so i i know you can't tell but you're looking at a new and improved version of me today because i just finished the canadian government's online ethics course and so my my capacity to manifest ethical behavior has been improved by an immeasurable amount so okay so today we're going to talk about something that's actually quite controversial although i guess what we talked about last lecture was rather controversial too people hate this topic generally speaking and it's because like there's nothing ever there's never any guarantee that if you investigate things from a scientific perspective that you're going to learn things that you want to learn or that you're happy about knowing or that you wish were that way i mean i would say one of the big advantages to the scientific method is that it presents you with data that you don't like i mean most of the time when you learn something it's because you're running into something that you don't like or don't want right because otherwise when the world is unfolding in front of you exactly as you predict and hope there's nothing to learn you almost always run into an impediment of one form or another before you ever learn anything so we're going to talk about openness today now that sounds rather innocuous in and of itself but the problem is is that openness is the place in the big five where iq hides especially non-verbal iq which is most specifically associated with fluid iq now the thing about intelligence is that it's not like the big five it's unidimensional in most regards so you know if you do the proper factor analysis with the entire corpus of trait descriptors in language you end up with five dimensions there's no superordinate single dimension you can make a case for plasticity and stability but the actual utility of that higher order factor structure has yet to be demonstrated in in a multiplicity of situations we have some evidence for with regards to plastility and stability that plasticity is predicted more by what people do and stability is much more predicted by what people don't do now i don't know how useful that is i mean it's kind of an interesting fact it was an incredibly powerful effect but and plasticity seems to be associated more with exploratory behavior and perhaps with dopaminergic function and stability perhaps more with the control and constraint of behavior and serotonergic function but it's still pretty vague so you can certainly make a case for the for the hierarchy of factor structure with regards to trades to sort of top out at the five factor level with some possibility of it of an informative level above that iq isn't like that it's pretty damn unidimensional and it's complicated because there does seem to be some utility in in distinguishing between verbal and non-verbal intelligence or fluid and crystallized intelligence depending on how you look at it and i think the distinction is basically this is that fluid intelligence roughly is a measure of how rapidly you can learn things and then crystallized intelligence roughly is an indication of how much you've learned and then you can see why those two things would be very highly correlated right because how much you know is obviously going to be a function of how fast you can learn but you could also see that there would be some circumstances under which those two things could be dissociated so one of the things that happens for example as you get older your fluid iq drops quite precipitously and it starts doing that somewhere in your mid-20s so there's some of you are already getting stupider which is kind of annoying at least from the perspective of the ability to learn but your crystallized iq or your verbal iq depending on how you look at it can you continue to rise for the rest of your life as you put more information into yourself so to speak and some of that might be a measurement artifact somewhat because the way that you test verbal or crystallized intelligence generally is by asking people about their knowledge of something maybe it's their vocabulary for example which is an excellent measure of verbal intelligence as you might expect probably because it's an index of how much people read that would be my guess or general information tests which is what a sample of your required factual knowledge and so forth um that sort of thing can increase as you as you age as your ability to learn decreases the best way by the way if you want to keep your intelligence intact the best way to do that is to uh to exercise just so you know it both weight lifting and cardiovascular exercise can maintain your fluid intelligence to quite a remarkable degree across the course of your life and the reason for that likely is that your brain is a pretty vascularized organ and it use uses a tremendous amount of your body's oxygen and energy and so if your cardiovascular system isn't in that good of shape then what seems to happen is that it's harder for your brain to get rid of waste products that are produced during its during its metabolic processes and so you can't work as efficiently there's not a lot of evidence that brain games of one form or another can produce any real positive effect although there's scattered reports in the literature that video games can improve that can improve spatial intelligence which is a subset of intelligence even though it's very highly correlated with fluid intelligence in domains other than the game usually what happens if you if you get people to develop expertise at a game that requires abstract ability like a video game what happens is they get tremendously better at the thing that they're practicing but there doesn't seem to be a lot of transfer of ability to different games and and what fluid intelligence is in large part is what's common across multiple the ability that's common across multiple complex tasks whatever that ability happens to be now we don't know exactly what that ability is partly because we don't really know very much about how the brain works but we definitely know how to measure it and that irritates people so iq fits under openness and the terminology is still a little bit i would say awkward um for a while when people were trying to sort out what the fifth factor was the openness factor some people thought about it as intellect and some people thought about it as openness and it ended up being named openness when we did our aspects study back in 2007 we broke it up into openness to experience proper and intellect so those seem to be aspects of the higher order trait and the aspect level differentiation actually turned out to be rel rather useful at least at least so far so one of the things we just published a study for example showing that if you were higher in openness to experience the aspect you were more likely to be in the humanities and if you were higher in intellect you were more likely to be in the sciences for example so anyways what we'll do first is we're going to talk a little bit about intelligence per se and then we'll talk about the trait the reason i want to talk about iq really because really that's what i'm talking about is because the best measure of the intellect aspect isn't a big five personality questionnaire it's actually an iq test and so and it's very very important to understand iq and there's a bunch of reasons for this and first reason is is that iq is more powerfully predictive of long-term life success than any other phenomena that can be measured among human beings and not only that the statistics that were derived statistics that were used to derive iq tests and then used to predict future performance are exactly the same statistics that every social scientist particularly psychologists every social scientist uses to do all of their statistics so you can't criticize the derivation of iq tests on statistical grounds without criticizing every single finding in psychology that's ever been made by anyone ever since we started to use statistics and i would say not only that the best statisticians that psychology has ever produced are the people who invented and promoted and developed and tested iq tests so there's no getting out of it by saying that there's something something faulty about the statistics so for example stephen j gould who's a famous evolutionary biologist and pretty radical left-wing thinker he debated he had a public debate at one point about what he called the mismeasure of man because he wasn't very much of a fan of iq tests and he claimed that iq tests were faulty because they relied on factor analysis and because basically what iq is is the first factor that you draw out of a huge battery of questions that require abstraction any kinds of questions you'll find that if people do well on one question they tend to do well at all the other questions that's the general factor and he said well that's just a factor and that's means it's a mathematical abstraction and that means that it's not real it's like well first of all the first factor that you derive out of the performance indices for a very large number of answers to abstract questions is almost perfectly correlated with the average the mean and so that's tantamount to saying that the mean is a mathematical abstraction and