Conversation with Bob Williams on Political Correctness and Career Progression, and Controversies: Retired Nuclear Physicist (8)

Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com

Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Journal Founding: August 2, 2012

Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year

Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed

Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access

Fees: None (Free)

Volume Numbering: 12

Issue Numbering: 3

Section: A

Theme Type: Idea

Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”

Theme Part: 31

Formal Sub-Theme: None.

Individual Publication Date: June 1, 2024

Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2024

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Word Count: 3,933

Image Credits: Bob Williams.

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*

Abstract

Bob Williams is a Member of the Triple Nine Society, Mensa International, and the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry. He discusses: the massive split between young men and women in higher education, noting the societal shifts and personality differences contributing to this trend; women’s increased focus on academic work, resulting in higher grades and career pursuits; delayed or omitted marriage and childbirth due to birth control technologies; men still dominate STEM fields while women gravitate towards humanities and people-oriented careers; the debate on sex differences in intelligence with reference to Haier and Colom’s work; the “corrected” SAT and WISC tests for eliminating sex differences in g; Richard Lynn’s Bayesian model linking head size to intelligence but disputes the Flynn Effect’s impact on g; Helmuth Nyborg’s job suspension and court battles over his research on sex differences in intelligence; Christopher Brand’s firing and depublishing incident due to his book on general intelligence; the controversial nature of psychology and the replication crisis in intelligence research; the Gaussian distribution of intelligence but questions its validity at extreme ends; the lack of scandalous claims on extrapolated IQs above 4 sigma; high-IQ societies’ role in pre-internet peer interactions and their evolution with the internet; comments on the variable success of high-IQ societies in meeting member needs; expresses skepticism about AI’s magical problem-solving capabilities while acknowledging its potential in data analysis and medical diagnosis; the social impacts of increasing education and career pursuits among women, leading to demographic changes and below replacement birth rates in developed nations.

Keywords: Gender disparities, higher education trends, career aspirations, academic performance, personality traits, marriage trends, childbirth patterns, birth control impact, STEM fields, humanities preferences.

Conversation with Bob Williams on Political Correctness and Career Progression, and Controversies: Retired Nuclear Physicist (8)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you make of this massive split between young men and young women in colleges, polytechnics, and universities now? It is rather drastic by this time, and nowhere near completing its trend.

Bob Williams: It is an interesting development that presumably has multiple causes.  One of those is the shift from society sending men to college so that they can obtain a good job with their degree and support a family, while women were expected to rear children and keep the home.  As that changed, women clearly wanted to pursue their own careers and were eager to consume higher education.  Another factor is the sex differences we see in personalities.  These have led to women often getting higher grades than men in various majors.  My take is that women are more likely to focus  on academic work and to resist distractions.  Trait conscientiousness may be higher for women.  The related change that goes with this is delayed or omitted marriage and delayed or omitted childbirth.  No doubt, birth control technologies also contributed to these changes in choices.

We still see more men going into STEM than women, either as a matter of choice, or ability.  The opposite happens in humanities.  Even among very bright women, the SMPY (Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth) longitudinal study shows that women are much more inclined to choose career paths that involve working with people than with things (STEM).

There remains some disagreement between researchers about the intelligence differences between the sexes.  In  The science of human intelligence, Haier and Colom* mostly argue for no difference, but with obvious differences on a subject by subject basis (particularly math and verbal).  Although they treated the topic at length, it left me feeling that some things were simply ignored, such as consistently higher male scores on both SAT-M and SAT-V.  They argue that this difference is due to differences in the makeup of the test takers, but the differences go on for too long for this to make sense.  Data relating to whether there are sex differences in reaction time, inspection time, polygenic scores, and other measurable factors that are low level and directly measured are missing.  As I recall, both SAT and WISC tests have been “corrected” to eliminate differential item functioning (by sex).  If test items that are more difficult for women than men are removed, the test logically will have difficulty in showing sex differences in g.

*[Haier, R.J., Colom, R. and Hunt, E., 2023. The science of human intelligence. Cambridge University Press.]

—–

Jacobsen: How statistically significantly different were the Army helmet sizes?

