at least some) smart people are allowing them to. And this would in turn mean there is something wrong with point #1. All good things do not flow from IQ. There is one problem that IQ can't automatically solve, and that is the political problem.
If #2 is true, a likely reason that some intelligent people are systematically obscuring the fact that the strong are ruling the weak and the clever are manipulating the strong, is that it is to their advantage to do so. High IQ leads them to lie about high IQ. If so, clearly there is something perverse about IQ, and this should lead us to question it as a political value.
Let's say you're a large stockholder in a corporation, and you need to choose a CEO. You have a pretty smart normal guy, or a stone cold psychopathic genius. For my money, I would worry about the damage the psychopathic guy could do with all his IQ. I would vote for ordinary competence.
And if the genius psychopath makes your business run better, it's possible there's something wrong with what your business is doing in the first place.
But in order to assess all this, we might need to appeal to some values that have nothing to do with IQ, that can't be measured by the Test. Certain qualities, not quantities: wisdom, virtue, far-sightedness, religiousness or spiritualiy, even aesthetic sensibility. Things that ancient men would have understood without the guidance of modern science.
Maybe we need good people more than we need smart people. If true, this is pretty good news, since goodness can be cultivated, and IQ, as we are told over and over, cannot.
+ Am I not overstating the IQers position here? I don't think so. If anything, I'm underselling it. The faith in IQ produces a naive faith in AI, which is the very same abstract machinic conception of "intelligence" divorced from humanity. IQ is already AI. The culmination of IQ boosterism proceeds neatly from "Put the smart people in charge so they can solve all our problems" to "build a machine and tell it to solve all of our problems."
Much of modernity, in fact, is the project of trying to replace ineluctable moral and existential problems with some kind of automatic system or algorithm. Socialism, Capitalism, Science, technology: it all points to the robot. It naturally culminates in transhumanism and accelerationism.
*Of course some do believe that the stupid can rule the smart and the weak can rule the strong, through nothing more than the sheer number of them. Likely they imagine a scenario like the movie Idiocracy. However, if you recall the plot of that movie, a single man of pretty middling intelligence is able to save the day merely through the difference of intelligence between him and everybody else. The setup to this dystopia would superficially seem to support the numbers-over-intelligence thesis: successful high IQ couple, with all their caution and foresight, try to have a "planned parenthood," and fail to reproduce entirely, while a trailer-park redneck (they couldn't portray the stupid man anything but white) fathers many children with many wives like an ancient warlord.
But the problem here is that the smart people ought to be behaving like the stupid people. They're trying to apply intelligence to a act that should be instinctual, and thus they lose. Spengler talks about this very thing in The Decline of the West, in which he predicts depopulation along with urbanization. As soon as reproduction is subject to reason, the game is pretty much up.
Pro-IQ intellectuals don't think this way, of course. To them it is simply a problem of controlling the population of the underclass. But that's pretty much how they think of everything: in terms of exerting control. That's their overriding political value. Which may have something to be said for it, but they express it dishonestly in scientistic terms.
