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Malcolm Gladwell has a new book out, which means that he’s so popular that the backlash will be automatic, a product of muscle memory more than genuine resentment. Though I do understand that there’s a bit of burning resentment and anger at anyone who has managed to write books that so well lend him to getting those $40,000 a speech consultant fees he can command. I can’t bring myself to be angry with him or jealous, though. Someone’s got to be pulling down that dough, and I’d prefer it if it were a cheeky, liberal-minded writer rather than the alternatives.
This is why I can’t help but like the guy: He’s reached the “automatic bestseller list” point in his career, and what does he choose to do with that automatic audience, many of whom are management wanks? He chooses to explain how yes, nurture is more important than nature when it comes to genius and success. This sounds very “duh” to us (think of all the reams and reams of academic work and blogging that can be boiled down to the word “privilege” alone), but believe me, it’s far from settled in the popular culture. I’m sure if you put it to a nationwide poll and asked if the great geniuses of Western civilization were almost all white and male until the 20th century, a majority still to this day would suggest that something about being white and male inherently inclines you to genius, instead of the much more likely answer, which is that the oppression of non-white people and women throughout said history means that their genius had little expression. And that even when it was expressed, history suppressed it.
What sounds interesting about this book is that Gladwell wrestles the discourse away from just the subject of privilege and seems to be asking about background in a less loaded way. I mean, most of it is about privilege, it looks like, but by phrasing the question a little differently, you can see how there’s other factors at play. For instance, Barack Obama is going to be heralded for a long time as a political genius, but it’s not that it’s inborn so much as he’s got a fresh perspective due to having a much different career than a lot of the more traditional Democratic politicians who in the past would be considered the only eligible ones to run for President. And it’s not just the race thing, but also that he comes from an urban perspective (almost every politician except JFK I can think of was more rural), and that he’s more writerly and introspective.
Still, there’s no way around it---the books sounds foremost like a dissection of privilege. And he shoved it into a space that’s usually hostile to that message, that successful people owe it more to their background than their inherent superiority over people who aren’t as successful, but likely as smart and creative. Unfortunately, according to this review, Gladwell indulges his urge to wank off on pet theories a little too much, using rice paddies to explain why some Asian nations best the rest of the world in math scores. I think the likelier explanation is more mundane, which is that Asia began to rise in the world markets at precisely the time that economies started to be driven more and more by science and technology, and they reacted to that environment by putting the focus on math in schools. Americans, alas, just don’t care as much. But I’m curious to read the book and see if Gladwell makes his case.
The reviewer makes a couple of sloppy criticisms I want to address.
Gladwell’s “Outliers” model—the idea that success is shaped by environment, not genetics—has two additional problems. First, it is insufficiently predictive. We can easily see that favoring people with January birthdays over people with September birthdays, as Canadian hockey leagues do, can have consequences. But how could anyone have predicted that postwar Jewish lawyers would be rewarded for their expertise 20 years down the road? Or that, 20 years after Bill Gates was born, the advent of the personal computer would turn programming geeks into masters of the universe? These are historical accidents, for which it is impossible to prepare. Success, in these instances, is simply a byproduct of luck.
This leads us to the second problem with Gladwell’s model: It is every bit as deterministic as the “genius” model. “The successful are those who have been given opportunities,” he writes, “and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.” But opportunity is as much out of our control as genetics. What if the opportunity doesn’t come? If, as Gladwell suggests, we are prisoners of our ethnic or cultural legacies, what if we are of the wrong ethnicity or the wrong culture? How can we ever hope to succeed? If, on the other hand, we can overcome these environmental barriers through relatively quick fixes, as Gladwell suggests elsewhere, then how significant are those barriers?
That luck is hard to predict and that determinism is depressing have nothing to do with whether or not Gladwell is right. It’s funny, because the reviewer criticized Gladwell earlier (and correctly) for the habit of ignoring evidence that doesn’t fit his theory. I fail, however, to see how rejecting a theory because you find the implications unpleasant is any better. I’d also add that quick fixes don’t necessarily mean barriers are insignificant. Sometimes big problems do have elegant solutions. Plus, a lot of the fixes implied by this theory only sound quick on paper. For instance, “This American Life” had a segment on one of the so-called quick fixes, a program on the Harlem Children’s Zone’s pipeline program that starts with the Baby College. On paper, the program sounds like a classic quick fix---the idea behind it is to create a childhood that more closely resembles that of a privileged child for underprivileged kids starting from infancy on. (The Baby College teaches parents who don’t have access to child psychology books and magazines and social circles the principles of child psychology. Little things like time outs instead of spankings supposedly pay off in big dividends down the road. I’m not saying I agree or disagree, just reporting on what they’re doing.) But in reality, it’s not a small, quick thing at all. It requires a big commitment, huge amounts of work, and I suspect there’s a lot of time spent putting out fires and clinging to kids whose circumstances make it hard to stick to the pipeline.