Williams: I don’t know.  The data apparently showed that there was an increase in head size for the group being considered (US military).  It could have shown different results in other nations.  Richard Lynn argued that, using a Bayesian model, measures of child development, including head size, showed general increases in measures that may relate to intelligence.  He took this as biological evidence of the Flynn Effect, which was mostly or exclusively positive at that time.  The problem was that repeated attempts to show a change in g failed.  People in nations with strong FE gains did not show real world gains in measures of validity, nor did they become less intelligent when the FE reversed.  The actual gains in child development were almost certainly related to improved diets and medical care causing positive health effects, but not real gains in g.

—–

Jacobsen: How did Nyborg suffer up to losing his job?

Williams: I don’t recall having learned about his earlier relationships with his university.  Although I met him in 2005, it was not until the following year that I had a long discussion with him.  He was telling me about his job suspension at the University of Aarhus.  He appealed to ISIR members to make comments to the Rector.  Some responded and I assume that helped.  That same year the suspension was canceled and he received a “severe reprimand” over the Skanderborg project (sex differences in general intelligence). [The paper that caused the problem was titled “Sex-related differences in general intelligence g, brain size, and social status.”]

Unfortunately, that was not the end of the story.  Each time I saw Nyborg he told me about new problems.  I cannot recall how many iterations there were, but the general pattern was that he would be fired, then he would sue the university, then the courts would rule in his favor and he would be rehired.  I believe the last court ruling included a monetary award to him.  At that point, he was retired, but I don’t recall if the retirement was forced or not.  I think there was at least one forced retirement in the saga.  [The second paper that fueled the university animosity was titled “The Decay of Western Civilization: Double Relaxed Darwinian Selection.”]

—–

Jacobsen: How did Brand suffering up to losing his job?

Williams: The first I heard of Brand’s troubles was when he published Brand, C. (1996). The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications. Chichester, England: Wiley.  This was a well written book about general intelligence, which unfortunately was accurate in its discussion of between-group intelligence differences.  Due to this, the publishers received complaints that their book was racist, so Wiley actually de-published it.  They apparently collected already printed books and destroyed them.  [They didn’t get all of the books.  One of my friends has a hard-bound copy of the de-published book.]

Brand was reportedly working as a waiter to support himself after losing his job.  This seems sad to me.  I corresponded with him for a while and he published a piece I wrote about heritability on his web page.  Although I never met him I know one person who worked with him.  My impression, from his comments, was that Brand contributed to his problems by brashness and other personality traits.  He died in 2017.

—–

Jacobsen: How did both lose their jobs?

Williams: Brand was working at the University of Edinburgh and was fired because the university did not want him discussing politically hot topics.  Those topics, however, have been investigated by researchers from various nations.  There was nothing in his book, or other sources, that I found to be at odds with similar published work.

I listed the two papers that the university used against Nyborg.  They accused him of scientific misconduct.  Again, his work was sound and consistent with similar research elsewhere.  I think that the second paper I listed was particularly important because it properly explains phenomena seen in Western nations as a result of massive migration from low IQ nations.

—–

Jacobsen: How have they managed since their firings?

Williams: This has been mostly answered above.  Brand obviously had a very bad time of it, both in losing his already published book and then his job.  He tried to sell the book as a digital copy for a while.  Later, he posted the entire manuscript for open access.

Nyborg endured a drawn out battle in court that lasted for years and went through at least the two instances that I mentioned.  He seemed to maintain good spirits, based on my updates from him at conferences.  He is 87 now.  The last time I saw him, he was 81, strong and in good spirits.  We were in Edinburgh in 2018.  I took the picture below of Helmuth (blue tie) talking to Oliv Must (of Estonia).

—–

Jacobsen: Psychology seems prone to making their semi-prominent or prominent people undergo some controversy. Do you remember the Beth Loftus stuff around False Memory? I had coffee/meal with her, I think, 3 times and interviewed her years ago. Another person who went through – relative to academic life – an awful circumstance.

