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I want to talk about genetics. Scott Alexander has a new piece out about Missing Heritability, basically going through the issues with twin studies:
He goes through a TON of research literature, basically describing how the entire scientific apparatus in genetics tried to figure out why twin studies couldn't be confirmed via actual genetics. To me, it sounds like an extremely robust way to prove that the twin studies were wrong. However, his ultimate conclusion appears to be:
So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."
To me, this assertion is evidence of the glaring blindspot which materialist rationalists such as Alexander have - they assume that materialism / genetic determinism is right, and then reason backward in order to make their fundamental assumptions fit the data. While the genetic framework is clearly helpful and has had some limited success in new medical breakthroughs, it's beyond obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that compared to the hype in the early 2000s, the new branches of genetic science have been a massive let down.
Overall I'm very curious where the life sciences will go. Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary as well as other books, makes some interesting comments in a recent post where he excerpts his own book:
We'll have to see if biologists are actually able to move beyond the mechanistic model and into a more complex, realistic view of life. The obvious CW implications here are how the scientific/materialist worldview and the religious worldviews continue to interact. Right now, the Left seems to be mostly materialist, whereas the right is (nominally) religious. If we can work to merge these two views, we may find more political unity or at least a new set of combinations for our political approaches.
There are at least three pieces at play here: first, the question of deterministic heritability of mental characteristics; second, the question of how genes as we currently understand them map to mental characteristics; and third, the question of what, precisely, IQ is measuring in relation to mental characteristics.
As far as mental characteristics go, I think it’s fair to say that some are pretty clearly innate and inherited and others are not. There are a lot of children out there who pretty obviously derive their mental abilities from whatever their parents have. However, that’s not the whole story. There are habits of thought that can dramatically improve or sabotage a person’s performance. A simple example is just whether someone cares or not. When I play chess, my level of play whiplashes severely based on how focused I am, on the order of a few hundred Elo. When I’m not focused and don’t really care, I just play moves. I believe this replicates across most fields of activity, and that caring has a very strong cultural component. Of course, a few hundred Elo is not multiple standard deviations of performance, but I think it could explain half an SD pretty easily, which is actually quite a lot.
Genes are a stickier question. My rough viewpoint is that our current understanding of genetics is far too coarse to pick up on anything but the simplest behaviors, where a gene encodes a pretty straightforward protein with one real use case. But in real life, all of the body’s systems are expected to interact quite intricately, and we should expect some novel properties to emerge at the intersection of genes. I’m far from an expert here, so this is all I’ll say. I’m not surprised that efforts to reverse engineer the hack job that is evolution are hitting difficulties, but all it proves is the lingering inadequacy of our science.
IQ is the fun part. On the one level, it’s quite simple: IQ is just a measurement of how you do on a specific batch of tests. But those tests claim to be an imperfect measurement of intelligence, and that intelligence is a singular value. This I am not remotely convinced of.
The typical argument is that because different mental functions correlate, there must be some underlying characteristic that powers all of them, and that they’re all secretly linked. But this doesn’t hold much muster with reality. If our various mental abilities were merely outward expressions of a single underlying scalar, we would expect to see people at the far reaches of intelligence be great at everything. In reality, we tend to see them be amazing at one thing, and somewhere between good and terrible at the rest. Another personal example: I am >3SD on the right for analytical intelligence (measured, in this case, by visual puzzle solving) and dead middle on “processing speed”, which means the rate of quickly mapping trivial inputs to trivial outputs, as measured by a professionally administered adult IQ test. This is irreconcilable with the notion that both are just expressions of an underlying “intelligence.” How could that intelligence be both perfectly average and massively out of the ordinary at the same time? It’s nonsensical. What actually makes sense is that these are different capabilities of the mind, and for whatever reason I am much stronger in one than the other. That leaves the question of why these disparate capabilities correlate in most cases, to which I’ll just leave two hypotheses: first, adverse circumstances that lower all abilities, like how being severely obese will undermine pretty much all athletic performance; second, that humans are sorted into classes in a social hierarchy and that these traits are then selected for in groups based on what the class does. Those are explanations that are plausible and do not require a general intelligence.
