No bell curve?
Doc Searls has a follow up post to his "flat" post, where he disagrees with Dave Friedman's disagreement:
Friedman: "IQ distributions are a bell curve: there are very few people at the low (retarded) end of intelligence, and there are very few at the high (genius) end of intelligence. Most of us are bunched in the middle. The distribution is much the same as a distribution of humans' heights: Tom Cruise is below average in height and Yao Ming is above average. (But Tom Cruise is closer to the average than Ming.)"
Doc: "Wrong. I've been 5'9 the whole time my IQ has been measured everywhere from very smart to very dumb. Intelligence is complicated, conditional and hard to measure. The belief that people have "an IQ," however, comes easy. Too easy. "
I'm not so sure that the disagreement is as violent as it sounds. It would surprise me to find that intelligence isn't distributed on a bell curve - it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that measuring it is difficult, and that our current methods miss-classify people. To take a simple case - my Dad is mildly dyslexic, and never really liked to read because of that. I would guess that many IQ tests would rank him low because of that. A failure of methodology doesn't imply that a thing doesn't exist.
Doc wants to believe this:
The unwelcome point I've been making here, and that John Taylor Gatto has been making for much longer, is that most people are born smart and that we use theh likes of IQ tests to pound populations of uniquely gifted individuals into bell curves.
And sure, there's plenty of round pegging going on in the schools. The inability of the schools to deliver mass customization is a completely different problem though, and doesn't really speak to the distribution of intelligence. I'd agree with Doc that most current IQ tests are worse than useless. I do think there's something that could be measured, if we had any idea how. Ironically, his closing anecdote makes my point:
By the way, back when I got out of college, I was spared boring jobs at two insurance companies by flunking IQ tests. One was Aetna. That was administered right at the employment agency. No waiting. Impressive. I forget the name fo the other one, but I remember the setting vividly. It was in Newark. Nice offices, friendly people. The guy who interviewed me told the employment agency something like, "I was so impressed by the interview. He seemed real smart, and knew an awful lot of stuff. But then when we got the IQ test back we found out he was really dumb."
Placing the interviewer right down there towards the lower end of the bell curve, I think...
Comments
thanks for linking to my blog
[Dave Friedman] May 6, 2005 13:03:33.439
I respond to Doc Searls, saying much the same as you, here.
No bell curve?
[ alan knight] May 6, 2005 15:42:15.792
Comment by alan knight
So, *why* do you think there's something there that can be measured - and specifically one single thing. It seems to me from lived experience that people are good at different things. For example, in one narrow area - language, I learn words better than my wife does. But her accent is much better than mine. We can both spell, and are fussy about grammar. She consistently beats me at Scrabble. I'm not sure why it's important to try and distill that to a single number, and what meaning that number would have if we did. I'm confident that telling kids where they fall on some arbitrary scale, and pretending it's an innate and permanent measure that they can't do anything about, is harmful. I recall as a child being told I couldn't sing, and being afraid to for the next 15 years.
Measuring intelligence
[Doc Searls] May 6, 2005 16:55:12.292
I believe all of us, regardless of evident intelligence or talent, are born knowing what Whitman summed up best, in Song of Myself: "All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me. Now I stand on this spot with my soul. I know that I have the best of time and space. And that I was never measured, and never will be measured." We'd get a lot farther if we acknowledged the immeasurable than we're getting by insisting it can be measured.
Intelligence
[ Rich Demers] May 6, 2005 17:24:17.882
Comment by Rich Demers
There is something more to intelligence than any arbitrary measure of brain power, as if it were in the same category as horsepower. People who are good at some things are usually not so good at others. There are notable examples of people who seem to be good at everything they try, while others seemingly fumble at everything. It's best to think in terms of a 3D landscape whose axes are skill, ability, and population, with any individual occupying an area of the skills / abilities plain.
And then there's the "human factor." Some people reach mental stasis early in life, refusing stubbornly to learn and grow, refusing to use the skills they do have. I've met way too many people like this, who don't understand that there is no difference between someone who can't read and someone who won't --- including quite a few college grads. Contrast them with people for whom almost everything is of interest, for whom ideas are a playground and a source of stimulation and opportunity. Fortunately, I've also met quite a few of them, too -- some without formal educations.
So much for IQ tests...
Law of Form
[Hmmm] May 6, 2005 23:07:18.389
The distinction between more and less IQ exists because of an intention. Think about it. What do you think is the intention of the test? To justify those that know how intelligent they are? Or to box people that could have the enthusiasm to do something if they were not told that they're dumb? And in the middle of all this combing, where do people like Einstein or Ramanujan go?