And that’s why it’s not fair to say that the nurture theory is just as deterministic as the nature theory. Because you can, with research, funding, and will, change people’s circumstances. This shouldn’t be especially controversial. Look at what happened after unionizing lifted white working class people into the middle class---their kids flooded colleges, and intermarriage with the professional classes happened, and now you have rich white people pretending to be country music listening, pick-up driving hillbillies.
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Posted by
Amanda Marcotte on 10:35 AM •
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Considering your occasional disparagement of the concept of free will, shouldn’t you be rather attached to determinism?
$40k? If only…
I’m an event planner - just tried to book him a couple months back, got quoted $80-100k because of the new book. Granted that’s a negotiable figure but he left $40k territory behind long ago.
He chooses to explain how yes, nurture is more important than nature when it comes to genius and success
Success, yes, absolutely. Genius, it’s still pretty much 50-50: you either have it or you don’t, and it’s either fostered by family, culture, and government policy or its not.
I can see where Gladwell, a bi-racial Gen Xer who’s has gotten over the Boomer obsession with identity politics, would have a personal interest in the topic. I’m looking forward to reading the book, keeping the usual Gladwell pitfalls in mind as I do.
I think the likelier explanation is more mundane, which is that Asia began to rise in the world markets at precisely the time that economies started to be driven more and more by science and technology, and they reacted to that environment by putting the focus on math in schools.
There was also an existing culture in Confucian-influenced Asian societies that venerated learning (particularly the rote type, with both the advantages and disadvantages that implies). Combined with increased post-1948 access to education regardless of class/caste, and the fact that STEM education is minimally based in rote learning, it isn’t surprising. That’s a lot more significant contributor than a “rice-paddy work ethic” or larger geo-economic cycles.
He chooses to explain how yes, nurture is more important than nature when it comes to genius and success
I think it is more of a conditional statement: given genius, success is contingent up on access to resources.
We have seen too many examples of late of how success isn’t dependent on genius, given ready access to both human and material resources, e.g. W.
Well, that’s a funny sentiment, Flippanter. There’s a difference between the philosophical concept of determinism and the kind of determinism that suggests that cannot effect the circumstances of opportunity afforded to people by their birth. It’s not even a particularly subtle distinction. “Free will,” and whether it exists or not, is essentially irrelevant as to whether individual or collective/social actions can effect a change in the opportunities available to, say, children born to poor, black families. To say that our efforts make no difference is one kind of determinism; philosophical determinism is concerned with the choices we make, not the results of our actions.
It’s obvious that a child from an upper class, or even middle class economic background has advantages over children from poor or working class families. Bill Gates didn’t emerge from a blue collar household to become a billionaire, or come out of an inter-city neighborhood and succeed against all odds. Asian families, at least the ones I am familiar with place a lot of emphasis on education, more so than the white Appalachian families, or the working class southern white or African American families that I know.
There are certainly a lot of Asians at Georgia Tech. I’m not sure about the other schools in the University system, but I suspect that Asians are enrolled in a percentage that exceeds their percentage in the general population. African Americans are certainly underrepresented at the big University schools, like UGA, except in athletics, or course.
One reason for this is that the schools in heavily African American communities are not as good, overall as the schools in primarily white districts. A lot of the reason for this is racism, despite the lip service the different boards of education give to equality of opportunity.
It is in the interest of the people who run things in the south, the same people who have been running things since the old plantation days, to keep the population ignorant and uneducated. Playing the races off against each other, poor whites against poor blacks in particular, is an old southern political strategy which has caught on quite well nationally in the past few decades.
Genius may not be a heritable trait, it tends to pop up in all races, genders, nationalities and economic backgrounds, but privilege is certainly passed along from generation to generation.
In Canada at least, if your parents can’t afford to send you to university, you pretty much have to be a straight-A student to get the financial help you need. So if you’re black and poor, you pretty much have to be a genius to be afforded that opportunity. Whereas if you’re white and middle-class, you only need to be “average.”
In other words, I could care less about “genius” and helping it find success.
I’ve never been all that impressed by Gladwell. His pieces in the New Yorker often seem to cherry-pick facts on the way to counterintuitive (or just plain silly) conclusions. For instance, I wasted 20 minutes on an article of his purporting to prove that pit bulls are no more vicious than any other dogs.
“Gladwell indulges his urge to wank off on pet theories a little too much...”
Indeed.
Let me preface my comments by asserting some actual knowledge on this kind of topic…
First of all, Louis Bayard is an idiot who doesn’t really understand either the topic or Gladwell (unlikely since, if you look at his blog, Gladwell is a pretty clear writer) well enough to make a good review.