Williams: I recall encountering some references to false memory, but I know little about it.  As I recall, the claim was made that individuals could and did create false memories in others (usually patients).  I think that this claim was reasonably well verified, but I might have a false memory of it.  🙂

I agree that psychology has had more than its share of controversy.  In the specialty I follow, controversy has been heated, as we have previously discussed.  Sir Cyril Burt was an example of protracted controversy.  Kamin claimed that Burt falsified data relating to twin IQs, used to compute the heritability of intelligence.  This sort of case causes a lot of heat and little light.  There were two nasty parts to the charge: First, Burt was dead and had no way to defend himself against the claims.  Second, the study in question had no lasting impact on the understanding of the heritability of intelligence.  I have a bias relating to Kamin, whom I see as a scoundrel (for other reasons).  Rushton claimed to have evidence that the data was not altered.  Whether it was or was not altered, it was in agreement with a great deal of research that came up with the same answer.

Arguably, things have gotten worse today, at least in the field of intelligence research.  But I suppose psychology, in less quantitative niches, can be criticized as sloppy and difficult to replicate.  When the replication “crisis” happened, psychology did not fare well, but the more measurement based area of intelligence research held up reasonably well.  A first thought would be that this sort of thing would not be found in the hard sciences, but it was.  

Nearly 90 per cent of chemists said that they’d had the experience of failing to replicate another researcher’s result; nearly 80 percent of biologists said the same, as did almost 70 percent of physicists, engineers, and medical scientists. Only a slightly lower percentage of scientists said they’d had trouble in replicating their own results.

From: Ritchie, S., 2020. Science fictions: How fraud, bias, negligence, and hype undermine the search for truth. Metropolitan Books.

I wrote a review of this book which can be found here: https://openpsych.net/paper/64/

—–

Jacobsen: Is the true distribution of humanity over the billions of people truly a Bell Curve or something different after or meaningless after 4-sigma?

Williams: I think that it is fair to say that for the 8 billion people on our planet, we can only make guesses based on observations of comparatively small groups and general principles that apply.  The Central Limit Theorem is the usual support for a Gaussian distribution, for large data sets.  Here is a definition I lifted from Investopedia:

“The central limit theorem (CLT) states that the distribution of sample means approximates a normal distribution as the sample size gets larger, regardless of the population’s distribution.”

The whole thing about assuming a Gaussian distribution is reasonable and is seen in countless studies of intelligence distribution.  But… These studies simply don’t have data at 4-sigma.  Real world studies are typically based on sample sizes that have (hopefully) adequate statistical power.  If you browse through Bias in Mental Testing  (Jensen), you will see various distributions from several data sets and different IQ tests.  They all resemble a Gaussian distribution, but they don’t extend into the stratosphere.

The claim has been made (including by Jensen) that there are “fat tails” in the real distribution, which I have not seen supported by any well designed study.  As anyone who has read my prior answers knows, I dispute that the definition of intelligence remains fixed at the very high end.  I have no idea about the low end, other than that it typically has two incarnations.  The non-pathological distribution is the representation of IQ distribution without including people suffering from organic retardation.  This is the distribution used to norm a test.  The full distribution includes those people who have forms of organic retardation.  When they are included, the distribution shows a skew to the low end, for obvious reasons.

The intriguing aspect related to studying this question is that we are moving into the age of DNA and brain imaging methods of measuring intelligence.  A relatively few years ago, we could not measure IQ from DNA.  Now, it can be done, but with a large error at the individual level.  When large genomic data sets are used (as in national collections), the noise in the measurement cancels out, leaving an agreement with traditional IQ test data that is around 92%, using contemporary calculations.  If we project a few decades into the future, the limitations we have today will seem primitive.  Similarly, it is likely that brain imaging technology will be capable of providing robust measures of intelligence and we might even expect that a ratio scale will eventually be created.

—–

Jacobsen: Were there any scandalous acts around claims of extrapolated IQs above 4 sigma?

Williams: I don’t know of any.  In fact, when I became interested in cognitive science (early 90s) one of the things that I noticed was that the literature was overwhelmingly focused on the range of ± 2.5 sigma.  Even with studies that were intended to be about high intelligence, most were looking at the top 1%.  The Terman longitudinal study is one example.  The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth longitudinal study eventually got into a a range that went to the 1 in 10,000 level of math ability, based on the SAT taken at age 12.  One thing I failed to ask David Lubinski (with adequate opportunities) was if they ever compared the SAT data to comprehensive IQ tests (WAIS or Woodcock-Johnson).

It is reasonable to consider that most research is funded by grants of some kind and those are most often aimed at factors seen over the full range of intelligence, such as relationships between IQ and SES, academic success, career choice, and the sorts of social factors that were reported in The Bell Curve.

