Sept. 2, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:56
4182 Why Cognitive Inequality Matters
In a world where the discussion of human intelligence and cognitive inequality is fiercely opposed, we are robbed of factual information and empathy for those who face greater challenges in the modern world. Stefan Molyneux reviews a recent Quillette article on the dangers of ignoring cognitive inequality and discusses important factors involving intelligence which often aren’t considered.Article: https://quillette.com/2018/08/25/the-dangers-of-ignoring-cognitive-inequality/Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Kind of nice to see people working on this particular topic.
This is an article published August 25th, 2018 in Quillette, or Quillette, Q-U-I-L-L-E-T-T-E dot com, and we'll put the link below.
And the guy who wrote it, it's a pen name, man or woman, I suppose.
The Dangerous of Ignoring Cognitive Inequality.
Very interesting. I always like it when I learn something utterly new and shocking about history I had no idea about before.
I'm going to share that with you. So it starts, as there seems to be this kind of template for this stuff, it starts with an anecdote about the Australian mass shooter Martin Bryant, who murdered 35 people and wounded 23 more, and then pled guilty to a list of charges,
and then we point out, or the writer points out, the most notable And concrete fact, a Bryant psychological condition was his extremely low IQ of 66, well within the range, for mental disability.
So we go into IQ stuff, which is important to know.
This is one of the most essential elements of the modern world.
IQ scores are classified in a number of ways, all of which are broadly similar.
The Weschler Adult Intelligence score, Wave 4, establishes seven categories of IQ scores.
Most of us fall into the average band constituted by the 90 to 109 range.
Those achieving scores of 130 or higher are considered very superior.
Conversely, scores of 69 and under are classified as extremely low.
And automatically qualify the scorer for a diagnosis of mild retardation, according to the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
It is also in this band that Bryan's score falls.
Now, this is very interesting.
And whenever I point out the functionality of high IQ people and dysfunctionality of low IQ people, people get mad, which we'll get into.
I'm like, I'm sorry about the facts.
Don't shoot the messenger. So, there is, of course, this general argument that, you know, poor neighborhoods have high crime.
Well, not necessarily. It's around racial demographics as well.
The Appalachians are very poor in the United States, but not a lot of high crime.
Rural areas can be very poor, not a lot of high crime.
And during the Great Depression in the 1930s, people were extraordinarily poor, but crime did not explode.
And it does seem to be the case that the data is Well, the causality is the reverse of what people think.
So people say, oh, it's a poor neighborhood.
There's going to be high crime.
So if we give the poor people more money, crime will go down.
This doesn't really happen.
In fact, sometimes over the long run, it works the opposite way for reasons we'll get into in a few minutes.
But the reality is that lower IQ neighborhoods tend to be poor and the low IQ produces the crime, which also produces the poverty, right?
If there's a lot of crime around, people don't want to start businesses.
They don't want to hire people. They don't want to move in.
And so this is where you get this kind of moat around these particular neighborhoods.
So the connection, the article says, the connection between intelligence and behavioral problems such as conduct disorder or antisocial personality disorder was well known around the time of the Port Arthur massacre.
A review, you can follow these links if you want, a review, science contemporaneous studies to suggest that low IQ scores in childhood should be considered a risk factor for antisocial personality disorder and conduct disorders.
And these are pretty bad disorders.
In 2010, several psychologists published results from a longitudinal study containing data on over a million Swedish men.
I guess this is back when Swedish men were the expected Swedish men, who were tracked from conscription.
For a little over 20 years, they found that IQ scores tested during conscription were a significant and robust predictor, not only for antisocial personality disorder or conduct disorder, but for all categories of mental disorders.
Conscripts with low IQ were substantially more likely to be diagnosed with one or more mental disorders, to suffer from mood and personality disorders, and to be hospitalized for mental illness.
Those in the lowest band, like Bryant, were most at risk of severe psychological disorders.
So here is... The scale, it's not the most pretty graph you'll ever see, but it's very informative.
I don't know why we've got this scale going up to 100 when no number seems to go past 10.
Maybe it's to make it look less stark.
But here, you can see the IQ scale from lowest to highest, from 1 to 9.
I guess they've gone beyond the 7 here.
And hazard ratio is the risk.