Now, what’s really hard is *explaining* all this, which is why I would refrain from commenting on the rice pad scenario unless one has actually read it. In any event, certain countries are good at math and physics because they are cheap topics to teach and it doesn’t conflict with any but the most marginal of culteral preferences (eg bible says pi is 3 or 3.14). Most countries have at least one period where they were tops in math--it’s just that accessible for improvement. However, that possibility doesn’t actually conflict with the rice paddy thesis.
This leads to the really subtle point--Intelligence is a cultural artifact. Not that cultural affinity with test makers makes a person give higher scores on the produced tests. It’s that the richer your culture is, the higher your (base?)IQ will be--up to the median individual proficiency of your culture. That richness involves nutrition and medical care over a lifetime as well, you know!
The contradictory insight proves to be that all information and ways of knowledge and practice is entirely relative. 2+2=5 if you want it to be, and it doesn’t really say one thing about how smart you are. The mind makes its perception of salient information by judgeing what pleases it, what frightens it, and what is frightened by it. These three items hold up a schema that develops into what one could call a culture. To put a fine point on it, what matters to us is not that gravity causes things to fall down, but scenarios that makes us happy/greedy, frightened, or anticipatory/aggressive. We think of apples or rain or arrows falling down, not equations, and it’s a mistake to think of a genius as someone who can manipulate symbols especially well--there isn’t such a thing as objectively the smartest or even really really smart. How real anything is to anyone is *entirely* relative, and that relativity is entirely modulated by a culture. It matters if the archetype of sharp is a rose’s thorn, rather than a glass shard! Every “real” thing or event is interpreted through lenses that introduce entropic losses of data.
What a rich culture does is offer its citizens a range of ways to *feel* about anything. This includes the use of a visual, audial, and metaphorical spectrum that gives an individual an option of using a particular kind of lens to percieve something in his or her infor-sphere which is not available to a different, smaller culture. Iain Banks kinda hits people over the head in his Culture novels with this attitude.
Sooo, if there’s no such thing as smart, or genius, why do we feel as if there are such people? Simple, we are talking about people who can manipulate cultural artifacts into things that Culture values as good or impressive. Not necessarily the most capable linguist, speedy mathematician, highest leaper, or even the most inventive engineer are necessarily thought of as smart (at least until later when the Culture expands!). It is a matter of what is *immediate* to other organisms in the cultural medium. A genius is not someone who is the smartest about something or other. A genius is the most adapted organism in his or her cultural niche. Albert Einstein, for example, was *not* the smartest guy in his time, if you went by proficiency and comfort in mathematics, for example. Albert Einstein was famed because he could *create*, and make accessible new insights to the physics cultural medium. Being able to change a culture, is what a genius *is*. It’s easy to see this with Mozart and Frank Lloyd Wright (and Michael Jordan!), but this is integral and pervasive to how a culture changes. It’s also why IQ tests have fundamental limitations about geniuses. It literally cannot measure who is a true genius and who isn’t because those people change the metrics of the test! People who score high (error margins highest in the upper percentiles and gradually shrinking as one goes down to the median, after which it increases again) on intelligence test--merely score high (or low) on them.
end
p.s. Just because I saw Kung Fu Panda a few days ago, can I mention that I truly and proundly hate that movie and especially its message? The plots aren’t at all the same, but it has the same fundamental nastyness of A Merchant of Venice. I never wanted to root for the “bad guy” so hard!
factoid: It takes roughly 10 years to be truly good at anything, no matter how “smart” you are. It’s just the way the brain works.
Pit bull aren’t all that more vicious than any other dogs. Shih Tzus are vicious dogs.
Pit bulls are dangerous because they are big and strong dogs, and people like to abuse them.
I believe that genius, or at least high intelligence, is heritable, with a caveat… it is *really really easy* to screw a human brain up.
If you had the genes to be a genius, but you ate some peeling lead paint as a baby, you’re not a genius anymore. If you had the genes to be a genius, but you suffered severe malnutrition as a baby, you’re not a genius anymore. If you had the genes to be a genius, but you suffered loss of oxygen in the womb for a few minutes, you’re not a genius anymore. And if you had the genes to be a genius, but you never received an education… maybe you *are* a genius but who’d be able to tell?
Also, if a genius is strongly encouraged and/or required to stay at home, wash dishes, and clean house all day… only her kids will ever know she was a genius. My mom has an IQ of 160. All she has ever done with her life is raise kids, so besides us, who would know?