therefore doesn't really exist and well then you have a problem which is well exactly what do you mean by exist because you can certainly make a case that mathematical abstractions are more real than the thing that they're abstracted from if that wasn't the case then mathematics wouldn't be so powerful so basically gould's argument boiled down to the idea that there's no such thing as an average well this is part of what makes me a pragmatist philosophically i mean there's such thing as an average in so far as calculating the average and then using it produces certain results that you desire in order to deal with the world right so the average of a group of numbers is a tool of some sort it you know which obviously doesn't contain all the information that the entire set of numbers contained you need at least a standard deviation to get that as well because that talks to you about the the range know the variability but the idea that the average isn't a real thing is you know is silly it's a it's a shallow criticism it's also based on complete lack of knowledge about exactly what factor analysis does and doesn't do so now here's a list of some intercorrelations here between the various facets or the various aspects just so you know how tightly associated they are so industrious and industriousness and orderliness are correlated at about 0.4 that's from conscientiousness volatility and emotional still stability at about 0.59 politeness and compassion at about 0.44 assertiveness and enthusiasm at about 0.47 and openness and intelligence about 0.35 so openness and intelligence seem to be somewhat maximally differentiated as far as aspects go so the average correlation between the big five is r equals 0.22 and the correlation between the big two is r equals 0.24 so that just gives you some idea of how much segregation and how much overlap there is between the different aspects underneath the trait level let's see so what i should really tell you first i guess is how is how to conceptualize iq yeah this is a good one so you want to follow this carefully so that so that you you you can explain it to yourself and so that you can explain it to other people so here let's say you want to make an iq test so this is what an iq test is the first thing you might imagine that is that you have a huge library of questions and there be questions that could be formulated in language or some other symbolic manner often they don't have to be but often and then they require skill or knowledge to answer so here's some typical questions and you could generate multiple exemplars of questions like this what's 2 times 68 what's the capital of georgia how do you find how do you define hypertrix anemia um complete the pattern 2 4 8 16. remember these numbers 2 4 then you tell them back to me 6 12 15 14 18 20 22 you tell them back to me that's a working memory test by the way but working memory is basically indistinguishable from intelligence in many many ways so then you know another thing i might have you do for example is i might show you a pattern made out of squares and then give you some blocks and so that you could make the pattern out of the blocks and then time you to see how long it took you or maybe only give you a certain amount of time and if you didn't do it then you either pass or fail i might show you some patterns this is like a ravens progressive matrices test which is one of the most tests that is the most accurate at assessing nonverbal intelligence or fluid intelligence so i might show you six patterns six designs and each design changes sorry eight designs imagine a three by three array three here three here two here and a question mark and then over here i'd show you a bunch of options of patterns and one of the patterns would complete the sequence and usually you could calculate the sequence going down or across and and diagonally as well and that looks somewhat like a working memory test in that usually the raven's progressive matrices patterns involve a couple of different variables like it might be color and shape or something like that and so in order to complete the the test you have to figure out how the color is transforming and figure out how the shape is transforming or maybe in a more complex ravens matrices question it would be color shape and position on the page or something like that so you're increasing the number of dimensions that have to be attended to simultaneously in order to solve the problem so so one of the things that's quite interesting about the iq test it really doesn't matter what the questions are and so so anyway so imagine you have a whole pile of these questions lying around like a universal pile a universal library of potential questions that require abstraction to solve and then you take a random set of a hundred of those and then you give that to a thousand people and then you just score some up there you just sum up their scores and then you rank order them in terms of their performance and that's iq it's as simple as that now you could do some other things you could correct it for the age of the participant now sometimes that's useful and sometimes it's not um but you could do that and generally if you standardize the score and you correct it for age then what you get is an iq score i would so actually the the the total would just be an indicator of general cognitive ability an iq score would be the indicator of general cognitive ability corrected for age and that's it that's all and so here's some of the strange properties of of of that set of scores if you factor analyze the data set you'll pull out one factor and a few little bitty factors after that and that factor will be very very highly correlated with the sum so correlated at 0.9 0.92 0.93 like really highly correlated far more highly correlated than most tests are far more highly correlated than most tests are reliable now another thing that's very interesting is you take another set of 100 questions and you give them to the same thousand people and then you re-rank order the people and then you correlate the rank orders you get what i'm saying the correlation between the rank orders will be like 0.95 so what it means is no matter which set of 100 questions you take out of this universal library of questions people are going to score in the same order that they scored when they did the first hundred questions and that means that iq is extremely reliable test retest reliability this is actually an even more stringent form of reliability which is alternative form reliability so that's all there is to iq it's very simple now why it is that the ability to do well on one of those questions is highly correlated with the ability to do all the rest of them that's something that nobody really understands i think it has to do with the human capacity to abstract like we can abstract and we can manipulate abstractions it's not obvious that there's any other creature that can do that and it seems to be in some sense modular anything that can be abstracted and then manipulated draws on exactly the same set of underlying skills whatever those happen to be now you might say well so what which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say and so what is if you then take that rank order then let's say you take the same thousand people 20 years later and you rank order them in terms of how well they're doing at their job you could just use income say as a marker there's other markers you could use but for the sake of simplicity let's say income the correlation between their original rank order and the rank order of their performance will be something around if you had a full sample of intelligence be something around 0.5 which is 0.5 is a staggeringly high correlation so you know you'll hear that when you hear people talk about effect sizes you'll hear them say that 0.2 is a small effect size and point three is a medium effect size and point oh sorry 0.5 is a medium effect size and so forth what you find out if you look at the literature empirically is that point effect sizes of 0.5 correlations of 0.5 are vanishingly rare in the social sciences if you ever do a study with a reasonable number of people with a novel measure and you're predicting something with it if you get a correlation of 0.5 boy you're jumping around the room because that's only going to happen like once in your life unless you're measuring something that someone has already measured and you just don't know it and so it's it's fair it's a it's a reasonable to point out that the correlation between iq say and academic performance or the correlation between iq and long-term career success the size of that correlation is bigger than the correlation between virtually two two of virtually any other things that social scientists have ever discovered and the thing about it too is it's very straightforward you know what the procedure that i just told you anyone can replicate that you know you're not going to come up with a universal library of questions obviously but you can use the internet as a reasonable proxy so not only is iq easy to understand from a measurement perspective it's also the tests are very very easy to replicate and they're extremely powerful