"There’s the kind of boneheaded explanation, which is that a lot of people with PhDs are stupid..."

"... and like many stupid people, they associate complexity with intelligence. And therefore they get brainwashed into making their stuff more complicated than it needs to be," said David Foster Wallace in an old interview.

I think the smarter thing to say is that in many tight, insular communities—where membership is partly based on intelligence, proficiency and being able to speak the language of the discipline—pieces of writing become as much or more about presenting one’s own qualifications for inclusion in the group than transmission of meaning. And that’s how in disciplines like academia—or, I’ve read some really good legal prose, but when it’s really, really horrible (IRS Code stuff)—I think that very often it stems from insecurity and that people feel that unless they can mimic the particular jargon and style of their peers, they won’t be taken seriously and their ideas won’t be taken seriously. It’s a guess.

More of that sort of thing in "Quack This Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing," a newly published book.

Smarter people drink more.

Science (supposedly) says. At the link, summaries of studies that show the correlation.

Now, why is there a correlation? Let's brainstorm...

1. Drinking is a way to dial down your intelligence, thus adjusting yourself to the world as it is, built around the needs and interests of average people.

2. You'll still be able to get your tasks done. In fact, maybe you've been zipping through your work too quickly. If you were dumber, you couldn't afford to hamper yourself with drink.

3. Being smart, you find it easier to locate drinks. At some point, you'll be saying "Where's my drink?" like the next guy, but you'll have that extra margin of drink-locating capacity.

4. (An idea from the article.) "[T]he human brain has trouble dealing with situations that did not exist in the Pleistocene environment we evolved in... 'general intelligence evolved as a domain-specific psychological adaptation to solve evolutionarily novel problems.' Alcohol consumption is 'evolutionarily novel'—humans began cultivating and consuming alcohol only about 10,000 years ago," so smarter people are better at drinking.

Surely, there are more ideas here.

"Computers, like children, are more often taught by rote. They’re given thousands of rules and bits of data to memorize..."

"... If X happens, do Y; avoid big rocks — then sent out to test them by trial and error."

 This is slow, painstaking work, but it’s easier to predict and refine than machine learning. The trick, as in any educational system, is to combine the two in proper measure. Too much rote learning can make for a plodding machine. Too much experiential learning can make for blind spots and caprice. The roughest roads in the Grand Challenge were often the easiest to navigate, because they had clear paths and well-defined shoulders. It was on the open, sandy trails that the cars tended to go crazy. “Put too much intelligence into a car and it becomes creative,” Sebastian Thrun told me.

From a New Yorker article about self-driving cars.  I'm interested in the analogy to the education of humans especially with respect to the fear of creativity arising from too much intelligence but also the downside of too much experiential learning: blind spots and caprice.

"I like intelligent women. When you go out, it shouldn't be a staring contest."

Said Frank Sinatra. I found that quote because I was Googling to try to find out how intelligent Frank Sinatra was, a propos of yesterday's PR from the Farrow family that it's possible that Ronan Farrow came into existence because Mia Farrow continued — during her long relationship with Woody Allen — to have sex with the love of her life, her ex-husband, Frank Sinatra.

Ronan Farrow seems to be a young man of very high intelligence (since he started attending Yale Law School at age 15), so one naturally wonders about the relative intelligence of the 2 possible fathers.

What's Woody Allen's IQ? He once said "I've got a 150, 160 IQ," but that was as a character in a movie. "To Rome With Love." One might only guess that it's actually Woody Allen's IQ, but we know that he wrote the dialogue, and he was smart enough to write the dialogue, which had Judy Davis coming back with: "You're figuring it in Euros. In dollars, it's much less."

How intelligent is Mia Farrow? Presumably intelligent enough for Sinatra — the liker of intelligent women — to have married her. But what kind of judge of intelligence was Sinatra? His quote is pretty funny, maybe not Woody Allen funny, but funny in that it has a set up and punch line. "I like intelligent women" is the straight line. The joke — "When you go out, it shouldn't be a staring contest" — also works as Sinatra's definition of intelligent: able to keep up one end of a conversation. That might be kind of a low standard. He's saying he wants someone at his level and we're hard-pressed to infer what his level was. (ADDED: In a staring contest, no one is talking, so he may be saying he's pretty dumb and somebody needs to be able to say something.)

Sinatra was a genius at singing, but does musical intelligence express itself genetically in offspring who do things like go to Yale Law School at age 15? I doubt it! [ADDED: Ronan was accepted to YLS when he was 15, but deferred admission until he was 19. In the interval, he worked for UNICEF.)