Intelligent people tend to have intelligent children… even when you factor out being raised by those people. My ex had an extremely dumb grandmother and a not-so-bright mother who raised him, and a brilliant biological father that he didn’t meet until he was 16, upon which time he discovered that he and the father he’d never met shared a passion for science fiction, tinkering with cars, love of high end electronics, and interest in knowledge. On the other hand, said father had never gone to college, and was a mechanic. My ex, I met in college, and he had ambitions to be a psychiatrist… then he gave his college fund to his mother so she could buy a house, she never paid him back, and after working odd jobs in a toy store and a department store, last I checked he writes press releases for a science organization. Maybe he’s a genius, but who will ever know? His socioeconomic class didn’t allow him to finish college, he was trained to fear and resent white-collar work as “soul destroying” (because working in a department store is *totally* not soul destroying *snort*), so he took years and years to end up in any kind of profession that requires a mind. He was a very, very smart man, and he sure didn’t get it from the people who raised him… but what he did get from them ended up destroying his ability to prove his intellect to the world.
So I do think intelligence is heritable. But it doesn’t *matter*, because it is very easy to damage a child in a way that keeps them from expressing genes for intelligence, very easy to prevent a smart person from getting an education that allows them to show intelligence, and very easy to train even smart and educated people into cultural preferences that will cause them to never show their smarts outside their immediate circle of family and friends. Or, in other words, intelligence may be inherited but stupidity isn’t necessarily. People doing badly on tests, people not having an education, people not creating inventions that are remembered throughout time… none of that has to do with the components of intelligence that are inheritable.
“So I do think intelligence is heritable. But it doesn’t *matter*, because it is very easy to damage a child in a way that keeps them from expressing genes for intelligence, very easy to prevent a smart person from getting an education that allows them to show intelligence, and very easy to train even smart and educated people into cultural preferences that will cause them to never show their smarts outside their immediate circle of family and friends. “
Alara Rogers, that is how I’ve long looked on it too: nature defines a ceiling but nurture gets a veto.
The nature~nurture conundrum can’t be argued at all well
trans-racially ... across demographics, at all.
It is appropriate to do only within a cohort as homogeneous as possible.
Confounding factors otherwise....way too many.
Good comparatives might work, best with compartmentalized populations.
“Bill Gates didn’t emerge from a blue collar household”
No, Bill Gates III Jr certainly didn’t do that.
The best way to study nature vs nurture that I’ve heard of is studies of twins separated at birth. The degree of similarity is quite surprising. That said, I completely accept Alara’s point.
The idea of the “blank slate” as a model for the human mind really doesn’t work. I think some political thought is still evolving to deal with that fact.
“2+2=5 if you want it to”
No it doesn’t. It equals four(*). You can believe it’s five, but you are wrong. This is an important thing to realize. Some people are just wrong about things. That said, few things are so unambiguous. Some beliefs are wrong but are somehow accurately descriptive of the world, be that inside or outside operating human brains.
(*)Yes, you can make a silly argument about base three numbers so 2+2=1 or something but that is not what the poster was saying. Some things are factual and are not an aspect of culture even if we can sometimes be mistaken about what those things are.
Flippanter, it doesn’t really follow. Why does that haunt and traumatize you so much? My main objection to “free will” is that it’s a religious concept that hinders productive thinking, and that people who are willing to shed themselves of the religion box should reconsider “free will”. Now, what do you think of the actual content of the post, instead of how you can connect to an odd hobby horse?
Alara, I know you’re not meaning to, but you’re positing something that sounds close to a theory that people have a baseline intelligence and environment can detract. From what I understand, it’s not that simple. Brains are very flexible, actually. You can “make” someone smart as easily as you can “make” someone less smart. The science backs this theory up. What’s indisputable is that IQ scores are rising across the board for Americans, which is called the Flynn Effect. Now, intelligence might have a heritable component, but what’s indisputable is that if it was just genetics, there’s no reason to see a significant rise generation to generation when the gene pool is, for all intents and purposes, identical. Younger people are getting better at IQ tests, probably because the modern world moves a lot faster and your brain has to work a lot harder at keeping up, which means that people are, yep, getting smarter.
“It’s that the richer your culture is, the higher your (base?)IQ will be--up to the median individual proficiency of your culture. That richness involves nutrition and medical care over a lifetime as well, you know!”
This is almost correct. Test a set of privileged kids IQs and you’ll still get a bell curve. Test a set of underprivileged kids IQs and you’ll get a bell curve with a lower average, sure. But what causes the variance in each case?
“Intelligence is a cultural artifact. “
Partly. But mostly not. It’s mostly an artifact of brains.
BTW, where is culture, would you say? What is it made of? How is it manifested?
“How real anything is to anyone is *entirely* relative, and that relativity is entirely modulated by a culture.”
