The Anxiety-Complacency Connection

Fear is a market. To instill fear in people also has advantages. Not only in terms of drug use. Anxiety-driven people are easier to rule.

-Gerd Gogerenzer, Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research (Torsten Engelbrecht, Virus Mania, 2021)

I've been struggling to understand why it is that "The Blob" (or, as Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi have termed it, the "censorship-industrial complex") tolerates and even seems to embrace so many flavors of woke dogma. Many of these woke position are outright oxymorons. Here are a few examples:

Men = Woman

Carefully- gathered statistics (e.g., regarding police/race) are racist. And see here for many statistics that are inconvenient to the "abolish the police" insanity.

The Rule of Law is unfair, even racist/colonial/white supremacist etc.

Enlightenment Principles, including free speech, have become barriers to progress. See here for my articles on free speech.

Intelligence Tests (modern versions, which are highly predictive, as much as any other aspect of psychology, as well as very carefully designed to be race-neutral) are "racist."

Allowing high schoolers to take advanced math courses is racist. To preserve "equity" we must not allow such classes in high school.

I have written about all of these pronouncements at DI. I have also written repeatedly about immense pressures to conform to particular unwarranted, nonsensical and incurious narratives (see more than 250 of my articles that I have tagged as "narratives in media"), especially by corporate media outlets (which I am increasingly thinking of as government propaganda (often CIA) outlets--See Dick Russel's "Belly of the Beast" two-part article here and here. It is guaranteed to ruin your week--it can be painful when scales fall from your eyes).

My understanding from the sordid marriage between multinational corporations, U.S. foreign policy, government censorship and CIA dirty tricks is those with great economic and political power want more and more. They are never satisfied. But why allow woke ideology or even push it on us?  What does that have to do with money or power? For that, consider the quote at the beginning of this article. When those around us utter palpable bullshit, it makes us anxious, even when we know that it is bullshit (see here). It makes us stay indoors. It causes us to avoid going to school board meetings. It keeps us from speaking up at the workplace or even at family dinners. We know woke ideology makes no sense, but most of us are willing to do a LOT of work to keep others from disliking us, even if they are saying things that we know, for sure, make no sense. Even if we know that they are saying and believing these things due to a vast censorship effort funded and operated by our own government. Even if we are certain that the corporate media consensus is a false consensus enabled by a highly sophisticated government apparatus.

Hearing nonsensical things being uttered around us by family, friends and co-workers who rely on corporate media makes us anxious. In the long run, this anxiety makes us more obedient.

This leaves us with two paths in life.

#1: Run out to get yet another COVID booster, then go home to watch Disney and eat ice cream;

#2: Keep speaking up. When you hear nonsense, call it nonsense. You might be worried that if you say what you believe out loud, people will yell at you and call you names. That will, indeed, happen. But remember, for every ignorant loud mouth in the room, you have become a hero to 9 anxious and silent people who are sitting on their hands. Your job is to inspire those people to be heroes next time.

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What Many People Get Wrong about Intelligence and IQ

At Forbes, Tomas Chammoro-Premuzic discusses each of these misconceptions about intelligence and IQ:

  • IQ tests don’t measure intelligence

  • IQ scores don’t predict anything useful

  • IQ is less relevant to career success than EQ is

  • IQ matters less than learning agility

  • You can be intelligent in many different ways

  • IQ is the product of formal education

  • High IQ scorers are socially awkward

  • Selecting people on IQ harms diversity and inclusion efforts

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Fading creativity

As IQ inches upwards, creativity is sagging, according to this Newsweek article:

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
Why is this happening? The article suggests some possible reasons. "One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools."