So, as you can see, the risk of schizophrenia, other non-affective psychosis, mood disorders, neurosis, and somatoform disorders Well, the risk for that goes up exponentially as IQ goes.
Down. So IQ is, I suppose, because it correlates to some degree, to a large degree, with reaction times and other things.
IQ is like a well-functioning brain, and it seems to be a shield.
So this mad genius, this, he's so smart, he's unstable, or whatever, doesn't at all accord with the data.
And, of course, everyone in the comments below is going to say, well, I knew a smart guy who was really dysfunctional.
It's like, yeah, I get it.
I mean, I understand that, but...
Please take the idea that the plural of anecdote is data.
Take that and just go elsewhere.
You need a lower IQ channel.
It's just not for you. Not for you here.
So as you can see, as IQ goes up, mental disorders go down.
Now, let's look at these kinds of things, right?
Hazard ratio and IQ scale for personality disorders as a whole, alcohol-related disorders, other substance use disorders, adjustment disorders, any other diagnoses, as you can see, it's dose-dependent.
The smarter you get, the less likely you are to have these kinds of disorders.
So when I was talking in a video previously about how high IQ tends to be a shield against addiction, everyone was like, well, I know a smart guy who got a disorder, right?
It's like, oh, man. The amount of energy you people waste in this world is prodigious, let's just say.
So this is from the Swedish score.
So as you can see, lower IQ, higher dysfunction, higher addiction, higher psychological disorders.
And you see, it's not random.
It's very, very much dose-dependent.
Very, very much dose-dependent.
So, this is important, right?
So, when I talk about IQ, when I talk about ethnicity and IQ, these are all very, very important things to understand.
It's the single biggest issue in the world today, which is why I take the hits from idiots for talking about this kind of stuff.
I mean, people who are addicted to cigarettes didn't like it when doctors talk about smoking being bad for you, and I get it, I get it.
So, here, This is a question of distribution, right?
So here, in a population where intelligence is normally distributed with a mean of 100, so here we're talking about the white population.
The white population IQ are constantly recalibrated to be 100 as the center of the scale and East Asians, Chinese, Japanese, South Koreans and so on score higher than whites, Ashkenazi Jews score higher than East Asians, particularly in language scores for the most part.
And so here we're talking about the white population.
In a population where intelligence is normally distributed with a mean of 100, a little over 2% of people would attain IQ scores close to Bryant, right?
So he was 66.
So about 2% of whites have an IQ in that range.
Now, this is one of the big problems when talking about places like sub-Saharan Africa, where the average IQ for blacks is in the 70s, and it's in the low 70s.
So... That's a huge problem.
That's a huge problem.
It means that not far from 40 to 50% of the sub-Saharan blacks would be in the category of this guy's, in the range, like in the mid to high 60s, of this guy's IQ. Now, this is interesting as well. A further 15%, right, so 2%, a little over 2% of whites would have an IQ score close to the 66 for Bryant.
A further 15% of whites would receive IQ scores somewhere below 84.
Well beyond the threshold for disqualification in the Armed Forces Qualification Test used to determine suitability for admission into the U.S. Army until 1980.
So 84.
So 15% of whites have IQs below 84.
84, but the average IQ for blacks in America is in the mid-80s, so it's close to 50%, and that's a big challenge, right?
So the army can't find much to do for people with an IQ of 84 or below, right?
So it says, careers for below this level are extremely rare, a fact that might help explain the correlations between low IQ and an enhanced risk of criminal offending, given the scarcity of well-paid jobs for those with an IQ of below 84.
And again, Is it just the low pay or is a lower IQ? You can't really see over the horizon of the immediacy of your own actions.
You want something for nothing. And because, my friends, the reason I talk about this is out of massive sympathy and concern for people who, through no fault of their own, I really, really understand this, it is through no fault of their own that they're born with a lower IQ. IQ is...
You know, by your late teens is about 85% genetic.
There's a little bit of wiggle room, but not that much.
So it is not people's fault that they're born with lower IQs.
And we must have sympathy.
And we must also, I believe, have a sense of obligation, if we happen to be born with very high IQs, to help the world.
So one of the reasons why, because we don't talk about this kind of stuff, people end up with a lot of resentment and a lot of rage.
And it is very primitive.
It is very superstitious.
