Ask A Genius 1106: The Matter with What We Think Matters

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/09/27

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I interviewed with Steven Pinker. I had some correspondence with someone who is a dissenter from him. They cited people that Pinker has either been associated with or has referenced in his work and, therefore, concluded that Pinker is both a bad researcher and a bad person—or at least suspiciously so, something along those lines. I tried to convey to this person that the point of my interview with Pinker was about humanism and campuses. The focus was on that because I was highly time-constrained due to obligations in a war zone while conducting the interview.

It was a short interview, and that was not the primary topic. It’s an important topic, but it’s not necessarily appropriate to claim that their desired topic—calling out Pinker—was the focus of my interview with him. So, this person, who seemed to have some rather extreme views, snuck in under the radar. They studied some research, but I didn’t have time to dive into it. I work long days, and I have a lot of other projects on the go. I don’t have the time to do deep research for a passing interview just because someone claims that the person I interviewed turned out to be a bad guy. That’s their claim. But it sounds more like Pinker is doing good things in many areas, though he may have made some questionable statements here and there.

Rick Rosner: Let’s talk about one area I know quite a bit about. 

Jacobsen: Yes, this is a segue into your perspective. 

Rosner: Twitter, now called X, is in September 2024, and Musk has owned Twitter for a year and a half. Two years? He calls it free speech. I call it on not removing enough racists and antisemites from the platform.

In any case, I’ve been involved with IQ for 40 years now. And nothing good comes from people making claims or researching differences in national average IQs or differences in average IQs among racial groups. For one thing, there’s much bad work in that field. For another, 80% or more of the people interested in that field are racists looking to prove their claims. Third, IQ has never been the greatest measure, and it’s probably becoming obsolete as human knowledge and ability are increasingly augmented by easily accessible information and AI resources.

Now, when you Google something, I’m sure you’ve seen that most of the time, Google has AI write a short response to your query. It’s often the first thing that appears on the page, and the AI response is usually good enough to answer your question. This means that anyone with a phone, tablet, or laptop would be the smartest person in the world in 1978. Ask that person anything, and they’d have access to all the information in the world.

So, when people make claims about the average IQs of large groups, especially national or racial groups, they’re wading into dangerous territory. You’re associating with a lot of problematic ideas and people. What else?

Jacobsen: This is the point for me—my 2¢, quickly. My take is generally to give people space to express their honest opinions. That’s not to say they’re right or accurate, but it gives them a platform to express themselves. I trust the audience to make their judgments. 

Rosner: That’s the argument about freedom of speech: if you bombard people with enough nonsense, can they still make their own decisions? 

Jacobsen: It depends. But I don’t write for The New York Times or work for CNN as a lead correspondent. It’s a much different scale. And at the same time, I don’t think it’s worth researching racist pseudoscience—it’s a waste of time at a minimum, and racism is, of course, wrongheaded and stupid. The accusations against people by association or trying to change people’s minds with invective or personal attacks likely won’t work. It might make them more entrenched in their views.

Rosner: I agree. I don’t think you give that field oxygen. Another point, the Flynn Effect, which we’ve talked about a lot: In the half-century after World War II, the average IQ of the entire planet went up by 15 points, which is not insignificant. Flynn, who discovered this effect, says it’s just cultural literacy. When people learn the thinking that IQ tests measure, thanks to access to information from the rest of the world—particularly after World War II, when the world “lit up” informationally—it leads to these gains. Especially with the arrival of TV, I would say. The Flynn Effect occurred during the TV era, and by the time we get to the Internet and smartphone era, it has levelled off and even regressed a little. But somehow, TV, movies, books, and even regular telephones—not smartphones—gave people in the most remote parts of the world habits of mind that made them effectively smarter, as measured by IQ tests.

Jacobsen: Yes, and it’s an academic question, but also a cultural one, and offensive. That’s the danger of spreading racially oriented research into the public sphere because it taps into elements of society with a negative racial focus. At the same time, in an academic context, as far as I know—and I’m not an expert—biologists consider there to be only one human species. There have been arguments about subspecies or other categorizations, but we would have to change our minds if there were sufficient evidence for such distinctions. I think more evidence is needed. 

Rosner: It never has been. You can’t just measure things and develop evidence for racial distinctions like that. For example, women are, on average, smaller than men; therefore, women have smaller brains than men. Does that mean women are less intelligent than men? No. You can get the same amount of brainpower in a skull that might be 5% smaller in diameter. The brain size doesn’t correlate directly to intelligence.