predictors now it turns out actually that iq is correlated more strongly with how rapidly you learn a task than it is with your performance per se so the correlation between rate of learning of something novel and iq can be as high as 0.6 or 0.7 which you know the other bit of that would probably be taken up by something like conscientiousness or openness or negatively with emotional stability so you're picking up a tremendous amount of the variation between in people's performances with that single measure and you can derive a pretty decent indicator of iq in 20 minutes which is also pretty frightening you know so well so that's our cue does anybody have any questions about that yes well you have to formulate them in language that's all yeah now a lot of people have complained about the idea of intelligence because they don't like the idea they don't really mind the idea so much that there are smart people but people really don't like the idea that there are dumb people and you know it's it's it's it's really not reasonable from a logical perspective to have one without the other and it's easy to see why people object to that because whatever term you use to refer to the low end of the intelligence distribution rapidly takes on a pejorative nature so and so what happens is the culture cycles through various words decade by decade trying to describe the lower end of the intelligence distribution but all the words end up being pejorative and so they're they're changed decade after decade but you and you can understand that because first of all there's great danger in labeling someone unintelligent perhaps period but certainly if there's measurement error you know so if you're labeled unintelligent let's say and you're not that's going to be real catastrophe so there's measurement error problems but then you know you have to think about the problems of not doing the measurement so this is something i've thought about for a long time so let's say that i assessed your verbal iq before you came to the university of toronto forget linguistic differences assume we could control for that which is very difficult at the university of toronto because there's so many people who have english as a second language but forget about that for a minute let's say i got a entire population distribution not only of the applicants from the university of toronto but of the entire population and i said categorically that the bottom thirty percent of the people in that distribution would not be able to graduate from the university of toronto am i doing them a favor by not letting them apply or am i harming them well we know perfectly well i mean the probability that there's anybody in this room that has an iq of less than 115 is pretty damn low and if if there is someone in the room whose general intelligence level is at that level you can bloody well be sure they're working like mad dogs in order to keep up and i'm not saying that all of you who have to work like mad dogs to keep up you know are are necessarily lower than you might be in iq i'm just saying that because iq in part seems to be a measure of something like processing speed or rate of understanding or something like that if you're not in the upper echelons of the distribution and you're tasked with extraordinarily difficult tasks that require abstraction and quick learning the only way that you can compensate for it is by working to an incredible degree and you can do that and that's also why at the university of toronto we know this perfectly well and it's true in other educational institutions conscientiousness is almost as good a predictor of grades as intelligence and that only makes sense to me it's like who the hell is going to get the good grades the smart people who work hard and i mean would it wouldn't be good if that wasn't the case as far as i can tell because hopefully what you get when you get a grade is an indicator of how fast you are how well you know the material and how much effort you've put into learning it something like that the relationship between creativity and grades at the university of toronto is zero by the way once you control for iq which is you know perhaps rather appalling but the problem is is that it's very difficult to assess creative people right because they're annoying creative people do things in a new way and the problem with trying to assess whether or not someone has done some something in a new way is that you have to come up with a new scheme of grading for that and you can believe that's not going to happen you know and then it's worse because if you're a creative person and you're graded by someone who isn't creative they're not going to think you're creative they're just going to think that you're wrong and so and you might be because lots of times if you're creative you're also wrong because it's not that easy to come up with a novel way of doing something or a novel hypothesis that actually is going to be an improvement over the previous hypothesis right most of the time you're off on a tangent and it's an incorrect tangent now various people have criticized the idea of a single intelligence and so they've made i guess the most famous ones probably in the last 15 years or 20 years of being robert sternberg and martin gardner martin gardner is not a scientist by the way at all um he claims directly that he doesn't really care if his intelligences can be measured well that's not that helpful because if you're working as a scientist if what you're talking about can't be measured then it doesn't exist and you can even make a philosophical case i think that if what you're talking about can't be measured in any possible way that there's no sense in assuming that it exists now gardner is posited intelligence is like linguistic musical logical mathematical spatial body kinesthetic intrapersonal and interpersonal um one thing you might note is that we already have a perfectly good word for all of those performance variability across all those domains insofar as it actually exists and that would be talent so there's no reason to confuse the word talent with the word intelligence and the next thing that you might note is that a lot of these so-called intelligences are likely captured not so much by intelligence but by variability and personality traits which we already understand and so to throw a bunch of new terms in like linguistic musical logical mathematical spatial body kinesthetic interpersonal and interpersonal all that does is muddy the conceptual waters it adds now there's a reason for that the reason is fundamentally political and the political reason is is that um it is uncomfortable for people to admit that there might be something like actual differences in ability that are important and unerraticable now i can understand why people would have trouble with that but consider the alternatives we know part of the reason that you're here and will perhaps stay here and will perhaps be successful in so far as you can define success along the dimension of career attainment say in your life as it unfolds from this time onward is because you work hard okay but we also know that part of the reason that you're here is because you're smart now the question is what should you do with that from an ethical perspective exactly should you say no i'm no smarter than anyone else which means that maybe you're much more hard working than everyone else so you're still you know denigrating the non-achieving end of the distribution or do you say i've been blessed by something that's actually beyond my control and am privileged as a consequence of that and then decide what exactly that means in terms of your responsibility those are your choices but but to not take into account the fact that you've been blessed at at least one level of analysis with a favorable role of the of the randomness dice seems to me to completely misstate the nature of the causal sequences that propel you into what's essentially a position of privilege so but that by denying that the differences the innate differences in people with regards to important abilities all you do is attribute all your success to your own particular individual controllable actions and i mean i'm not saying that you don't deserve credit for your work it's like more power to you and all of that but the idea that some people are smarter than others that's not an idea that's a fact and it's an uncomfortable fact and the fact that we won't deal with it means that people suffer unnecessarily so let's go back to those people in the distribution i say the bottom 30 percent of the distribution isn't going to be able to get a degree at the university of toronto um unless they are they're capable of working to an insane level and even then likely not um so let's say that you have a ability blind admission process it's random so everybody's name is thrown into a hat and if they get pulled out they get to go do you think that you're doing the people who are going to fail a service or not you know now you can make a case that you are because it's likely that there'll be a couple of individuals in the bottom part of the distribution who will make it through partly because of measurement error right