It is downright crazy.
If you look at poor people, poverty is generally associated with a lower IQ.
And the achievement and maintenance of wealth is generally associated with a higher IQ.
And again, it's not the poor people's fault if they're poor because of low IQ.
It's just the way they're born. If they happen to be born short, they ain't gonna make it to the NBA. And it's not because they didn't try, not because they didn't practice, not because they didn't work hard at it.
You have to have sympathy for people who are struggling with limitations that is not fair It's not right.
It's not their fault.
Have some sympathy.
Now, if you have sympathy for the people who are, through no fault of their own, born with lower IQs as a whole, then it's also possible to have less hatred for people who have achieved wealth and status because of being born with high IQs.
Because it's so primitive in a way.
Because what happens is, if there's some disease that's running through a town and you blame witches, Well, I guess you can vent the rage that you feel about the disease and your vulnerability to it.
You can have the sick, sadistic joy of dragging some women and a few men out of their homes and boiling them alive or setting them on fire or otherwise eviscerating them or throwing them in prison for being witches.
The only thing is you're not doing anything about the actual disease and you're making a bad situation worse.
And in the same way, when you look at income inequality, wealth distribution and so on, people get this all kind of wrong.
They just fundamentally don't understand it.
They don't understand it.
It's largely IQ. Now, a lot of it has to do with corruption and predation within a very overextended and oversized government, but nonetheless, in a free market, this will happen.
Say, oh, there's a concentration of wealth among a small percentage of people.
It's like, no, the wealth is kind of created by a small percentage of people in the free market.
I mean, I'm not talking about government redistribution and the military-industrial complex and so on, but Wealth is created, right?
So people say, well, Jeff Bezos earns in, I don't know, what, 20 minutes, what some guy earns in a year or whatever.
It's like, but that's not just...
I mean, he creates more value.
You don't think of earning money.
Think of creating value.
That's the reality. And so if we have sympathy for the poor, then we can also let go of...
Rage towards the rich and the cognitive elite.
Because it's just the way the dice roll.
Now, if happiness is your concern, if it's any consolation, the smarter you are, there's not any particular correlation with being happier.
And I think most of us would take happiness over just about anything else, given that happiness generally requires good health and enough to eat and so on.
So don't get too mad at the cognitive elites for being happier than you are because there doesn't seem to be much association there at all.
But it is important to just look...
I return to singing ability because it's a great way to understand this.
People are born with a wide distribution of singing ability, both the physical instrument of the voice and your capacity for a perfect pitch and all of that kind of stuff and your willingness to work at it, your desire to sing and so on.
And so... It's true that the best singers tend to make the most money, right?
But that's not unfair or unequal.
They just happen to be born with great voices and they happen to have a desire to train for it.
And the training is associated with the great voice because if you don't have a great voice, why bother training it?
You're never going to reach that kind of elite status.
So it's not the fault of people who are born Without good singing voices.
And it's not some innate wonderful thing or bad thing that people are sometimes born with great singing voices.
It's just nature and her endless tinkering.
And we need to just start letting go of these ridiculous notions that all...
Inequalities and income are the result of exploitation and racism and sexism and so on.
At the highest levels of cognitive ability, men outstrip women in terms of the ratio by like 8 to 1, 10 to 1, 12 to 1.
And at the very highest, there are virtually no women at all.
You know, for reasons that, in a sense, don't really matter.
These are the facts that we have to work with.
It's not just sexism.
Now, here's something that's very, very interesting.
So the history of the Cold War, just astounding.
So they started running out of people during the draft and here of course you have to put in President Trump's temporary bone spurs and blah blah blah, right?
And so what happened was they started drafting people for Vietnam, but a lot of people died over in Vietnam.
A lot of people went into university because that's a way that you could defer The draft.
And there were draft dodgers, of course.
A lot of them moved to Canada. Some people even preferred to go to jail rather than be drafted.
So they did not have enough troops to fight the battle.
So they did try cracking down on draft dodgers.
But then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, this of course is in the 60s, what he decided to do was to draft men whose low IQ scores had hitherto disqualified them from military service.
And this has happened more recently as America's endless wars in the Middle East have ground on and on.
Now the longest, I think Afghanistan is the longest war that has ever been engaged in at 17 years plus.
