About a month ago, one of my regular respondents asked me to blog about self-awareness in animals. I’m doing so now because it will be useful for an essay I’m planning to write about ethical and legal definitions of humanity.
Category: Science
Mathematics versus reality
In the comments to my posting on the incoherence of Narnia, it has become apparent that some of the respondents are deeply confused about the relationship between mathematical and empirical truth. Symptoms of this confusion have included a superficially plausible but mistaken application of the Law of the Excluded Middle and an an attempt to… Continue reading Mathematics versus reality
People Getting Brighter, Culture Getting Dimmer
In response to my previous post noting that the Flynn effect turns out to be a mirage, at least two respondents have suggested that average IQ has actually been falling, and have pointed to the alleged dumbing-down of politics and popular culture in the last fifty years. I think both those respondents and the psychometricians… Continue reading People Getting Brighter, Culture Getting Dimmer
Out like Flynn
Renowned pychometrician Charles Murray has given us, in The Inequality Taboo, a concise summary of the most current science on group differences in IQ and other measures of capability. Most of it is not surprising to anybody who has been following the actual science rather than press accounts severely distorted by the demands of political… Continue reading Out like Flynn
What Do You Believe That You Cannot Prove?
I wrote this for John Brockman’s 2005 Edge Question. Can’t see any good reason not to blog it as well. I believe that nature is understandable, that scientific inquiry is the sharpest tool and the noblest endeavor of the human mind, and that any “final answers” we ever get will come from it rather than… Continue reading What Do You Believe That You Cannot Prove?
Predictability, Computability, and Free Will
I’ve been reading some philosophical discussion of the free-will/determism question recently. Quite a number of years ago I discovered a resolution of this question, but never did anything with it because I assumed I had simply reinvented a well-known position and could not really contribute anything to the debate. However, the research I’ve done recently… Continue reading Predictability, Computability, and Free Will
Racism and group differences
At the end of my essay What good is IQ?, I suggested that taking IQ seriously might (among other things) be an important step towards banishing racism. The behavioral differences between two people who are far apart on the IQ scale are far more significant than any we can associate with racial origin. Stupidity isn’t… Continue reading Racism and group differences
What good is IQ?
A reader asks: To clarify, while I believe natural selection explains a lot I have caveats about IQ as a tool for testing intelligence. If you can’t measure the coast of France with a single number how can you do it with human intelligence? Easily. Human intelligence is a great deal less complex than the… Continue reading What good is IQ?
Selecting for intelligence
Mike Smith relays an interesting possible explanation for the observed statistical fact that American and European Jews have a mean IQ a standard deviation higher than Caucasian gentiles: During the period from ancient times to modern times, there was a constant phenomenon of Jews converting to Christianity (there were many social pressures to do so).… Continue reading Selecting for intelligence