because you're not going to measure this perfectly and partly because well people are surprising and amazing creatures and you never know exactly what any given one of them is going to do but you're going to torture a lot of them to death at the same time you know i've been struggling with this because i've developed tests that help employees employers decide who might be competent more competent than who when they're hiring and that's partly dependent on general cognitive ability and we think based on the statistics the relevant statistics that we can improve the probability that a given employee employer will hire an above average worker in a cognitively complex um for a cognitively complex job position from 50 50 to 75 25 or 80 20. it's quite a lot but it's not obviously there's still a there's still a fair margin of error there but you know having half as many employees below average is definitely going to be of tremendous benefit to your company and you might say well that's unfair because there's going to be measurement error too and that's not the question the question is it is is it is it more unfair than to do it any other way well you could use interviews but tall good-looking extroverted people tend to do much better on interviews than short ugly introverted people especially if they're a little bit on the disagreeable side as well because agreeable people also do better in interviews so not only are they tremendously biased in all of those dimensions they actually don't predict performance in the long run very well at all so actually that means in the states they're illegal you know although companies lawyers haven't woken up to this fact yet but you're mandated by law in the united states to use the most accurate valid and reliable current means of hiring available and interviews are not that and neither are letters of recommendation which are pretty much as bad they're not so much biased the letters of recommendation they're just useless because you know except insofar as if you can't get anyone to write you a letter of recommendation at all well maybe that's an indication that you're very you're not very socially skilled or that you don't have a very good social network or whatever so maybe as a really blunt indicator of isolation you could derive some information out of letters of recommendation but as far as valid indicators of future performance they're just not valid at all it's partly why i hate writing them it's they're they're they're they're also illegal at least they they are in the us even though people don't understand that yet but i know the law and i know the validity statistics so and what you're required to do so then you might also ask so the so the other selection methods are also biased and unreliable you could say well you could hire someone based on their academic history but roughly that's an index of intelligence and conscientiousness anyways it's just not a very good one especially because there's tremendous variability between schools so if you have a you know a gpa of 4.0 from school x and this person has a gpa of 4.0 from school y there's no reason at all to assume that those are comparable so you can use grades but that's full of measurement error so that's not very good either so you could guess that'll give you 50 50 in terms of your probability of hiring someone who's above average versus below average but that doesn't seem to be a very intelligent way of going about it either because and here's here's something to think about so let's assume that there are 10 people working and inappropriate selection method places an incompetent manager above them so maybe the manager is less intelligent than the workers that might be one possibility or maybe the manager is less creative than the workers are maybe the manager is less conscientious or whatever it doesn't matter some dimension of competence is not well matched with the demands of the job well then one of the questions is what exactly are you doing to the manager well you're basically setting them up to fail and the tremendous number of managers fail in the first two years of their of their promotion it's it's well above 50 percent and so that's not so good for them but then you're also dooming the 10 people that they're supervising to a kind of horrible per you know perdition for the time it takes for everyone to calculate that the manager is actually failing and what that means generally is that the very highly qualified people in the worker pool will just leave because why would they put up with that so then you might think well is it unethical to select properly or is it ethical to select randomly or exactly how should you solve that problem and the answer is well we do try to solve it because we use selection methods but we usually use ones that aren't very accurate it's funny too because i tried selling accurate selection tests to corporations for a very long period of time and one of the things i learned is they didn't want them that was mind-boggling to me because the economic utility in hiring people who are competent compared to people who aren't is so high it's absolutely mind-boggling because the difference in productivity between people isn't even it isn't normally distributed it's paredo distributed some people are staggeringly more productive than other people so tilting your selection criteria so that you pick from the more productive end of the distribution means incredibly powerful economic benefits for your company but um at least when i was doing this to begin with human resources people who were usually the ones evaluating the tests weren't necessarily the most competent people in the corporate environment which is something that hasn't changed very much they were very badly trained and they believed that there were no differences between people that couldn't be eliminated with training which is like yeah no no that's wrong as anybody if you have any sense at all and you think about it for 15 or 20 seconds you know that's the case you know i don't know what it was like in your school but in the school i went to which was way the hell up in northern alberta in the middle of no man's land you know there was at least 15 percent of the students i would say it was probably higher who were still functionally illiterate by the time they hit grade 10 functional illiteracy being they had never read an entire book and that's way more common than you think like i don't know how common you think that is but the stats basically indicate there's as many people with iqs of 85 and lower as there are people with iqs of 115 and higher so and i already said that the minimum iq level of anybody in this room is likely to be something around 115. so the person in this room who has the lowest general cognitive ability is smarter than 85 percent of the general population at 85 and lower which is there's just as many people there as there is at 115 and higher at 85 and lower then you don't get literacy so people with iqs of 90 or less have a difficult time translating written words into action so they can't really read instructions so and that's like ten percent of the populations fifteen percent of the population actually fifteen percent of the population and it's so you might say well no way it's like well you don't get to have an opinion on this by the way because the science has already been done but i can tell you one fact it's pretty unsettling so the united states army has been doing iq testing on its recruits for since before world war one they actually did a lot of the research that established iq tests and validated them and indicated that they were reliable and so forth and they had a variety of reasons for doing that um partly i guess they didn't want to put incompetent people in charge of deadly machinery which you know does seem to be a reasonable proposition i would say but what they found as a consequence of their hundreds hundred years of testing was that you couldn't teach anybody with an iq of 83 or lower anything at all that would make them anything but an obstacle to the um tasks that the armed forces had to complete on a regular basis so that's 83 so now in the united states it's actually illegal to induct anyone into the armed forces if they have an iq of 83 or lower and that's more than 10 of the population now you've got to think about that because what it means is that approximately 10 percent of the population is sufficiently um has sufficiently low general cognitive ability that one of the complex enterprises that's chronically most desperate for manpower has decided that there's no point in even trying now that's a dismal outcome but i don't know exactly what you're supposed to do with that fact but ignoring it doesn't seem to me to be the right thing because it doesn't solve the problem and this is going to become an increasing increasingly present and and and unavoidable unignorable problem because you know already that's what's happening in developed countries less so in underdeveloped countries but in developed countries the gap between the rich and the poor is is increasing so for for example almost all of the increases in wealth that have accrued to people in the last 20 years