They have started saying, okay, well, if you have a criminal record, you can come in and okay, right?
So they lowered the intelligence requirement.
Now this stratagem, codenamed Project 100,000, and there's a book called McNamara's Folly, which you can find on Amazon.
And they were cruelly nicknamed, these draftees, low IQ draftees, were nicknamed McNamara's morons.
And that is, now this is an, I don't know if this is a typo or not, it says these draftees, cruelly nicknamed McNamara's morons, are generally capable of completing simple tasks, but even a simple task imperfectly executed can be disastrous in warfare.
I don't know if it means incapable or capable, but I assume capable, I would have checked this.
So there's an example of this guy named Jerry.
It's not his real name. And actually they say it's Project 100,000.
It actually was closer to 350,000 low IQ people who were drafted into the army in Vietnam.
So this guy, Jerry, was a guard and he was supposed to call halt who goes there followed by advance and be recognized, which is not that hard because an American soldier Does look a little bit different from the average Viet Cong guerrilla.
So if some well-liked American officer returned to camp, Jerry got this all wrong.
He saw the officer approaching, he yelled halt, and then opened fire, killing the man where he stood.
So this guy, Jerry, subsequently disappeared, either remorseful AWOL, or he was murdered by outraged members of his battalion.
This one is astonishing, too, because you think, well, you know, you think of people of a low IQ maybe as kind of inert and so on.
It's like, no, they just don't particularly read these kinds of cues and consequences.
One of the, quote, morons played a joke on his squad mates by throwing a disarmed hand grenade at them.
Despite being beaten up for it, he found this prank so amusing that he repeated it every day until the inevitable happened.
He forgot to disarm the grenade, causing the deaths of two soldiers and the grievous wounding of several more.
Now What happened to a lot of these 350,000 low IQ draftees?
So the writer says to survive in combat, you had to be smart.
You had to know how to use your rifle effectively and keep it clean and operable, how to navigate through jungles and rice paddies without alerting the enemy, and how to communicate and cooperate with other members of your team.
Fulfilling all or any one of these minimum requirements survival in a battlefield is contingent upon a certain level of verbal and visuospatial intelligence.
Which many of McNamara's draftees did not possess.
This ultimately led to their fatality rate in Vietnam exceeding those of other GIs by a factor of three, right?
So three times more of the low IQ people died relative to the average.
And that is just astonishing.
Now, it's not just about the battlefield.
So this is a 2010 study by four psychologists using data from the Danish Conscription Database, which is over 728,000 men.
Low IQ is a risk factor for almost all causes of death.
A drop in IQ by a single standard deviation, roughly 15 points worth of IQ, so like 85 to 100 is a standard deviation.
A drop in IQ by a single standard deviation was associated with a 28% increase in mortality risk.
Big, big deal.
The association between low IQ and mortality was particularly great for homicide and respiratory disease such as lung cancer, right?
So you get involved in crime, you smoke, like all stuff which gives you an immediate hit at a long-term cost.
The high homicide rate could reflect a predisposition for those of low IQ to find themselves in dangerous situations, perhaps due to a lack of economic opportunity or an increased likelihood of being victimized by predatory individuals.
Again, lack of economic opportunity You would have to look at, again, America in the 1930s during the Great Depression.
Was there a massive increase in crime, despite there being a huge drop in economic opportunity?
No. So, yeah.
So, yeah, it's not just smoking.
Inhaling more polluted industrial areas where it's easier to find low-skilled work.
I'm thinking of Freddie Gray and the lead paint that was in some of these ghetto houses.
Just horrible. Being born with low IQ is sufficient to set one up for an unlucky and unhappy life.
Very interesting. So, those with low IQs are much more likely to experience misfortune in seemingly every endeavor, right?
So having intelligence, the writer says, having intelligence is what allows us to operate in the world, both on our own and within the societies we inhabit.
Now, this is particularly true in the modern West because we're automating a lot of lower-skilled jobs.
I mean, if you've ever seen the show Downton Abbey, I did a whole show on Downton Abbey, But you can see that there are people there who are, you know, washing dishes.
There are people there who are going out and cutting wood and keeping the fires going and so on.
Low IQ stuff. And again, I mean, it's not an insult.
It's just the way things are.