Jacobsen: Exactly, because then you’d critique the metric scientifically and look at things like encephalization—the proportion of brain size relative to body size. You’d get a more accurate assessment that’s not just looking at brain size in isolation but considering proportionality to body size.

Rosner: Right. 

Jacobsen: That’s the methodology I’m talking about. The orientation of the framing and the precision of the evidence could, in theory, come up with some distinctions, but I don’t see it happening. 

Rosner: No measuring stick is reliable or precise enough to support these arguments.

Jacobsen: We’re arguing the same thing from different angles. We don’t have sufficiently advanced tools to make these distinctions, even hypothetically right now.

Rosner: Exactly, and another point, it won’t even matter in 5, 10, or 15 years because AI will determine how smart you are by how effectively you can connect with it. The people who will excel are those who are good at prompting AI and utilizing it to its fullest potential. I’ve already seen people advertising services to train others to be “AI whisperers,” which is a racket. But eventually, the smartest people on Earth will be those most intimately linked with information processing, like through Neuralink, if it works. That’s Musk’s brain chip. But at some point, someone—since he’s not the only one working on it—will develop a super advanced interface between your brain and something that pipes information into your head more effectively. Or even something less science fiction-like, such as contact lenses or glasses that provide a steady stream of information floating in front of your eyes. We already had something like that with Google Glass about 15 years ago, but it was half-baked. Eventually, it won’t be.

And so, who cares how well someone performs on an IQ test in 2038 without devices? By then, everyone will be tied into tech that augments their thinking. How smart you are will depend on how good you are at interacting with that tech. I had an idea for a game show called Search Party during the writers’ strike before this one. It was sometime in the 2000s.

I had some spare time because production had shut down. The idea was to throw tough trivia questions at kids—something challenging. For example, “What kind of car was Sonny Corleone driving when assassinated in The Godfather?” Nowadays, you type “car Sonny Corleone Godfather,” and the answer pops up. When I was developing this show, retrieving information was a bit harder. It may have even been pre-Google.

But the whole idea was that retrieving information is a skill. Fifteen years later, that’s obvious. Everyone is reasonably good at it—well, most people. Some don’t care about information and go with their gut. 

Jacobsen: However, the easier and more effective ways to increase this capacity are through Head Start programs, nutrition programs, proper education, and low-stress environments for kids. These improve cognitive and emotional capacity, giving kids a more well-rounded foundation because they have the energy and nutrition to develop fully.

Rosner:Exactly. When these people enter the adult world, those with the best technology to augment themselves will be smarter than those without or who can’t use the tech as efficiently. As an aside, we have a friend who’s an elementary school teacher, and she said that after COVID, her first graders are like babies because they missed out on preschool. They were homeschooled, so the first and second-graders have the social skills of kids a couple of years younger. That’s a real issue.

Jacobsen: Right, and that proves the point. But this connects to something we discussed yesterday or the day before. The floor for functioning in society was probably lower a few centuries ago, especially regarding literacy. With all this new technology, which extends cognitive capacities in magical ways, the floor for functionality might rise. Using these devices efficiently could raise the baseline for everyone. But at the same time, it could create a bigger barrier for a larger portion of the population who can’t access or use these technologies effectively. That’s the risk.

Rosner: Researching what nutrition does for brain development or what living in a language-rich environment can do makes sense. There’s an argument that kids do better growing up in two-parent households because they hear adults talking to each other. It’s not just kids watching TV or adults yelling at them—it’s conversations. I can see studies being done around things like that. But studies about whether people in Singapore are, on average, smarter than people in Sri Lanka or China or wherever are useless. Those studies are filled with bias and racist agendas.

Jacobsen: That’s an entirely different issue, though still significant—the issue of racist agendas. But that’s separate from two things. First, welfare programs and social safety nets that support people during crucial developmental years, and second, the academic question of whether people are trying to suppress open questioning and research in an academic environment. Then there’s the other side—the public policy and social commentary domain, where both of us are concerned about people with racist agendas harming those who are typically vulnerable in this cycle.

Rosner: Let me condense my argument into one simple point: Who wrote The Bell Curve? It’s two guys. Charles… it’s two. 

Jacobsen: Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. 

Rosner: Or wait, Charles Murray is alive, and Richard Herrnstein, right?

Jacobsen: Yes, that’s right. Long day, I get it. 

Rosner: The Bell Curve is the most well-known book arguing for racial differences in IQ, and it’s been around for almost 30 years now. It’s a classic in that problematic genre. If you see someone bringing it up on social media, 90-plus percent of the time, that person is a creepy racist.