Bollocks. Every culture has bollocks. They are not a cultural artifact. They are real to everyone. There is no relativity in bollocks. Why are you unable to accept that structures in the brain are inherited?
me, I am saying nothing about the general consensus about 2+2=4 or even the procedure. Culture, after all, *is* limited by outcome within the physical world. However, that limitation is nebulous, and there are plenty of ways for a Culture to work around (by intent or accident) certain things. How do you think the Republican Party and its followers operate? They survive by letting other subcultures do the hard work of pulling sustenance from wherever, and then raiding as Vikings will for much of that loot. They believe what they believe, and promote people like Karl Rove as a genius, because it allows them the most pleasing context, as well as the skills, to do what they are good at. To actually *fit* in that subculture, you actively have to believe various ideological artifacts that are pretty much the equivalent of 2 + 2 = 5, and these beliefs are necessary for the successful perpetuation of the skillsets that allow the subculture to make a living.
“Younger people are getting better at IQ tests, probably because the modern world moves a lot faster and your brain has to work a lot harder at keeping up, which means that people are, yep, getting smarter.”
I think this aspect is as important as nutrition, lead poisoning, etc. The brain demonstrably responds to stimulus. One example I’ve heard of is a study of London taxi drivers. They all had a particular region of their brain enlarged because part of their job specification is that they need to know all the streets of their city (they are tested on it). And some of the brain regions that are tested in IQ tests are being stimulated by some means (probably internet use, texting and video games). I wouldn’t conclude from this that all regions that are stimulated in privileged children are being so in all kids in the US. But hopefully it will level the playing field, or at least require privileged kids to up their game: they only need to be a bit better to claim superiority, not vastly better.
Note I said “claim”. Not all claims are legitimate.
“that are pretty much the equivalent of 2 + 2 = 5”
I don’t think you realize quite how profound a fact 2+2=4 is. It is a property of the physical world. As I said, you can believe 2+2=5 and it can be necessary to believe it, etc, etc. It’s still wrong. Incorrect. False.
Structures in the brain *are* inherited. But IQ tests are culturally devised tools for measuring intelligence. What this means is that IQ tests don’t necessarily measure intelligence per se, as much as measure how well a person fits into current cultural standards. In the past, it was found that IQ tests were biased against women and other minorities by how they were written. For instance, a very common question (at the basic leve) was “What is on the top of a house”. The answer should be chimmey, always, right? Wrong. In Italy, crosses are on top of houses, and in other countries, there is either something else or nothing on top of houses.
I always take IQ test results with a grain of salt. As a teacher, it has become clear to me over the years that it is nearly impossible to precisely quantify and measure intelligence with the tests we use today. We can only measure the outcomes. That’s why students who take the test are encouraged to “learn the test”, take a good nights’ sleep before, and practice rote memorization of facts. That is, in fact, what IQ tests actually do measure. There have been some innovative work in the field the last thirty years or so, what more accurately measure spatial and reasoning skills, for instance. Even then, those skills have a specific cultural value.
There was once a time when it was thought that men were more intelligent, more proficient in languages, and so women would be unsuitable for writing, teaching, and speaking. Nowadays, teaching is a pink ghetto job, and the skills that are valued are from the STEM fields.
me
I am not saying that brain mechanisms aren’t inherited. I am saying that intellegence is a social construct that maps to how well your brains adapt to the social medium. That there isn’t any objective “smart”.
Reading your posts, I’m really inclined to believe that we’re having a “ships passing each other in the night” phenomenon.
me…
I’m getting exasperated. 2 + 2 = 4 is something that is completely near axiomatic if not axiomatic. You can’t actually *prove* 2 + 2 = 4 without using *assumptions* as to the properties of integers. I use this because it’s a founding cultural artifact with no provable basis in reality! There is a reason that the thought experiment of Martians attempting to understand Terran math is typically used to illustrate parts of Godel’s theorems! There is a reason why little kids all over the world has to memorize addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division tables, instead of giving a simple formula that gives you the answer!
“To actually *fit* in that subculture, you actively have to believe various ideological artifacts that are pretty much the equivalent of 2 + 2 = 5, and these beliefs are necessary for the successful perpetuation of the skillsets that allow the subculture to make a living. “
How is all of this inconsistent with the Republicans being wrong and 2+2 = 4 not 5?
“I am saying that intellegence is a social construct that maps to how well your brains adapt to the social medium. That there isn’t any objective “smart”.”
So what about the ability to understand the natural world? Some people can better than others and since nature is not part of the “social medium” wouldn’t this make a person objectively smarter?
Melaka: “What is on the top of a house”
I would have said roof. Not having a fireplace or wood stove my knowledge of chimneys is limited. That is certainly cultural.
Like me said though, some things are universal. Having the cultural belief that the earth was created in seven days doesn’t make it a valid argument for creationism.
