[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Are you familiar with Dinesh D’Souza?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: So you know he’s a right-wing propagandist and kind of often not too concerned with exact truths, right?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: So, he saw a tweet I think where somebody was talking about how statistically Trumpy Republicans are dumber than average and he came back with, “Yeah but the Democratic party is built on black people whom it has been well established by multiple studies, score a standard deviation lower than other races.” Then I came back with, as somebody who knows a lot about IQ that “Anybody who’s talking about racial differences in IQ is pursuing a creepy agenda and any such differences if they’re real at all are largely cultural and Dinesh D’Souza is a felon and a liar,” and that thing took off. So we’re doing Lance versus Rick again and we talked about it there and it’s made me think about the whole thing more. I’ve obviously benefited from the idea of IQ because I’ve gotten publicity for having a high IQ and I feel like I’ve exploited it properly or like strategically which is to both say IQ is bullshit and I’m a weirdo with a high IQ.
If you go out there and earnestly promote yourself, kind of more like Raniere, that everybody should listen to me because of my high IQ, that’s creepy. I don’t know but it fucking worked for Raneire. It got him a sex cult and it got him access to tens of millions of dollars from the Seagram’s heiresses. So, I don’t know maybe that works too.
Jacobsen: Also, the Bronfmans that you mentioned, they’re in my community. They’re in the horse community.
Rosner: Oh. Are they nice? I mean everything I’ve seen of them indicates that…
Jacobsen: No, at least one of them is in jail. I mean the international equestrian community; they knew of them. When I talked to a prominent person who works here they said “Oh yeah, we knew about that, the Raniere thing. We were surprised shocked too.”
Rosner: Yeah. I mean it’s not a sin to be naive and to be taken in by a con man. One of them went to prison because of the Raniere thing.
Jacobsen: For complicity with the sex trafficking I think.
Rosner: Right, well that’s a shame. I think some of the Bronfmans went to a school where Carol worked. So, anyway my recent thinking has led me to think even more that IQ is a racist structure in this way. My daughter does history of art, particularly women’s art and there’s generally has been a distinction made over the past 150 years and they’ve been certainly longer really between art art, painting and sculpture, and anything else which is seen as craft. She could tell you the one guy who was a very influential critic, I think in the 19th century, who really nailed down this impression arguing that art art is art and everything else isn’t and it’s no coincidence that art art painting and sculpture is dominated by men. Even when women do it, like Mary Cassatt, there have been quite a few women artists in the fields of painting and sculpture who have been really good but they tend to be de-emphasized. And then people who do the kind of art that my daughter looks at like needlework of and other kind of home-based crafts their stuff is completely devalued and called craft rather than art and part of her efforts is to say that the these so-called crafts are just as much art and are just as creative as somebody doing frescoes.
That makes me think of IQ where we’ve discussed Flynn who discovered the Flynn effect which is the increase by about one standard deviation of the average IQ of the entire world in the 50 years after World War II, which Flynn argues persuasively and I think accurately, is due to increased cultural Literacy that the whole world which used to be much more cut off as the world was unified by cell phones and TV and the penetration of movies and all sorts of media to parts of the world that had less access before World War II, everybody learned the styles of thought that are measured by IQ tests. He didn’t really go into those styles being kind of bullshit but you could argue and I’m and I’m doing it here that those styles are to some extent bullshit.
The example that Flynn uses in styles of thought is if you take a naïve, say hunter-gatherer, who’s never been exposed to written language, you take somebody who hasn’t been exposed to culture and you ask them how a fox and a rabbit are alike. That person will answer while a fox hunts a rabbit, fox eats a rabbit and that’s a wrong answer on an IQ test because that’s not what alike means according to an IQ test though the person answered they’re alike in being part of a struggle between the hunter and The hunted. But the correct answer according to an IQ test is they both have four feet, they both have fur, they’re both mammals, they’re both warm-blooded, they both walk on four feet, they both lope, they both live in coldish climates, etc. So they reflect a different kind of understanding.
You understand what alike means; it means shared characteristics. It reflects an ability to break something down into its characteristics but that’s a cultural ability. You could argue further which is what I’m doing here, which I don’t think Flynn argues, that that style of thinking isn’t necessarily any better than other styles of thinking. You could further argue that there’s been a neglect of those styles of thinking on IQ tests because people who created IQ tests looked down on practical skills as indicative of thinking ability. If you went to like one of the early IQ test makers and probably even now, you show up at the Stanford Binet offices or the Wechsler offices and say “Here, I’ve got a whole new IQ test” and one of the questions on the test is make a pair of shoes, they’d be like “What the fuck is this?” but should they really be what the fuck is this? Because practical knowledge isn’t necessarily shittier knowledge or shittier thinking than being able to break things down into their characteristics. Comments?
Jacobsen: I mean to have practical knowledge is to have broken those things down into the relevant characteristics emphasizing relevant and then putting them in a sequence that you can manipulate in time.
Rosner: Yes. Here’s another question on that new IQ test. You have half an hour, come back with a hundred dollars. They’d be like “Well that’s bullshit.” But is it? I mean there are plenty of ways to argue that it is bullshit but it’s not necessarily completely bullshit. There’s an argument that I’ve made recently, the argument goes like this that one reason that rich white kids do better than poor kids is intact households that have breathing space. Kid comes home from school, has dinner with two parents, listens to the parents have adult talk with each other, the parents have the leisure to be able to read or to be able to do something other than have two or three jobs just to survive but a poor kid in Chicago and when you say Chicago, you’re implying black. And so a kid in a poor household say with a single mom, an 11 year old who after school takes care of an eight-year-old and a five-year-old while the mom is working two jobs. All the talk in that household if there is much talk is either coming from the TV with kids shows or Easy Entertainment or it’s among the children. The mom gets home at 11 at night and the kids are in bed. Maybe the 11 year old’s awake enough to say hi to the mom. The mom’s tired and doesn’t have much to say and she’s certainly not going to talk over politics with a kid. So the kid gets exposed to less adult talk and has a less developed vocabulary.
So I believe that’s a true argument in terms of kids’ vocabularies. I think it’s also racist because it says that black people are poor but there’s another dimension to the argument. Along with that argument often goes the cultural emphasis. We know that and I’m sure there are studies but even without studies we can say that there are probably a higher percentage of black kids who earnestly aspire to be college or professional athletes versus say Jewish kids. My athletic aspiration was to avoid being laughed at in PE or to get a doctor’s note to get out of PE altogether which I did because I was just so shitty at it and it just wrecked me at school because that was the era of being shitty at PE meant you were a little F word.
My brother who’s almost 6’3 and was great at basketball; he had athletic aspirations. He was I think unusual for Jews statistically. At the Wechsler test, I show up at the Whistler office with my new IQ test and I say here’s a basketball situation. 11 seconds on the clock; you have the ball out of bounds and you’re down by two. Which of these things do you do? And it’s a multiple choice. Why isn’t that a legitimate question for an IQ test? Its knowledge that a black kid who aspires to play college ball would be better at than like I would and why is that reasoning any less relevant. Maybe I could figure it out. Anyway, that’s my argument that the same way that they’re snobbery about painting and sculpture versus needlework, there has been snobbery over styles of thought in making IQ tests. Comments?
Jacobsen: Fair.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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