Anyway, interesting topic, and I do agree that too many of the opinions here come down to faith over examining what’s going on and flexibly adjusting based on new information.
You're first and last point are strongly related. Back when we were introduced into chess as kids, I was exceptional at it compared to most of the others, because I could use raw logic better than them. But once some started to train and I didn't, I predictably slipped behind. Based on my skill with other games and the fact that I started from a higher floor, I could probably keep being better than them, I just didn't focus on it. I liked other games more. If you investigated skill in different board games that all need broadly similar traits and talents, I'm pretty sure you'd find results akin to our IQ results: There is quite a strong correlation between them, and especially on the >1SD and >2SD level you find a lot of people who are just generally good at everything with mild specialisation. But to reach the >3+ SD and more, you need some serious over-focusing and specialisation to the exclusion of other things in addition to the naturally high general talent. Mind you, you somewhat misrepresent the state of the research AFAIK; Even the people at the top end for one category still tend to be significantly above average in other fields, they just aren't at the top end of everything simultaneously.
That's not to say that there aren't other skills critical for only one subfield, or even other relevant general skills. EQ, for example, really needs good face reading to work. Meaning if you have some degree of prosopagnosia, it will be much harder for you, even if you try to focus your intelligence on it. Likewise, if you think about problems in physical space, then a talent for innate 3d visualisation is extremely useful (something I relied on a lot when studying math; I always prefer to move everything towards geometry, which some other students didn't understand, while others also found it intuitively helpful).
Nevertheless, once I account for these other skills, I still use my general reasoning in everything. I use it to mentally move and manipulate shapes, I use it to understand people, I use it to time-plan.
For another example, memory is also a fairly general skill, though not equally so for everything, and I have always really noticed the impact of focus there. Back when I played Battlefield Bad Company 2, I memorized every single weapons traits: Damage, mag size, recoil, delay between bullets, reloading time, even the exact shape of the damage-distance curve ... Same goes for other games. Meanwhile my social memory used to be awful, to the degree that I once forgot my own name when introducing myself (awkward!). I used to tell myself that these are just totally separate things and that it's not my fault, but now that I'm a dad and office worker, I find myself having much less trouble remembering social details about various people, as long as I think they matter. In the same vein I have less patience to remember all the detailed mechanics of arcane games. It's increasingly clear to me that I'm merely re-directing a general skill towards the things I care about, as opposed to there being different skills.
I like your examples of face-reading and 3D visualization. Doesn’t it sound a lot like these are distinct mental capabilities that certain people have distinct from their other capacities? And the idea of using your visualization skills to understand other mathematical realms suggests that your “general” intelligence in this case is informed by your ability to generally apply a more specific talent - and this works for students in proportion to their capacity with that specific talent. Presumably the students who don’t get it but who are still good at the subject are channeling a different underlying ability.
Flipping it around heavily, the memory example is also great. I’ve seen this as well: pretty much everyone I’ve met who was not heavily brain damaged has had some category of thing which they remember quite a lot about, corresponding tightly to their areas of interest. Presuming that “my results on a test” can be an area of interest, does that mean that the means of measuring abilities can identify divides in capacity when it’s really just a divide in focus?
My biggest sense for IQ and intelligence is that we just don’t really have a good idea of what’s going on. We’ve found certain capabilities which are confusingly harsh yes/no values, like the internal monologue and the ability to envision things, considering that there is no evidence that someone is one or the other without asking them: you would expect the difference to be night and day, like it is for children and adults! But we’ve also found certain capabilities that appear to be a single thing, like memory, but which express themselves in such radically different ways that you’d be forgiven for thinking they were entirely different capabilities, and which differences are immediately obvious upon meeting someone. That is, our intuition struggles to break intelligence down into real atoms, and naive external analysis carves at awkward joints.
To the extent I have a point, it’s that intelligence is way, way more complicated than the IQ test model makes it out to be, that we know effectively nothing about it, and that we should be really, incredibly humble about our proclamations about it. We’re all out here debating the four humors; that’s how bad it is. People back then would talk very confidently about the humors, and now they look ridiculous. They may have been smart, but the reality was that they were fools, and they could have been less foolish by being honest on what they didn’t know.
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