And, melaka, I suspect that teaching became a pink ghetto job because of the low pay, and remains a low paying job, in relationship to the education required, because it is considered a pink ghetto job. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that it would be dominated by males because of their “superior intellect and language skills,” but I’ll bet a lot more men would be interested in the job if it paid more, and willing to use their status as males to shift the number of teaching jobs in their favor. I can’t imagine that there is anything gender specific in teaching skills, or math and science skills for that matter.
Girls and boys were treated differently in the classrooms when I was in high school though. It wasn’t even subtle. Boys always got more attention in science classes. That is just my experience though. Your experience may be different. It was probably true in my elementary school as well, but I wasn’t paying as much attention.
That is also privilege rather than nature though.
jb, nature is not part of the social medium. However, man’s understanding of nature most definitly is--a scientist most certainly has to use things like words, heuristics, physical tools, and metaphors to understand nature. Albert Einstein did not grasp the inherent max speediness of light, he built a thought experiment with him on a train and moving within it, and enlightenment comes from that description of what the math sez, and which the math is a description of basic inductions.
There is no such thing as direct recieved wisdom, not even for Archimedes.
2+2=5 if you want it to be, and it doesn’t really say one thing about how smart you are.ETC
shah8, was that posting a parody? Because it seemed to encapsulate all the ridiculous thoughts bandied about in the 20th century in one handy package.
And: I wouldn’t want to travel across a bridge designed by people who believed “2+2=5”.
No, Bill Gates III Jr certainly didn’t do that.
Wouldn’t that make him BG IV?
His family nickname is “Trey”, so I’m thinking he’s just III. (Now, there’s a guy who got lucky in his ‘choice’ of parents.)
Too many seem hung up on shah8’s statement about 2+2=5 sometimes. He didn’t mean it literally for god’s sake.
He’s describing something like Lysenkoism which was standard dogma in the Soviet Union for a long time despite being scientifically ridiculous. If you have to believe some certain thing, wrong or not, to fit in with your peers, you’ll believe it.
It’s not that hard to understand, and it’s a great metaphor…
A good recent real life example of what shah8 is saying would be the belief that many wingnuts had (some still do) that George Bush is some kind of political and leaderly genius, which many have only recently given up because the stench of his presidency was too great to ignore…
shah8, you said: “The contradictory insight proves to be that all information and ways of knowledge and practice is entirely relative.”
I’m arguing that this is not true because certain types of knowledge allow you to predict and manipulate natural phenomena and others do not. Furthermore someone like Einstein is objectively smarter than you or I, in at least one way, because he’s better at this.
Your argument is that Einstein is only smarter because he was better socially adapted than we are? And that if he’d chosen to put 2+2=5 over on the scientific community he could have just as easily as the photo electric effect?
Eric, I have a suitably high IQ and a pretty decent education.
and yet I say 2 + 2 = 5! And I certainly know enough engineering, and I am familiar with CAD programs as well as material properties to know how to build a bridge that’s perfectly safe. All while ernestly believing and profession in that eternal truth!
And I am not alone! Plenty of people have built excellent bridges over the eons despite being illiterate and innumerate, and vast parts of the human production was done by people, that if you had known them, you wouldn’t touch what they make with a 10 foot pole! Yet you eat what they make, trust the ladders that you stand on, and swim in pools trusting in the lifeguards. Good or bad, you’re surrounded by incompetent people! How is it that we don’t DIE in massive car wrecks every time we enter the freeway system? Think about it!
Guys, I’m not actually talking about anything that’s truly controversial here…
I am saying that intelligence is a social construct that maps to how well your brains adapt to the social medium.
That it, in and of itself, a measure of intelligence-- an ability to analyze facts and solve problems, even if that problem is a “social medium.”
Albert Einstein was famed because he could *create*, and make accessible new insights to the physics cultural medium.
No, he made new insights into physics.
shah8, the reason you’re getting exasperated is because people simply don’t buy into your claims. Genius and intelligence aren’t a cultural artifacts. It’s insight into how the mind works. Perhaps you’d feel better if we agreed that we’re not making a judgment about someone’s moral worth if they’re a genius. Tamerlane was a genius, but he was also a monster.
Plenty of people have built excellent bridges over the eons despite being illiterate and innumerate
But they were very, very smart and good at solving problems. Intelligence, as Alara and others point out, is fairly common and there have been many smart people for eons. The problem is that they haven’t always been able to exploit their abilities. If you were very smart, but your life involved digging for potatoes all day, who would know? Though maybe you’d come up with some more efficient and effective way of potato digging that people didn’t, but maybe no one noticed and no one adopted your methods.