have accrued to people who are in the top one percent of the distribution of wealth and that's not going to stop by the way and part of the reason is is that cognitive power has become even more valuable than it was four years ago and the reason for that is computers basically because if you're really smart and you're good with a computer you're way ahead of someone who isn't very smart and who doesn't know how to use computers at all and you're not just a little bit ahead you're leaps and bounds ahead and worse than that you're getting farther ahead all the time and the reason for that is that computational power keeps increasing and it increases a lot it's doubling about every 18 months so part of the problem that the human race is going to have to face in the next 30 years along with many other problems is what are you going to do with people who have neither the cognitive ability nor the conscientiousness to find a niche in society that's actually that that other people will value enough to pay for because that's really the question what do you do well the conservative answer to that is well there's a job for everyone it's like no that's wrong there isn't and the liberal answer is well everybody's the same so it's just a matter of training and that's also wrong they're both both of those positions are there the scientific research has rendered them permanently outdated well you know there is the possibility of providing a minimum income the the the question what will that do is completely unanswerable we have no idea what it'll do you know and i mean it might stop people from from starving to death although i wouldn't say in north america that's generally not a problem people have anyways but we don't know see i think of that i think of human beings as pack animals fundamentally you know and i and i this is just it's a metaphor in some sense i don't think that people can be happy unless they are burdened down with something like a sled dog is burdened down with something you know you you have to have a responsibilities they have to be important responsibilities you have to be sequenced in your time you know most of the people i have in my clinical practice if they're not employed they just fall apart and the conscientious ones fall apart because they eat themselves up with shame and and guilt and the unconscientious ones fall apart because their sleep schedule goes all over the place they don't eat regularly regularly anymore they do all sorts of impulsive things that are counterproductive and you know they just sort of spiral into a pool of meaninglessness so human beings are pretty social and we're pretty altruistic you know in in some weird manner and it doesn't seem to me that people can live a life that's acceptable if all they have is enforced leisure so maybe that'll be wrong if you provided people with a base salary maybe people would figure out what to do with their spare time but um i doubt it i don't think people are i think it's very very difficult for people to regulate themselves in the absence of a certain minimum of of social structuring and guidance i've seen very very few people who can conjure that up on their own and manage it for extensive periods of time i think i've only met one person i would say in my whole life who's actually managed that and that particular person has a very large array of talents and is extremely intelligent so all right so you might ask well what what what exactly is intelligence and maybe what exactly is the ability to abstract and i think it's something like this the world is made out of the world is a very very high resolution place no matter how much you zoom into something you can zoom in more there's information that more and more and more and more levels of detail and then also no matter how far you back away from something there's more and more and more levels of detail so you know you guys are composed of a whole variety of subsystems complex functioning subsystems all the way down to the subatomic level and then above your phenomenological level of perception your members of families your members of cities your members of provinces and and nationalities and international organizations and ecological structures and so forth and so on and all of that's characteristic of you all the time and in every situation but you don't deal with all that information and you can't and so one of the things that people seem to have learned how to do is to abstract from that and i'm not exactly sure what it means to abstract but it seems to me that it means something that's similar to producing um a low resolution representation like a thumbnail and so actually when i look at each of you what i'm actually seeing is a thumbnail of what you are you know first of all obviously i don't see the other side of you that or or either side for that matter i only see you face on so in some sense it's a two-dimensional um thumbnail and then i have no idea what's going on in the subsystems that that constitute you at levels outside you know underneath your mirror surface that's a complex diagnostic problem for example if there was something wrong with you and i can't see your families or except in very you know low resolution ways your nationality or any of the systems that you're identified with and embedded in so just looking at you is an act of abstraction you know and part of that thankfully is done by the fact that our sensory systems just aren't that good so there's a whole bunch of things we can't perceive and that simplifies the problem now what we're hoping is that i can perceive enough of you at a given time so that if i interact with you i get what i want and you get what you want roughly speaking it's something like that so what we hope is the model the abstract model even of perception itself is sufficiently accurate so that it's sufficiently it's a sufficiently unbiased sample of the reality that it reflects so that if i interact with it things work out the way that i would like them to work out but there's lots of times when that doesn't happen at all right it doesn't happen when you're sick the fact is that you're the resolution of your sensory apparatus is a huge impediment to figuring out why you might be ill you know and it doesn't help much either when people are engaged in struggles that go beyond the merely personal so if we happen to be if i happen to be the member of one ethnic group and you happen to be the member of another and there's strife between those two ethnic groups then the fact that i can perceive you at this level of resolution might have very little to do with my ability to solve that particular problem now obviously people can abstract you know part of that's just built into us so that we abstract the phenomena that we see but then human beings i think in some sense are capable of meta abstraction so i think what happens is you can imagine that there's the phenomena in and of itself whatever that is that complicated multi-layer thing that's always in front of you and then there's your representation of it which is what you perceive which is already extracted to a tremendous degree and limited to a tremendous degree and then there's abstractions of that so what seemed what it seems to me to be is that language is a thumbnail of images that are a thumbnail of the reality of things it's something like that so it's a dual compression so if i say cat to you you'll what what the word cat does for you is produce the image of a generic cat which is already a kind of abstraction and then that's attached to your understanding in some sense so that you can you can generate the understanding that would go along with at least in part with perceiving or interacting with a real cat so in some sense what you're doing is i'm compressing the information down to a tremendously low resolution thumbnail and i'm throwing that at you and you decompress it into a low resolution image and then you decompress that into something that's roughly equivalent to reality that's what you're doing when you're reading a book for example right because when you read the book you can conjure up images of the places that the author is talking about you conjure up images of the characters themselves so to such a degree that if you go to see a movie that's made of your favorite book you might be irritated because the person in the movie looks nothing like the person that you read about at least as far as your imagination was concerned now intelligence in general seems to be whatever underlies the ability to generate those low resolution representations to and to utilize them so that would mean to manipulate them in your own mind but also to communicate them to others a big part of intelligence is working memory and working memory is well while you're sitting there thinking if you're thinking how many of you think in words primarily as far as you're concerned so how many of you don't think in images anybody images well that's another possibility how many of you think in words and images okay okay so so okay well that's fine you know the images are already a representation and in many ways the words are a representation of the images and so your ability to abstract and then your