But that gets us no closer to the answer to the question who is Ronan's father, since Woody Allen is also a genius of a particular sort — writing comedy — and that sort of genius also seems disconnected from the sort of mind that gets drawn into law school at 15.

By the way, I love the question whether high-level legal analysis is more like comic writing or more like the vocal interpretation of song lyrics.

Googling for answers to my idle questions, I ran across the 1992 Farrow PR that — like this new piece — appeared in Vanity Fair. It came up because it had "IQ":

Soon-Yi issued her own statement... “I’m not a retarded little underage flower who was raped, molested and spoiled by some evil stepfather—not by a long shot. I’m a psychology major at college who fell for a man who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Mia.”...

Mia’s family were astounded by the statement. “Soon-Yi doesn’t know half those words, what they mean,” one close to them said.... When Soon-Yi was in the third grade, her I.Q. tested as slightly below average.... “She’s a very typical L.D. kid, very socially inappropriate, very, very naïve,” says [a woman who tutored Soon-Yi]. “She has trouble processing information, trouble understanding language on an inferential level. She’s very, very literal and flat in how she interprets what she sees and how she interprets things socially. She misinterprets situations."

One might infer that Woody Allen is most likely the father, since Woody, unlike Frank, seems to have gravitated to females who don't seem so intelligent to him. Since both men gravitated to Mia Farrow, that may mean that Woody was more intelligent than Frank, if she seemed relatively dumb to Woody and relatively smart to Frank.

"[T]he Constitution’s term 'freedom of the press' means 'freedom to publish,' not 'freedom for the institutional Press.'"

"But Durbin’s a partisan ignoramus, so he can’t be expected to know this sort of thing. I mean, he’s only a Senator, and there’s no IQ test for that job."

It shouldn't take much intelligence to understand the term "freedom of the press," but intelligence has been applied to suppressing this simple truth.

Is it ridiculous/unethical for a woman to wear glasses to look smarter?

This is a seemingly silly question asked of the NYT "ethicist":

I wear nonprescription eyeglasses on job interviews or when meeting new clients for the distinct purpose of gaining respect by appearing smarter and more credible. It would be unethical to use a wheelchair to gain sympathy by appearing disabled, so is this any different?

The letter writer is a woman, and the ethicist — a man — tells her it's not unethical and only an unintelligent person would think glasses make you look more intelligent. And: "If this fashion decision fools people, they deserve to be fooled."

I have about 10 problems with this answer:

1. There's an unexamined opinion that it's okay to fool people who are not intelligent.

2. There's the completely wrong notion that intelligent people have only rational, fact-based thoughts, not emotions and intuitions and sexual urges that influence what they do.

3. There's no attention to the analogy to using a wheelchair, which has many intriguing similarities and differences, such as the fact that a wheelchair only partly corrects a physical deficiency, but glasses presumably get you up to 20/20...

4. ... and the person in glasses is not trying to stimulate a feeling of warmth — sympathy — she's trying to avert feelings of warmth — sexual attraction — or avoid the appearance of warmth that may emanate from the unbespectacled face of a woman.

5. The word "fashion" is used to connote superficiality and light weight, but fashion is powerful in making impressions, and not just on fools. In fact, you're a fool if you think fashion has no impact on you.

6. Saying "fashion" implies the alternate analogy to clothing, but most of us dress in a special way for job interviews or to meet new clients, and we take that pretty seriously without assuming only a fool would be influenced.

7. The analogy to clothing is interestingly inaccurate, because glasses are needed — when they are needed — in a way that is different from clothing. We all need clothing to avoid being naked, but glasses are needed to get to an ideal level that some people have naturally. So wearing glasses contains this claim of physical weakness that the letter writer feels might constitute a lie.

8. Is unnecessary display of physical need wrong in this professional setting? We certainly — if we can — hide sexual urges and our need to urinate. Imagine what our clients would think if we made an outward display of those things. On this analysis, one could imagine thinking that people who need vision correction ought to wear contacts lenses.

9. This might really be about makeup. Studies have shown that it's contrast that makes a woman's face look more feminine — and women often use eyeliner, mascara, and eyebrow pencil to achieve this effect, but too much makeup may seem to send the wrong message. Glasses are a way to get some contrast onto the face.

10. Why do glasses work to turn Superman into Clark Kent?

"Anybody who is a Republican who goes into politics and thinks they're going to get a fair shake from the mainstream media is obviously missing some IQ points."