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Richard Nisbett: Intelligence mostly varies due to the environment, not genes

The dominant hereditarian view of intelligence holds that intelligence is mostly fixed by the genes. Richard Nisbett has dismantled the evidence on which the hereditarian theory is based. In his new book, Intelligence and How to Get It, Nesbitt argues that the twin studies on which the hereditarian view is based are deeply flawed. The main problem is that the adoptive homes in which those separated twins often find themselves are uniformly enriched learning environments. Nisbett's book was reviewed by Jim Holt of the NYT Book Review:

Nisbett bridles at the hereditarian claim that I.Q. is 75 to 85 percent heritable; the real figure, he thinks, is less than 50 percent. Estimates come from comparing the I.Q.’s of blood relatives — identical twins, fraternal twins, siblings — growing up in different adoptive families. But there is a snare here. As Nisbett observes, “adoptive families, like Tolstoy’s happy families, are all alike.” Not only are they more affluent than average, they also tend to give children lots of cognitive stimulation. Thus data from them yield erroneously high estimates of I.Q. heritability. (Think: if we all grew up in exactly the same environment, I.Q. differences would appear to be 100 percent genetic.) This underscores an important point: there is no fixed value for heritability. The notion makes sense only relative to a population. Heritability of I.Q. is higher for upper-class families than for lower-class families, because lower-class families provide a wider range of cognitive environments, from terrible to pretty good.

What does Nisbett's book have to say about race and intelligence? That the differences among the "races" are not genetic. Evidence in point: The "racial" IQ gap has been shrinking. "Over the last 30 years, the measured I.Q. difference between black and white 12-year-olds has dropped from 15 points to 9.5 points."

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Should science study race and IQ?

Should science study race and IQ? A recent article in Nature ("Should scientists study race and IQ") says yes, as long as the research is done carefully and kept free of outside influence and premature application by social scientists and politicians. Science did not give rise to bigotry. After all, scientific studies of race and IQ began in relatively modern times, only after long centuries of "pernicious folk-theories of racial and gender inferiority predated scientific studies." The authors believe that first-rate scientific research will, in the end, dispel much of the racial bigotry that still exists.

Some scientists hold more 'acceptable' views, ourselves included. We think racial and gender differences in IQ are not innate but instead reflect environmental challenges. Although we endorse this view, plenty of scholars remain unpersuaded. Whereas our 'politically correct' work garners us praise, speaking invitations and book contracts, challengers are demeaned, ostracized and occasionally threatened with tenure revocation.

Acts of censure edge close to Lysenkoism. They also do a disservice to science. When dissenters' positions are prevented exposure in high-impact journals and excluded from conferences, the dominant side goes unchallenged, and eventually its rationale is forgotten, forestalling the evolution of crucial ideas.

I am sympathetic to the need to for scientists to carefully examine everything, no exceptions. I'm concerned, though, that we need to look extra-closely at the concept of "race," which I consider to be virtually useless in daily matters. Nor should we allow the simplistic concept of "IQ" to serve as a variable, given much more expansive ways to measure intelligence (see, for example this post on Howard Gardner's work). For more on the dangers of misusing "IQ," see Steven J. Gould's 1996 book, "The Mismeasure of Man."

In sum, we should do good science and I believe that good science would suffocate bigotry. The article points out several examples of this. Good science should be done on only after kicking out the clumsy, pernicious concepts of "race" and "IQ," reframing the debate as the relationship between fine-grained genotypic variation and competence in each of the many ways in which humans display competence. Because genotypic variation within "races" is at least as wide as genotypic variation among "races," a meaningful scientific exploration would not amount to a simplistic survey of how people with different colors of skin do on standardized intelligence tests. That would not be good science. Good science will always take into account the convoluted ever-changing environment, and that is not easy to do when we are dealing with basic concepts that are vague.

I'm not convinced that we are prepared to begin the necessary research on this general topic, because too many of us, including many well-trained scientists, have not done their ontological homework (consider the incoherent and clumsy stumblings of DNA co-discoverer James Watson, described in the article). Are "race" and "IQ" useful constructs with which to do this sort of research? Time will tell if we are intelligent enough to sharpen our constructs before running off to demonstrate our "truths."

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