ability to manipulate those abstractions seems to be at the core of whatever intelligence is and that's what iq purports to measure um your working memory so when you're if you sit there right now um so let's do this here is the sentence to think about okay now think about that sentence okay so the faculty that you're using to represent that sentence to yourself is working memory and it's not very powerful you can't contain very much in your working memory seven digits is about the maximum now people vary some people think that four bits of information is actually the limit to working memory some people think it's closer to seven but it's not very much that's why telephone numbers tend to be seven digits long so you can kind of easily remember seven things which is not very many things you know so part of what your intelligence is is the breadth of that working memory and then the speed with which you can run abstractions through it so now you know i've put a little map here up so that the thing on the top left well that's sort of a multi-dimensional it's a schema of a multi-dimensional reality and i you know if you look at that what it is it's a collection of dots or circles arrayed in a variety of different arrays my proposition is that you can represent that array in a variety of different ways i've called them object one you can't see object two slide error object three object four and object five those are all low resolution representations of the thing that's in the top left hand corner and you can see that in some sense they capture something important they capture some important element of the thing in the top left hand corner but they don't capture all of it now it might be that not capturing all of it is a good idea because you don't want to use any more information than you have to and then at the bottom well those are words or semantic symbols of one form or another and they represent the representations um i saw temple grandin speak once i don't remember if i told you about this but she's a very famous autistic researcher um she's quite autistic and she's very fun to listen to she's quite a good public speaker which is quite remarkable she's trying to figure out she thinks that autistic people think like animals and and she actually works with animals and she seems to be very good at understanding them she believes that what things that frighten her are the same thing that frightens animals and for the same reasons and so her proposition for example is that if i say the word church all of you people are going to have what you might describe as a schematic abstraction like a hero glyph that's more or less representative of the class of churches and so or maybe i can say house kids are good at this you see this house it's like it's got a little rectangle on the top and it's got a kind of a square on the bottom it's got a door and two windows and the windows have crosses in them and there's always a chimney on the top with smoke coming out which i think is quite remarkable because you actually don't see that many houses now that have chimneys with smoke coming out but still that's the canonical image for a child temple grandin's claim was that she cannot see house she can only see a house and so if you say to her something like house then what comes to mind is a particular house that she's actually experienced she can't take the next level of abstraction past that which seems to be something like a deficit in generating like a hieroglyphic image one one of the ways to think about children's drawings you know how they draw people with sticks and circles you know you think oh that's so primitive it's like no it's not it's unbelievably sophisticated because those aren't pictures they're hieroglyphics and the child automatically produces them and that's a proto-linguistic development so some autistic kids can draw like leonardo da vinci with no training whatsoever and that's partly because they don't use hieroglyphics and that means that they don't really conceptualize the thing they're looking at as an abstraction they see nothing but detail and if you're training yourself to be a visual artist you have to stop looking at the abstraction and you have to start looking at the thing and that's very unsettling so if you take your hand for example and you look at it and you snap it out of hand representation when you do that property it all of a sudden looks like some kind of like octopus claw it's a very bizarre looking thing and as soon as you see it that way you can draw it but as long as you're seeing it like a hand you're going to put you know a balloon with four balloons on it or something like that and that's going to be the hand so all right this guy's name is john carroll carol's a real scientist um he looked at the structure of iq for a very long period of time wrote a very thick book on it which nobody likes to read because it's almost entirely technical so it's really more of a reference book but what what carol hypothesized and i think his hypothesis is as close to state of the art as as any is that there's a stratum three level which is fluid intelligence g and it's the main factor that unites all these other tests and then that stratum one you get fluid intelligence crystallized intelligence verbal intelligence i don't remember what the rest of them stand for and then each of those can be sub divided into specific tests and each of the tests can be subdivided into somewhat particularized individual cognitive abilities now they're not that individual because there's a single factor that accounts for most of the variability in the performance so in a sense what this theory says is that the intelligence is sum up to one intelligence and that seems to be essentially correct this although you can't see it very well um if you look at g there on the left the lines leading to the first or i think that's the second strata the next strata anyways show you the correlation between g and each of the individual intelligences and what you see is the correlation between g and fluid intelligence is 0.94 which is such a tight correlation that it might as well just be the thing itself between g and and crystallized intelligence is 0.85 all of the first order correlations there are above 0.8 that's exactly and then at the far right you get concepts that you might think about as particularized and so those include concept formation analysis and synthesis number series number matrices spatial relations picture recognition block rotation visual matching decision speed block rotation crossout visual and auditory learning memory for name sound blending incomplete word that would be incomplete word completion sound patterns auditory attention etc etc and you can think of those each as individual tests in that you could make a test that theoretically only individually assessed that thing but you couldn't help but be testing all sorts of other things at the same time because that they're not actually individual one of the things you will learn is that there are neuropsychological tests and the neuropsychologists like to think that iq is something that's primitive and that they've already what would you say advanced past and so they have specific prefrontal tests say that hypothetically assess specific prefrontal abilities and then they'll note that if you take a single test of prefrontal ability and correlate it with iq it'll only correlate at about 0.3 or 0.4 and then they'll assume because it only correlates that low that it's measuring something other than what iq is measuring but really what happens is that it's just not a very good iq test and the reason that the correlation is so low is because of measurement error so if you gave the same test to the same person 20 times and then you varied the test so there were 30 variants of it you gave those all to the same person 20 times then what would come out would be a score that would be much more highly correlated with iq and probably indistinguishable from it and so you'll learn from neuropsychologists that there's such a thing as prefrontal ability and that's associated with executive control and that's associated with self-regulation which would be control over your impulses and as far as i can tell that's all completely wrong and it took me like ten years to figure that out because i was taught that it was right and it wasn't until i plowed through it painfully to and understood that there was no evidence for that so i can tell you how that works so for example we gave a neuropsych battery that consisted of dorsolateral prefrontal tests to 3000 people it was a 90 minute battery so it was exhaustive and when we factor analyzed it when there was only about 200 participants we got four factors but then when we factor analyzed it after we had three thousand participants we got two factors and one was one on which almost all the tests loaded and it was undoubtedly fluid intelligence so but it's worse than that you know because you hear about how the prefrontal cortex regulates behavior well here's a problem with that what's the correlation between iq and conscientiousness zero roughly speaking it's probably a little off zero although it might not be and you know