I’m not actually talking about anything that’s truly controversial here…
It’s not that people haven’t heard the things you’re talking about before, it’s that we just don’t take them that seriously. It’s a set of claims that doesn’t provide any additional insight for us and comes across as sort of pedantic without being useful. And it’s sort of wanking, because you’re posing your claims in such a way as they can’t really be argued with.
“Genius and intelligence aren’t a cultural artifacts. It’s insight into how the mind works.”
True. You get a culturally-filtered insight into how some people handle culturally-based tests and values…
Who was smarter, Mozart or Einstein? Well, the answer depends on whether you want to experience an opera or understand post-Newton physics...right?
I think I have to make clearer one thing:
I am not saying that all people are the same level of “smart” here. I am saying that intellegence is mismeasured because we have false assumptions about what it is.
I do not actually believe 2 + 2 = 5. Nor am I saying that all people have the same native capacity for math. I would prefer that an engineer who’s building a bridge that I will use knows basic addition, but I’d prefer even more that said engineer has a general engineering “metis”. So much of what is intellegent or smart or skilled about *us* is *external* to us--something that a Culture grants to us.
Moreover, peeps, read some histories of science! Check out, say, the evolution of geology as a science and the plate techtonics theory. Read about people who were freakin’ brilliant when we see them now, but were thought of as idiots in their times.
Or, we can talk about idiots!
We have a myth about Christopher Columbus, that he was struggling against the idea that the world was flat, and then sailed and proved those idiots wrong by not falling off the edge of the universe. That myth was completly wrong. Christopher Columbus was a medieval thinking idiot who couldn’t find Japan if a japanese person pointed out the country on a modern map. He used old thinking, using outdated measures and confused thinking to push a notion that the Earth was about a fifth of it’s actual size--something that just about every educated person in a European court knew was wrong. He got the go-ahead from Isabella because, to her, it was a cheap what-the-hell gesture. Christopher Columbus *survived* his little trip to the Americas because he was a member of a seafaring culture with members who knew their way around a ship, despite not being the best crew available. And now, people believe that Christopher Columbus was a genius.
Intellegence.just.doesn’t.matter.the.way.people.think.it.does. It matters a heckuva lot. Just not for individuals.
Who was smarter, Mozart or Einstein?
This quickly devolves into one of those, “Who would win in a fight-- Superman or the Hulk?” conversations.
You get a culturally-filtered insight into how some people handle culturally-based tests and values…
Now that’s total bullshit unless you’re trying to be a parody of shah8. Unless you call things like problem-solving to be a “value system.” Tests of intelligence tests measure a certain set of mind problems. It’s not measuring something cultural any more than measuring someone’s height is measuring something cultural as opposed to measuring someone’s weight. I think people are jumping on this a little too much because it is assumed we are making a judgment about someone’s personal or moral worth when we say that someone is very intelligent. And there is some objective worth in that for a lot of things, but it doesn’t mean you’re a good and/or productive person. But we can still claim they are intelligent and have insight.
“This quickly devolves into one of those, “Who would win in a fight-- Superman or the Hulk?” conversations.”
...only if you want it to.
I used that as an example of what I think shah8: There is a context to evaluating something like intelligence. Within a certain context someone may be a genius, and within another average or below average.
Mozart supposedly was writing music as a 3-year old, and went on to create some of the best loved music in the classical cannon. But he would probably have had great difficulty with your “certain set of mind problems”.
Einstein would probably test well on your “certain set of mind problems” as long as they were presented in German. And no one would expect Einstein to compose great music.
Context is everything…
MikeEss, my wild guess is that both Einstein and Mozart would “test” as very intelligent, even though the actual end-results of their lives’ work would turn out quite differently and in quite different areas. As I said, it’s not a judgment of moral worth.
So much of what is intelligent or smart or skilled about *us* is *external* to us--something that a Culture grants to us.
Skills are acquired. The ability to make connections between concepts and analyze facts and solve problems. Many of the things an engineer is good at aren’t “cultural artifacts,” though it so happens that he was lucky enough to be placed in a situation where he was able to be an engineer, rather than a slightly-better-than-average farmhand.
shah8’s “well, intelligence means anything and nothing” doesn’t help us much. That’s why we’re pretty much dismissive of it.
Dammit, I’m too busy today to play in the sandbox and I really want to play in this sandbox. I’ll just say that two decades from now the Harlem Children’s Zone will be considered one of the crowning achievements of America and another pillar of the Civil Rights movement. We need 1000 more Geoffrey Canada’s on this planet.
Alara, I know you’re not meaning to, but you’re positing something that sounds close to a theory that people have a baseline intelligence and environment can detract. From what I understand, it’s not that simple. Brains are very flexible, actually. You can “make” someone smart as easily as you can “make” someone less smart. The science backs this theory up.