Now, a lot of this stuff has been automated.
If you have a house, go down to your basement, look at all the equipment down there and think of how many people it would take to keep you warm in the winter and keep you cool in the summer and like it's all automated.
And computers are automating things and robots are automating things and like you name it, it's being automated and this means that the requirement for lower IQ people is going down and down and down and that is a huge problem and not to mention the fact that the West is currently importing millions and millions of people from lower IQ populations at a time when automation is increasing.
This is I mean, it's a recipe for the kind of disaster that has never been seen before in human history.
Never been seen before in human history.
Now, this is a good point.
Those lucky enough to have high IQs, says the writer, have an easier time at dispatching the various challenges they face and thus naturally rise within hierarchies of competence.
Of course, right? Of course.
And this is why some people say that meritocracies are racist, right?
And... This is some of these areas of success.
Friendship, groups, romantic relationships, professional employment are so fundamental to the individual pursuit of happiness that to be unable to progress in them is profoundly damaging to one's sense of well-being and intrinsic self-worth.
And that is very important.
Once we start to understand this basic biological reality...
That IQ is unevenly distributed within and between populations.
We can start to deal with the facts and reduce these artificial answers of sexism and racism and the hatred that that engenders and the rage and the frustration.
Like, we're really cruel to people using the current false narratives and we need to start dealing with science.
We need to start dealing with science.
You know, a lot of people who are atheists can't believe it took so long for people who are religious to give up their superstition, so to speak.
Not that I agree with that particular way of phrasing it anymore, but the reality is that the radical egalitarianism that's on the left, which says all inequalities are the result of exploitation, is a far more damaging ideology than fundamentalist religiosity.
And it's very hard for people to let go of that way of explaining the world.
And it's a tougher problem to solve than people think.
So, yeah, it's really, really frustrating.
So, yeah, there's times where you try to do something and you can't really do it that well.
And here's, the writer says, very few of us know what it is like to have that feeling of failure almost all the time.
And to have a large proportion of one's attempt at self-betterment or advancement frustrated by forces that seem to be beyond our control.
This is the cruelty we have of not talking about IQ, of not talking about IQ and its distribution because It is incredibly frustrating.
The consequences of that are beyond, like people literally get killed.
Entire societies can die based upon this delusion.
So, yeah, this guy who ended up shooting up people in Australia, it was tough.
You know, he couldn't really make friends.
He was lonely. He was depressed.
And he got increasingly enraged and frustrated.
And of course, was told that he's kind of like everyone else.
And therefore, his lack of success must be other people's fault.
As opposed to, sorry man, you can't sing, you don't get a place in the choir.
Now, what happens to people as a whole is a big question.
We'll talk about that another time.
I don't have all the answers, other than freedom is the answer, but we're not even at the place where we're really intelligently talking about these issues.
So, if we look at college completion, of course, it's a huge issue.
But the one thing I think that is a challenge here with this as a whole is that he says, well, there aren't that many job opportunities available for people with lower IQs, and therefore they get so angry and frustrated.
But not only is that not differentiating things by race or ethnicity, but it also is not differentiating by gender.
Because of the welfare state, we have another situation.
another situation entirely and that situation is this that if you are a woman then you can just have babies and the government will forcibly redistribute resources from other people people who have jobs people who are being productive probably people of a higher IQ so what happens is if you're a man sure you may be drawn to a life of crime you may be drawn to a life of danger you may be drawn to a wide variety of things or you may Get a good job and not earn that much,
but have a solid social circle and a decent life.
But if you're a woman, you can just choose to have babies.
And if you have babies, you will make a good deal of money.
And of course, if you're a man, you can choose to impregnate women What do they call the welfare state houses, the government houses, Section 8 houses, girlfriend farms, right?
Just go and impregnate a woman, and then you can live off her welfare, cycling from place to place.
So this is a huge challenge and a huge problem.
We're not even close to beginning a rational conversation about this.
And we're making decisions as a society, particularly to do with accepting migrants and immigration as a whole without any cognizance of these issues.
So I'm really, really glad that people are starting to write about this kind of stuff.
And hopefully we can get a conversation moving forward using these basic scientific facts.
But yeah, it's a big challenge.
People are really, really upset by this.
As an old Oscar Wilde line says, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