that because the dimensions of the big five are roughly orthogonal i showed you at the beginning of this that each trait of the big five traits is correlated with the other trait on an average of about 0.2 now why that is it's probably because of something like um what would you call it's probably a halo effect if you tend to rate yourself as positive on one trait more conscientious more agreeable more emotionally stable you're going to tend to rate yourself as more positive on the other traits so that would artificially inflate their correlation that's one way of looking at it anyways weirdly enough the correlation between conscientiousness and iq is essentially zero now that's a big problem isn't it because it's unconscientious people that seem to be behaviorally dysregulated right they can't stick to a task they they they jump about they're they're not on track they appear impulsive although we don't know how to define impulsive by the way but your heel psychologists use that all the time it's like well if prefrontal ability regulates behavior how come the correlation between intelligence and other forms of executive control are correlated with conscientiousness at zero right zero is a very bad number when you're testing out a hypothesis so and you know if you think about it it has to be that way and the reason it has to be that way is this like so if you're dreaming you're going to just lay there and dream but your eyes are going to move back and forth now you might say why aren't you running around acting out your dreams while you're dreaming and the answer to that is there's a little switch in your head roughly speaking that shuts off your motor apparatus when you're dreaming and so what happens is you can't run around and act out all your dreams because you're paralyzed and sometimes people wake up in that state it's called sleep paralysis they wake up they're sort of half awake and they can't move and then they often hallucinate all sorts of weird things and thinks aliens have come and abducted them and various peculiarities but if you take a cat and you take out that little switch then the cat will run around while it's dreaming until it runs into something which is the problem with running around acting out your dreams so what does that allow one to conclude well if you couldn't abstract away from your behavior you couldn't think right because what thinking means is to represent an alternative world or maybe just a tiny little fraction of the world whatever to represent it abstractly to manipulate it around but not to simultaneously act it out then it wouldn't be abstracting at all it would be fiddling about with the world through trial and error so you have to be able to pull what you think about out of your body so to speak play with it and then implement it back in now it looks maybe like the ability to implement a plan is associated with conscientiousness but we don't understand that that would be industriousness and we don't know a bloody thing about industriousness like it's just a black hole but the idea that it's your ability to think that allows you to regulate your behavior strikes well there's no evidence for it there's no evidence for it smart people are not necessarily better at regulating their behavior so because for you can have a very unconscientious smart person and you i see them in my clinical practice now and then they come and say well i'm really smart and here's the evidence but i'm doing very badly in everything they're underachievers roughly speaking you know so they can't implement their thoughts not in any stable manner so the fact that they're smart you know on average across their life smart people are healthier mentally and physically than people who aren't as smart but the reason for that isn't because their intelligence allows them to regulate their health the reason for that is because their intelligence allows them roughly speaking to succeed so they're higher up in the dominance hierarchy and if you're higher up in the dominance harkey then your life isn't stressful and you don't get sick as often but that doesn't indicate that there's a direct control between your intelligence and your behavioral output there's very little evidence for that well i think there's no evidence for it so that's rather shocking so you know to me that just wiped out a whole a whole substrate of psychological theorizing and it's i'm sure how many of you have come up against the proposition that prefrontal ability was associated with behavioral control yeah yeah well it isn't so you know not any more than i first of all it's not differentiable from iq regardless of what the neuropsychologists say because they don't know anything about psychometrics generally and they don't like iq because if they studied iq then what they'd find is all the things that they're studying are basically variants of iq and that would suck because other people have already figured out iq and then there's the big problem which is well variation in prefrontal ability which is equivalent to variation in iq isn't correlated with behavioral control it's a really big problem so and so i would like to say well what is correlated with behavioral control and then but the problem with that is well i don't know what you mean by behavioral control i don't know how you're going to measure it and if you do measure it the probability that you're going to come up with something like conscientiousness is pretty much 100 so all right let's see yes effect sizes this is from a very important paper by a guy named hemphill called interpreting the magnitudes of correlation coefficients from the american psychologist number 58. what hemphill did was look at a whole he didn't guess it how big an effect size had to be for it to be a big effect size what he did was go into the literature and study a whole bunch of papers and then empirically rank the effect sizes so that would be the standard deviation difference or the correlation or the r squared you can convert those and then decide you know what proportion of papers had which effect size and decide that well you could empirically rank them and then you'd know how big your effect size was and what he found was that um about three percent of social science studies showed a correlation coefficient of 0.5 or above and that's about the correlation between iq and and general life success in relatively complex conditions point three five to point five only about one in four papers to one in ten an hour 0.15 to 0.35 25 to 57 percent of papers and then r of less than 0.15 was about a quarter of papers so what that means is the ability of iq to predict whatever it is that you want to predict with it is way the hell up in the in the rare rare what would you call it well it's up in the stratosphere with regards to effect power okay so what does it mean practically speaking this is from a company called the wonderlic company in the wonderlic wonderlic sells iq tests to businesses now it's actually illegal for businesses to use iq tests in the united states so actually it's illegal to do anything to hire employ employees in the united states as it turns out because you have to use a test you have to use the test that's the most valid and reliable available that doesn't produce any ethnic or gender differences well there's no tests like that so it's illegal it's also so it's illegal to use interviews it's illegal to use letters of reference it's illegal to use ability tests you might be able to use conscientiousness tests because conscientiousness tests do seem to be completely free of not exactly because older people are more conscientious than younger people so that's also a problem so anyways wonderlic it's a good company it makes really it's iq tests are genuine tests but they are iq tests and people do use them in business even though they're not supposed to but so but what they've done over over a long period of using the test is to come up with approximations for different forms of employment opportunities so how smart do you have to be in order to be placed in a given occupation with a reasonable probability of success so we can tell you here so um let's see is that we got it exactly the right place okay so if you have iqs of 116 to 130 that's pretty much you guys although i would suspect there's a fair chunk of you that have an iq of over 130 because 130 makes you 115 makes you 15 130 makes you about 98 percentile 145 makes you 99th percentile 160 makes you 99.9 percentile something else to think about percentiles are strange things because you might say well there's no difference between someone who scores 95th percentile on an iq test and 99th percentile because it's only four percentiles different but that's not four percentages the person who scores 95 is one in 20. the person who scores 99 is 100 the person who scores 99.9 is one in a so thousand you might think well it doesn't matter because as you you know once you get to a certain degree of smart that's smart enough and now that's wrong in fact it's it's probably radically wrong in that the differences between people actually increase as you go up the iq scale so and that's because performance isn't distributed in a normal