—–

Jacobsen: What purpose do high-IQ societies serve now?

Williams: Before the internet, these societies enabled bright people to find peers for discussions (and more often, arguments) and occasional group meetings.  The journals offered a place to write and share thoughts about things that would possibly be of little interest to the general public.  It is my opinion that the need that is present in bright people to interact with peers, is best met by selective universities, very demanding university majors, and employment in research labs, think tanks, and other jobs that require lots of brain power.  People who were not able to use one or more of these, probably benefited more from the societies than those who were doing work in cosmology or theoretical mathematics.

The internet suddenly changed our lives by granting fast access to people around the globe.  It created numerous social media paths that now allow bright people to quickly find and communicate with peers.  This hasn’t made people more genteel, but it has at least provided paths for both personal level communications and for more lengthy and public missive distributions through blogs.

Those of us who actively participated in the old style societies still retain some interest in them and still use them for the initially intended purposes.  My guess is that there will be more movement to web based groups.  One aspect of web groups is that they can be quickly assembled and just as quickly dissolved.

—–

Jacobsen: In my analysis, we have had between 100-125, probably, high-IQ societies, about half – off the top – are defunct. The rest range from journals like the Mega Society to journals and meetings such as Mensa International. Obviously, these provide something to members. Have they met the needs of their intended audiences based on original intent of such societies and organizations, or have they fallen short?

Williams: I think this has varied from group to group, with some enduring for decades and others evaporating.  Mensa is a special case, since it has the advantage of a potentially high membership (due to its low entry threshold) and it is organized to hold regional gatherings that mostly work well, and an annual gathering that draws a lot of attendees.  These tend to be structured around social activities and various presentations by people with expertise in interesting fields.  When I was much younger, I attended these and found that the best ones were well received.  Some of them experienced planning, budget, and space related problems.  Mensa also has some sober components, such as projects that help distribute books, activities for bright children, the Mensa Research Journal, and a traveler hosting program.

One of the unfortunate issues that sometimes happens is that battles between members sometimes end up as legal confrontations.  Examples of this include the dispute over Mega Society East vs. Mega Society and the series of suits from Clint Williams that caused a lot of problems for TNS.

—–

Jacobsen: Are we putting a sort of magical-mystical problem-solving essence onto the concept of AI? These are new. We do not know the extent of impact, limits and scope, for example. I feel as if we are inundated by science fiction, where I see a faith in AI as if a panacea to ills. Certain areas, we have seen empirical evidence of powerful computation plus human expertise used to inform the systems making superhuman performance.

Williams: I was surprised when AI suddenly became a big public topic.  It had been under development and in use for some applications for a long time, so I was expecting an incremental improvement from time to time, but then we had ChatGPT and other systems available to anyone and able to do at least some “tricks” that were undeniably advanced.  Of these, the ability to communicate in human-like form was startling.  Then we saw AI images that were photo-realistic and even able to replicate the appearances and voices of well known public figures.  Some of this (deep spoofing) has reached the point where it certainly has the potential to cause both social and legal problems.

The part of the uproar that I find to be premature is the fear that AI will become a supernatural alien force of the type we saw in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.  This kind of fear is easy to generate and strikes me as presently premature and probably not even a concern for the distant future.  When I see our government trying to regulate AI development, I cringe.  Imagine the totally uninformed people who already show us that their jobs could be done by AI or maybe an intelligent monkey, trying to prohibit us from developing the things that our global adversaries are not going to abandon.  If nothing else, the military aspects (including control of communications) of this are as essential to free nations as are their air, ground, space and sea forces.

To me, the excitement about AI is that we already have evidence of it being able to examine massive amounts of data and to learn how to use it to develop insights that would otherwise be impossible.  Consider the example of brain imaging.  The problem with this is that each scan can show slightly different content, causing interpretation problems for researchers.  But AI can take in details of the scans and use those to reach conclusions that are amazingly accurate, even when the researchers have no idea how the AI did its job.  This has obvious implications for medical diagnosis and should make the role of doctors turn into something more like the role of a radiologist who takes images, but stops at that point, letting the AI read and interpret them.  Of the hundreds of papers I have heard presented at ISIR conferences, I would think that all of them would benefit from deep analysis with AI.  The problem we have with finding single nucleotide polymorphisms that are associated with intelligence is the tiny effect size of a single SNP.  This has left us with knowing what happens without being able to find even half of the associated SNPs.  Right now, we have found 1,271 such SNPs; the experts tell us that the number that defines intelligence lies in the range of 10,000 to 40,000.  We have already found the SNPs with average effect sizes of about 0.01%, but the rest presumably have smaller effect sizes.  Of course much larger genomic data sets will help, but I believe that the next breakthrough could be by using AI to do its magic.

