[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so you pitched this idea again in email yesterday, the day before I guess, I’m percolating a bit between the two of those for a while. So, what’s behind the term IQ post-mortem? What’s the intention there?
Rick Rosner: It’s kind of the end of the IQ era where IQ was created as a test, as a testing concept at the beginning of the 20th century and fell into relative disrepute by the end of the 20th century. There will be new ways of measuring conscious information processing capacity go along with the rise of AI and figuring out the mathematics of consciousness. IQ may survive in some small way but it’ll be smaller and not as big a deal as it was for the people in the 60s say. So, that’s one kind of post-mortem that IQ as a reputable idea is kind of coming to an end. And then it’s kind of the end for people who have traded on IQ notoriety. In the 80s, Marilyn Savant got famous for having the world’s highest IQ according to the Guinness Book of World Records and to build a nice career out of it over the next 35 years. The careers of people trading on IQ or are for the most part coming to an end. So, there’s another kind of post-mortem.
Jacobsen: What do you think was or were factors killing it off?
Rosner: It’s very difficult, especially if you don’t want to, IQ is still well loved by racist fuckers and even if you’re not a racist or a sexist, it’s fairly hard to avoid some of the racist and sexist aspects of like trying to measure intelligence. Certainly the people who like to claim the entire nations have average IQs that that differ from other nations, these are due to cultural or genetic reasons, certainly those people are fucking racist assholes with creepy agendas but even the people who don’t do that it’s a kind of an icky concept. So, that’s thing one, that it’s icky.
Thing two is, it’s unnecessary. U.S colleges are learning to do that without the SAT, an aptitude test that’s supposed to measure your innate skills as they apply to go on to school. It’s been known for decades that your SAT score doesn’t add any further predictive value to the rest of your academic portfolio that the people can predict how well you’re going to do in college exactly as well with or without looking at your SAT score. So it doesn’t do anything and SAT is a surrogate for IQ. So, it doesn’t do anything, it’s not a very useful tool. If somebody has learning deficiencies you can learn about those directly and you don’t need to extrapolate from their performance on an IQ test. It just seems kind of passé that over the past 40 years we’ve gotten more conscious cognizant of the labels we hang on people about sexuality and again race and just all that different stuff and labeling somebody with an IQ is just one more label to maybe avoid. So, those are three pretty big factors.
Why do you think it’s going away if you do think it’s going away?
Jacobsen: Well, if we look at the psychological studies on heritability there does appear to be a heritability paradox. On the one hand it appears to be highly heritable where on a minus one plus one heritability, the metrics are anywhere from 0.6 to 0.8 with some recent studies even pointing out to 0.85 plus size spectrum in terms of positive correlation. So there could be a lot of founding factors there yet at the same time it shows heritability on one range of things. On the other hand, apparently to experts there are other ways in which the heritability is less clear. There’s something like a heritability paradox and this is an actual phenomenon they’re trying to work on and any studies on genetics and epigenetic aren’t fully fleshed out because we’re at the very inception of these things.
Rosner: I have one more other factor. IQ is kind of cheesy, like people who aren’t socially inept know not to brag about their IQs. It kind of has a reek of geekiness and not good geekiness but like creepy geekiness.
Jacobsen: It has a sense of elitism, people don’t like that.
Rosner: Yeah, but not even legit elite-ness, like you can say you went to Harvard or let it be known somehow. People might think you’re an asshole for dropping Harvard into a conversation but they’ll still be kind of impressed you went to Harvard but if you drop IQ into a conversation not only will people think you’re kind of an asshole for doing that but they won’t be impressed, you don’t get anything from it.
Jacobsen: Another facet is cultural values have changed over the last 100 years. And IQ came in around a time in full force when no rapid militarization was necessary. So, getting everyone lined up and putting them on a comparison ranking and then for them it was important to kind of let them know…
Rosner: Separating the office or candidates from the enlisted man.