distribution it's distributed in a pareto distribution such that almost no one does anything and a very small number of people do everything so which is also a very dismal fact okay so anyways if you're in the upper echelons of the of the cognitive distribution so from 116 to 130 you could be an attorney a research analyst an editor an advertising manager a chemist engineer an executive a manager a trait manager trainee a systems analyst or an auditor from 115 to 110 110 to 115 so that's that'd be in the upper half of a high school graduating class roughly speaking upper quarter copywriter accountant manager supervisor sales manager sales man programmer analyst teacher adjuster general manager purchasing agent registered nurse sales account executive 108 203 administrative assistant store manager bookkeeper credit clerk drafter designer lab tester secretary accounting clerk medical debt collection computer operator customer service rep automotive salesman clerk and typist 102 to 100 so that's pretty much right at the mean dispatcher general office dispatcher police patrol officer receptionist cashier general clerical work inside sales clerk meter reader printer teller data entry or an electrical helper for iq from 95 to 98 machinist quality control checker claims clerk driver delivery man security guard unskilled labor maintenance machine operator arc welder mechanic medical dental assistant from 87 to 93 messenger factory production assembler food service worker nurses aid warehouseman custodian janitor material handler and packer and then that's it so you see that things are getting pretty damn dismal for the people who are have an iq of 85 and below so now what's the difference between intellect and openness proper well one difference is that men seem to be higher in intellect the trait and women seem to be higher in openness and openness seems to be associated with verbal intelligence and with imagination and with fantasy and with aesthetic experience and it seems to go along with the fact that women read more fiction than men so men read non-fiction roughly speaking and women read fiction you know it's obviously there's a lot of overlap but fundamentally that seems to be how it distributes maybe that's also partly because women are more agreeable and so they're more interested in human relations and characters and you know that's the central that's the central theme of fiction um people who are high in openness think divergently here we can do a quick little divergent thinking test so why don't we do that take out a piece of paper in a pen and or or you can type on your computer i don't care you can scratch it onto the desk for all i care it's law but get out a piece of paper something you can write on and we'll do this so um i'll only give you a minute since you're all so fast then we only have six minutes left so write down as many uses as you can think of for a brick you have one minute so so so okay that's all the time you get okay so the first question is i'm just going to ask you i'm going to point at you and you can answer how many how many uses did you come up with thirteen five eight you two it's okay eight that's all right seven seven okay did anybody come up with more than thirteen how many fourteen did anybody come up with more than fourteen okay so you two are the most idiationally fluent people in the class and fluency is a matter of the rapidity with which you can generate exemplars from a category so one of the things that we might ask just as much would be how many words can you write that begin with the letter s in a minute and they'll be you wouldn't believe the bloody range of that there'll be people who'll be people who get six and there'll be people who get fifty you know so ideational fluency is actually a pretty decent predictor of creative ability now you know that's not a great test right because it was very short and i do that multiple times with multiple time durations and just different exemplars and some across that but the correlation between aviation fluency and long-term creative achievement is about 0.3 that's pretty major okay so let's hear a use for a brick how about you oh you could draw on the sidewalk with a brick how about you a paperweight how many people got paperweight yes that's a low creative response now why that doesn't mean that all your responses are but it's a technical definition right so here's what makes a response low creative everyone has it now it's a perfectly reasonable response but for it to be creative virtually by definition it has to be a low probability response that actually makes sense so draw on sidewalk is is is is a more low probability response somebody got a weird use for a brick ground into dust and used okay okay all right anybody else have that they ground their brick into dust for something no yes you could kill someone with a brick anybody have that yes low agreeableness low creativity yeah yeah okay so anybody else go to like a peculiar one for a brick yeah yeah anybody else have that okay so you know it's kind of a lousy musical instrument but in a pinch it would work yeah well that's a good one first of all you can kill it and then you can drown it yeah yeah so the way you would score this by the way it's quite straight it's not that straightforward actually first of all you count the number of responses and you get rid of ones that are um repetitive and then you also get usually a couple of people to throw at once that are just like they're neither original nor practical the best responses are original and practical now there's a bit of a judgment call there you know what i mean but if you get a number of people to do the rating you can get pretty decent integrated reliability and so then you score originality and the way you score originality is merely by summing like listing all the responses and then calculating how probable or frequent the responses are and the more infrequent responses you get a higher score for so it's def it's basically a population sample so and those things actually work those those tests just so you know now i'll stop with this this is a this is a a measure that i derived with one of my students when i worked in boston her name was shelly carson and this thing has actually become one of the standard measures of creativity in the creativity literature which is quite fun and it's a creative achievement questionnaire so what i gave you just now was a creativity test it's one of many creativity tests but it wasn't a creative achievement test because you can generate uses for a brick without running out and becoming a brick entrepreneur you know so there's a difference between being able to think divergently and with loose associations and then also being able to put that into practice so you achieve something and so here's some levels of achievement so there's the scientific discovery domain i do not have training or recognized ability in this field i often think about ways that scientific problems could be solved i have won a prize at a science fair or other local competition i've received a scholarship based on my work in science or medicine i've been author or core author of a study published in the scientific journal i've won a national prize i've received a grant my work has been cited by other scientists in national publications okay and then the same thing for say theater film and culinary arts zero is i do not have training or recognized ability and theater and film number seven is my theatrical work has been recognized in the national publication for culinary arts i do not have training or experience and the highest one is my recipes have been published nationally okay so there's 13 different domains and that's the distribution it's not normally distributed so what you see there actually it's not quite right because the the median answers about 66 percent of the respondents to the creative achievement questionnaire have a median score of zero right zero they do not have training or talent in any of the 13 areas and then there's some people who are way out on the right hand distribution because you can imagine that once you have national exposure in one magazine as a writer the probability that you're going to get national exposure again for your second novel starts to go up pretty damn high right and so you get this terrible step down function so that almost everybody aggregates at nothing and then a few people are way out in the distribution and they just get everything and there's actually a law it's called the matthew principle that economists use and it's from a statement in the new testament from matthew and it's a statement where christ says from those who have to those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken away and that seems to be how creative resources are distributed in the population and to a large degree that's dependent on intelligence openness and conscientiousness so you can understand why none of that's very popular with people since you're all smart and conscientious though it's going to work out well for you see you on tuesday i'm going to post your midterm marks what we're going to do after that with regards to this strike i don't i can't i don't know yet