True, and I wasn’t considering this research in my post. There are definitely techniques that make children smarter, and there are techniques that make children take standardized tests better, and they’re not necessarily the same techniques. 
A child who is trained in a culture that puts a great deal of value on tradition, customs and authority will probably do much better in rote learning tasks than a child who is trained in a culture that puts a great deal of value on questioning authority, being individualistic, and being creative… and this has been presented as an argument for why Americans are very good at innovating new technologies even though we have *never* educationally been on a par with the rest of the developed world. Personally I think there are still too many Americans who value tradition, customs and authority, but y’know, I’m a leftie, so I would.
But within the bell curve for a population receiving the same education and stimulus, there’s still variation, and that’s likely to be genetic. Which is why, as another poster pointed out, it makes no sense to compare poor people to rich people, black people to white people, or girls to boys, unless you can very tightly control the variables to make sure that you are really comparing comparable situations. It is quite reasonable to say that you could compare Sasha and Malia Obama to other children of highly educated politicians, because belonging to the class of “highly educated politicians” probably matters more than belonging to the class of “black people” when comparing educational level and opportunity… but comparing, say, my daughter, the child of white college-educated IT workers, to her classmates who may be the children of black mechanics and retail clerks with high school educations, would ignore the profound influence of the subcultures that my daughter vs. her classmates belong to.
The truth is that most of the time, culture as it acts on the *individual* makes us stupider. Few parents are really able to make their kids smarter. The *entire* culture as a whole might make us all smarter together, which would suggest that young people would routinely be smarter than old people when everything else is equal (but young people are better adapted to the technologies of the day, so again, how can you tell?), but when a parent or a family or a peer group is acting on a child to affect their intelligence, I suspect that usually they are either allowing the child to reach the potential they have (but not increasing that potential), or damaging the child so they never will. I don’t see much evidence that individual parents can make their children smarter by any significant degree. (Although, individual parents *can* overcome adversities their children face, if they’re both lucky and hardworking. My cousin was once diagnosed with severe autism. Now his diagnosis has been downgraded to Asperger’s because of the intense effort my aunt put in, and his luck in having a variant of the condition that *could* respond to such intense effort.)
I could be wrong, though. I have seen plenty of cases of smart people adopted by not so smart people who ended up smart, and when they found their birth parents, those were smart too. But I have not seen children who were adopted by smart people who then found their birth parents, to know if children with dumb birth parents who are adopted by smart people end up smart or dumb. You’d really need to see an infant from an open adoption where you knew what kind of prenatal care the mother got, to rule out any effects of malnutrition or poor prenatal care.
The nature~nurture conundrum can’t be argued at all well trans-racially ... across demographics, at all.
Then why do culturally sensitive teaching programmes seem to get better results for minorities (and I’m looking at an article on Te Kotahitanga now)? That would seem to be a firm piece of evidence for the importance of “nurture”.
Fair enough, Alara. I do think the people who get into Baby Mozart are fooling themselves. That said, there’s a body of evidence to show that you can, if not make your kid smarter, make your kid more disciplined and more of a self-starter, which is probably even more important than being smart. The time out method of discipline is growing in popularity over spanking not just because it’s less cruel, but because it gets a kid into regulating his own behavior much better.
G Porgy _
I don’t know if you are around to respond back, but here I go.
Your point that teaching is a pink ghetto job is because of the low pay is absolutely correct. However, teaching has not always been a pink ghetto job. There was once a time when it was a highly valued work, teachers were very well compensated. What changed? Those teachers were men. When the field opened up for women to teach, the value dropped. After all, if a mere woman could do it, why pay that much? There is a well established history of a drop in salary and prestige in careers when women are permitted in. Being a secretariat was once a very respected position and sought after by young men. Now secretaries are viewed as support staff that do routine work and are not paid equivalent to the work they actually do (please note I am referring to the typical secretary/receptionist, not the highly skilled ones who do work at upper levels of management or government.)
Women’s work has been devalued this way for hundreds of years. Even still today there are people who believe that teaching, taking care of children or any such work is easy to do, that teachers and caretakers are paid too much for what they do.
That is what I am referring to when I argue that intelligence is cuturally constructed in part- someone can be smart, but people notice only if its in the way it matters. One reason that “geekdom” is now popular is because we have all reaped the benefits of those skinny boys who were in the Science Club back in the 60’s and 70’s (just riffing off a stereotype here).
Hmm. I wonder if that’s partly why Obama was so successful - after years of cowboy diplomacy, people just wanted someone who was smart, curious, and innovative.
I know it was one of the reasons I voted for him.
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Considering your occasional disparagement of the concept of free will, shouldn’t you be rather attached to determinism?