Jacobsen: Correct. So, in a lot of ways this is a holdover of that period of time which was more of a sort of soft totalitarian measure on behalf of democratic governments to get things going. It was an emergency act in a lot of ways. As society has become a lot more loose, soft, creative, flexible, and liberal in its values and diverse with various immigration policies and with particularly in the United States, a wider range of freedom of expression, people can think things that haven’t necessarily even been thought before or combined thoughts that haven’t even been thought ever. So thinking about the 60s the 70s when things were really good, quite in a cultural shift in this in fact it’s a little bit recently some.
Rosner: Here’s another reason. Let’s say in the 1940s if you’re going off to war or even if you’re coming back from war, your ability to navigate the world was based on things like privilege but I mean controlling for that, just two guys they’re arriving in New York; one with a higher IQ than the other navigating the big city with just their native cleverness and maybe the knowledge that their cleverness has helped them acquire. Well 80 years later shit’s different where we all have access to all the information and all the apps in the world and nobody’s just relying solely on their cleverness. We have devices that that do our thinking for us and our research for us and somehow inherent cleverness might be less of a big deal.
Jacobsen: Brains are neuroplastic. So if we live in a less rugged time people in some ways would be less forced to grow up, will be less forced to use a variety of cognitive skills for example creative problem solving which would not fall under a categorization of strict IQ to me.
Rosner: Let’s talk about less rough times for just a second because people who live through rough times tend to overvalue rough times and the tough behavior that gets you through them.
Jacobsen: Also true.
Rosner: Rough tough people think a little bullying is good for you and they look at today’s culture and they think it’s sissified and a lot of people from that era though certainly not everybody, kind of hate the idea of sexual fluidity and trans people as if it’s a demasculinization of society and somehow that’s bad. And I would argue no, it’s not bad. Are we going to be dealing with issues where we’re going to have to are the Russians going to be invading and all need to be super masculine to hunker down like they did in Red Dawn? I kind of doubt that. And really if shit does hit the fan we will certainly toughen up.
Tucker Carlson that fucking asshole on Fox, likes to say that our military is feminized now and woke and that makes us unprepared and I would like to say fuck you Tucker Carlson who himself is a soft boy. But more important than whether or not the military is woke, actually I’d say that it’s important the military be woke, that people can be in the military and still live decent lives and more important than everybody being Sergeant Rock with 18 inch biceps and a scar that runs across his face is being able to have the technology that lets you beat threats back and also be able to use the technology being, smart enough. And to some extent, mentally healthy enough to address the issues of a modern military. That probably doesn’t include being super concerned about what people’s genitals are configured as.
Jacobsen: You can put this mathematically to make it clear. In times of survival and emergency individually and collectively, people need solid categories, a small number of them to make a rapid decisions. And so the cultural clash in a lot of ways can be a difference between emergency survival thinking for a decade as their developmental period and comfort abundance surplus culture for several decades.
Rosner: Yeah, it’s like the Eloi versus the Morlocks. And one more thing is the U.S has a number of instances of being under prepared for war and then ramping up pretty fast. World War II was a semi-surprise for us, we could see it spreading across Europe and we were ramping up our whole military but Pearl Harbor was still a surprise. A further surprise was that we declared war on Europe where really we could have just fought in the Pacific Theater but Roosevelt and probably a huge chunk of the U.S population thought we were already helping out Britain but thought we should jump into the fight. The people saw the two theaters of War as being equally important to fight in.
Jacobsen: And also, if the cultural landscape is internationalized with the intellectual landscape and the creative landscape and the banal landscape widened so much, IQ which was already in the background fades more and more to the background as a natural consequence.
Rosner: IQ Advocates would argue that no matter how much different culture vary from each other there’s still an underlying intelligence that provides those cultures forward.
Jacobsen: I’m not speaking about that, I’m speaking about it as a cultural item.
Rosner: What you’re saying is that IQ was a bigger deal in the Western countries and particularly in America.
Jacobsen: In the 20th century and in North America and in West America.
Rosner: So, now the U.S doesn’t dominate the world the way it did right after World War II that then the concepts that the U.S was kind of built, it its was structured around also are less important.
Jacobsen: It’s like Michael Jackson and the Beatles; people still talk about them, but they’re not in the front page news necessarily; unless it’s another Michael.
Rosner: It’s still not clear to me whether his kids are actually his kids.
Jacobsen: I have no idea.
Rosner: Who cares?
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 