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Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Psychology: Intelligence does not lead to better judgement, decision-making

Dennis Prager, who interviewed Mario and me about The Spiritual Brain, argues,
Most Americans upon hearing that someone has attended Harvard University assumes that this person is not only smarter than most other people but is actually a more impressive person. That is why, for example, people assume that a Nobel laureate in physics has something particularly intelligent to say about social policy. In fact, there is no reason at all to assume that a Nobel physicist has more insight into health care issues or capital punishment than a high school physics teacher, let alone more insight than a moral theologian. But people, especially the highly educated, do think so. That's why one frequently sees ads advocating some political position signed by Nobel laureates.

Intellectuals, e.g., those with graduate degrees, have among the worst, if not the worst, records on the great moral issues of the past century. Intellectuals such as the widely adulated French intellectual Jean Paul Sartre were far more likely than hardhats to admire butchers of humanity like Stalin and Mao. But this has had no impact on most people's adulation of the intellect and intellectuals.

So, too, the current economic decline was brought about in large measure by people in the financial sector widely regarded as "brilliant." Of course, it turns out that many of them were either dummies, amoral, incompetent, or all three.
Prager is making the classical distinction between being smart and being wise. It is wisdom that is the worthwhile pursuit and the source of whatever real happiness we may find in this life.

By the way, if you want to know what is wrong with modern secular intellectuals, read Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, a magisterial study of people who thought ideas were more important than people, and what really happened.

(Note: No one doubts that clinical developmental delay creates problems with judgement. But it does not follow that brilliance leads to good judgement. The two situations are not commensurate.)

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posted by Denyse @ 4:53 PM  

Monday, August 18, 2008

Brain: How much does brainpower matter to success? Some surprising answers, only one of which matters much

In "High-Aptitude Minds: The Neurological Roots of Genius" (Scientific American Mind - September 3, 2008) Christian Hoppe and Jelena Stojanovic tell us that "Researchers are finding clues to the basis of brilliance in the brain."

The clues are pretty murky, and the whole area sounds confusing and contradictory in the article (which is not the writers' or the researchers' fault - it is more likely due to the plasticity of the brain). For example,
No one is sure why some experiments indicate that a bright brain is a hardworking one, whereas others suggest it is one that can afford to relax. Some, such as Haier—who has found higher brain metabolic rates in more astute individuals in some of his studies but not in others—speculate one reason could relate to the difficulty of the tasks. When a problem is very complex, even a gifted person’s brain has to work to solve it. The brain’s relatively high metabolic rate in this instance might reflect greater engagement with the task. If that task was out of reach for someone of average intellect, that person’s brain might be relatively inactive because of an inability to tackle the problem. And yet a bright individual’s brain might nonetheless solve a less difficult problem efficiently and with little effort as compared with someone who has a lower IQ.
The most useful take-home information is this:
University of Pennsylvania psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman examined final grades of 164 eighth-grade students, along with their admission to (or rejection from) a prestigious high school. By such measures, the researchers determined that scholarly success was more than twice as dependent on assessments of self-discipline as on IQ. What is more, they reported in 2005, students with more self-discipline—a willingness to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term gain—were more likely than those lacking this skill to improve their grades during the school year. A high IQ, on the other hand, did not predict a climb in grades.
In other words, one reason that a difference between highly intelligent people and the rest of us may be difficult to identify is that the difference is not necessarily reflected in real life performance.

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posted by Denyse @ 9:32 PM  

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Smart birds spur scientists to rethink intelligence

The remarkable feats of intelligence of some (not most) species of birds, effortlessly surpassing that of apes, is spurring a reappraisal of the origin of intelligence:
Alex, an African gray parrot who lived in a Brandeis laboratory and possessed a vocabulary of nearly 150 words. Yet as remarkable as Alex was - he could identify colors and shapes - he was not alone. The songs of starlings display a sophisticated grammar once thought the sole domain of human thinking. A nutcracker can remember the precise location of hundreds of different food storage spots. And crows in Japan have learned how to get people to crack walnuts for them: They drop them near busy intersections, then retrieve the smashed nuts when the traffic light turns red.

[ ... ]

The intelligence of birds, which sit far from man on the evolutionary tree, has also forced a reappraisal of where intelligence comes from. Scientists once assumed that intelligence evolved out of physical need - animals got smart in order to exploit natural resources. But the brainpower of birds suggests that intelligence is actually a byproduct of complex social interactions. Living in a group requires an animal to juggle lots of information about its peers. So it's not a coincidence that the smartest creatures are also the most social.
This sounds like a far more promising account of the origin of intelligence, actually.

I've long been skeptical of claims that intelligence evolved as an aid to survival. The vast majority of life forms that have survived for millions or even hundreds of millions of years did not require - or acquire - intelligence. The newer notion that intelligence is spurred by the need for complex social interactions seems a bit closer to the mark, though not entirely satisfactory. After all, many insects have achieved complex social interactions without anything like what we humans regard as intelligence.
Nicola Clayton and Nathan Emery, another researcher at the University of Cambridge, showed in 2001 that only western scrub jays that had previously stolen food from other birds would always re-hide their food. Jays that had never stolen before didn't worry about being stolen from.

"These birds are projecting their experience of being a thief onto other birds," Clayton says. "They are thinking 'Well, I've stolen food, so this guy might too.' It's a form of mental simulation."

That, of course, admirably explains one of the uses of intelligence - once the bird has it - but does not account for its origin. As we all know, many birds are fairly stupid, and would likely be better off if they were smarter. But they do not become smarter on that account. It is reasonable to suppose that many species of birds have become extinct on account of a problem with their environment that they might have been able to solve if they had become smarter - yet they did not.

Of course, we all love a good mystery, and this one should keep us going for a long time.

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posted by Denyse @ 7:13 PM