Jacobsen: Yes, and it’s a two-way street. Are they citing the whole text? Or just a section? On the other hand, is the person countering that argument by rejecting the entire book without having read it? Or are they focusing on a particular passage and saying, “No, the evidence does not support this”? The truth is, social media isn’t that sophisticated.

Rosner: Right. Anybody bringing that stuff up on social media is likely doing so with bad intent. Like I said, 90-plus percent of the time, they’re just using it to push a racist agenda. 

Jacobsen: I’ve seen this in email correspondence when I offer interviews. Despite my constrained time, with all the projects I have going on, I sometimes do limited interviews—like a 25-minute one on a specific topic, say topic A or A and B. Then someone comes back asking, “Why didn’t you talk about topic C?” Or, “Why didn’t you call out this person for their supposed racist associations with D?” It’s unfair.

Rosner: Exactly. It feels like falling into a trap. 

Jacobsen: Just like on Twitter, where some people are full-on, proud white supremacists, there are also left-wing versions of that extremism.

Rosner: There are also subtler people on Twitter. Just like white supremacists who constantly post news about undocumented immigrants or Black people doing something terrible, there’s a subtler version of that—people who use academic studies to build an argument. They put together a series of studies, and it’s only after reading dozens of their posts that you see their real agenda. Without stating it outright, they’re pushing the idea that “whitey is better than non-whitey.” But they hide that agenda behind a veneer of intellectualism. They may even have other interests beyond their belief in white superiority, but the thread of their argument takes time to catch.

Jacobsen: Even if someone is center-left, we have to be careful not to engage in racist generalizations when countering these kinds of arguments. 

Rosner: I’ve seen people on the center-left who are naïve and get taken in by white man’s burden arguments. They might believe we need to help people from other countries or backgrounds because they’re intellectually disadvantaged to catch.

Jacobsen: I’m not sure I’ve personally seen that flavour of awfulness, but I can imagine it exists.

Here’s a concrete example: Some parts of the so-called “woke” movement are doing good work addressing racism, sexism, and class-based injustices. But at the same time, they promote a hierarchy of oppression in society, and in doing so, they make generalized statements about men, white people, and so on. They’re engaging in the very thing they condemn. That kind of intellectual hypocrisy is untenable in the long term, though it is gaining traction in the short term.

And that’s a danger that, in the long term, could damage center-left, if not left-wing, movements. At least in terms of the rhetorical flourish, we’ve been seeing for the last 5 or 10 years. And not taking those categories as absolutes but rather as statistical inferences. You have to take everyone individually, but yes, you can generally understand why men, or people in North America, have been privileged in various ways over others—for example, basic things like the right to vote or access to certain positions and jobs. But in making these generalizations, you can fall into the same trap of stereotyping that you’re condemning. You make generalizations about white people, men, or people with more money, which follow the same logic you’re criticizing.

Rosner: I see that happening. And here’s my prejudice: I think MAGA supporters are, on average, less intelligent than the rest of the U.S. population. So, I’m guilty of demographic generalization, too. I don’t think it’s prejudiced to say that a significant percentage of older people—those in their seventies or eighties—experience mild or early cognitive decline, making them more gullible or less sharp. I’d stand by that. It’s an actual problem because people in cognitive decline are often targeted by politicians and scam artists with overly simple arguments. I’d say Fox News, for example, is designed for what they call “low-information voters,” which is a euphemism for less informed or less critical people.

Jacobsen: Yes, we’ve touched on this territory before.

Rosner: So why do I feel justified in thinking that while I argue that people who generalize about entire nations can’t do the same? It’s a tricky line. The moral paradigm and stereotyping seem wrong to me. But if you were to say MAGA ideas are stupid, wrong, or even evil, that’s a different claim than saying most MAGA people are. Still, I’d argue that to fall for those ideas, you either have to be dumb enough to believe them, or you’re pretending. It’s either a case of genuinely believing nonsense or conveniently buying into it because it fits your worldview.

In one case, you’re intellectually lazy or uninformed; in the other, you’re being cynical. So, am I doing the same thing I criticize when people make generalizations? Possibly. However, part of the argument is whether these people are genuinely less informed or intellectually lazy.

Are they letting social factors turn off their critical judgment? I might be overthinking this. 

Jacobsen: Regarding public life, I’m taking too much of an academic approach. I want to be overly self-critical about having these prejudices—not in terms of the content but the underlying logic and how I’m applying it.We have two minutes left. Should we cut it here, or do you want to keep going?

Rosner: No, that’s fine. I got up on my high horse and then jumped into the muck. You tried to pull me out of the muck, but once you’re in it, you’re in it. 

Jacobsen: All right, talk to you tomorrow. Thank you.

Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com

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