We hear a lot about AI taking over jobs and some of this may happen, but I believe it will take a good bit of time for corporations to adjust to restructuring their entire operations to operate in concert with AI.  Every time I make a phone call to a business, I find that the robotic “push 1 for this and 2 for that” response irritates me, but then, if I ever reach a living person, they are idiots.  I would love to instead talk to a natural language robot who can actually help.  

—–

Jacobsen: Women are far more educated than men. Something increasing in effect the younger age one takes into account. A process happening over the last – maybe, 40 years – or something. What does this do to prospects of marriage, family formation, single parenthood, late-age motherhood (e.g., 40+), and so on? I have, for example, as you may have too, seen the push for a change in cultural conversation about parenthood and single parenthood, changing gender roles, and the increase in women having children age 40+ compared to other ages, where we tend to see a decrease in birth rates. There may be an overlay commentary for you, too, where we see in most advanced industrial economies a below replacement rate birth rate across populations, in general. You gave a brief comment on this in Norway, before, and the use of IVF technologies.

Williams: My thought on this topic is that we are at a divergence point where we no longer have time to catch up with the social impacts of our technological progress.  My grandmother was 20 years old when the Wright brothers flew for the first time.  Her generation was born before electrification.  She lived well past the first moon landing.  In one lifetime humans experienced air travel (and war), cinema, radio, television, amazing medical advances, early computers, space travel, plastics being used for countless products, the discovery of DNA, and the remaining endless list of life changing events.  But when we look at mankind, it evolved over 200,000 or so years, with time for social and even biological corrections to adapt to the slow increase in knowledge and technology.  Now the rate of change is insane.  We have not had time to adjust to how people have changed their lives, to the ability to live, not for daily survival efforts, but to a fast paced world with people flying from nation to nation, to news that reaches us instantly, to laws that were made by earlier generations, and to social norms that have become unstable.  We simply don’t have time to adjust.  Meanwhile, we have parts of world populations that are still living as hunter-gatherers.  The differences between groups expand with evident factors causing increasing friction not only with nearby nations, but with those on any part of the planet.

Among the changes that are consequential are women changing to new roles, many of them more attractive than motherhood, at least to some.  This has led to later marriages, omitting marriage, later childbirth, smaller families and more childless couples.  The developed nations are seeing below replacement rates of population growth by their native groups, followed by immigration from low IQ populations into the resulting vacuum.  Many commentators have discussed the obvious driver of these changes–modern birth control.

Bibliography

None

Footnotes

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Citations

American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Bob Williams on Political Correctness and Career Progression, and Controversies: Retired Nuclear Physicist (8). June 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/williams-8

American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, June 1). Conversation with Bob Williams on Political Correctness and Career Progression, and Controversies: Retired Nuclear Physicist (8). In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).

Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Bob Williams on Political Correctness and Career Progression, and Controversies: Retired Nuclear Physicist (8). In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.

Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with Bob Williams on Political Correctness and Career Progression, and Controversies: Retired Nuclear Physicist (8).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/williams-8.

Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Bob Williams on Political Correctness and Career Progression, and Controversies: Retired Nuclear Physicist (8).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (June 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/williams-8.

Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with Bob Williams on Political Correctness and Career Progression, and Controversies: Retired Nuclear Physicist (8)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/williams-8>.

Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with Bob Williams on Political Correctness and Career Progression, and Controversies: Retired Nuclear Physicist (8)’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/williams-8>.

Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Bob Williams on Political Correctness and Career Progression, and Controversies: Retired Nuclear Physicist (8).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/williams-8.

Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Bob Williams on Political Correctness and Career Progression, and Controversies: Retired Nuclear Physicist (8) [Internet]. 2024 Jun; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/williams-8.

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