"You go into it knowing you're going to have a tough road with the media and if you're not willing to deal with that, don't get into the race."

"I Love ‘The Big Bang Theory.’ And You Should, Too."

Okay, I tried to watch this show as a result of that article, but I couldn't put up with 10 minutes of it. Like a typical network comedy, the lines were delivered with a big nudge, followed by overdone audience laughter. The characters — we're told over and over — are supposed to be super-intelligent, but we are not credited with enough intelligence to discern the presence of a joke, even when it's in TV-script gag format. It's not that I feel personally insulted, just that everything feels bogged down, boring, and stupid.

Question asked at the link: "Why can Penny-the-waitress afford her own apartment, while physicists Sheldon and Leonard have to share? Why doesn’t fancy engineer Howard, with a bigshot JPL job, have any money?" I can answer that: Sheldon and Leonard have done the math, looking at all the factors, planning for future contingencies, including retirement. Penny spends down to her last penny (and beyond).

ADDED: The link goes to Instapundit, but the underlying article is in the NYT. I'm surprised that the NYT allowed this usage (boldface added): "In his dervishy nerdiness, he seemed to evoke any number of classic TV neurotics or fussbudgets: Paul Lynde, Tony Randall, Pee-wee Herman."

The (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary has only one meaning for "dervish": "A Muslim friar, who has taken vows of poverty and austere life. Of these there are various orders, some of whom are known from their fantastic practices as dancing or whirling, and as howling dervishes."

File under: Althouse, more politically correct than the NYT.

AND: I'm contemplating the possible conflation of dervishy with derpy. 

"People with higher IQs are slow to detect large background movements because their brains filter out non-essential information."

"From previous research, we expected that all participants would be worse at detecting the movement of large images, but high IQ individuals were much, much worse."

I'm interested in this subject: Things really smart people are especially bad at.

1. Chelsea Clinton running NYU's "multifaith" institute. 2. The Harvard Kennedy School granting a PhD for a dissertation about the IQ of Hispanic immigrants.

1. We learn today that Chelsea Clinton will take on "a 'multifaith' role as co-founder and co-chair of [NYU's] brand-new Of Many Institute, a program to "develop multifaith dialogue and train multifaith leaders." It should be noted, in this context, that Chelsea Clinton's degree is a Master's of Public Health, and that she has been teaching at the graduate level at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health.

2. Yesterday, we were talking about the Harvard students who are petitioning for an investigation into how the Harvard Kennedy School accepted a dissertation that reached conclusions that the students regarded as unethical, because it supported discrimination against persons of a particular ethnicity on the ground of purported lower intelligence.

Let's talk about these 2 stories together. Here are 3 highly prestigious institutions — NYU, Columbia, and Harvard — and schools/institutes within them that most of us would assume have a political slant in the liberal direction:  NYU's Of Many Institute, Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, and Harvard's Kennedy School.

Both stories make the institutions look weak — NYU and Columbia for taking in the Clintons' daughter — and Harvard for awarding degrees for weak dissertations.

Be clear what I'm saying about Harvard. I mean to express no opinion about Jason Richwine's "IQ and Immigration Policy" dissertation. I haven't read it, and I'm not an expert in the field. I can't believe the professors at the Kennedy School liked where Richwine was going with his research, but I suspect that they went forward, approving his dissertation, because it wasn't any worse than the many  left/liberal dissertations they've approved over the years.

ADDED: Why is NYU's multifaith institute called "Of Many"? Is it based on "Out of many, one" — E pluribus unum?



AND: Do students at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health take courses with Chelsea because of the value of networking the Clintons? That's pretty valuable! Inference: you're a chump if you're paying high tuition and not buying access to power.

"Academic freedom and a reasoned debate are essential to our academic community."

"However, the Harvard Kennedy School cannot ethically stand behind academic work advocating a national policy of exclusion and advancing an agenda of discrimination."

A petition with 1,200 signatures collected by Harvard students, who seem to want an investigation targeting this one case, because the conclusion offends them. It seems to me the investigation ought to be much broader, into what the general standards are at the school. The students have a big interest in whether the degree means what it's supposed to mean, but the one dissertation they loathe ought to be presented as evidence that the school has low standards, and the investigation ought to range across the political spectrum. But the students are speaking in terms of which policies are ethical, and that sounds like they want a political standard to restrict research, which, ironically, would not be an ethical policy.

"What on earth are these 'liberals' so terrified of, if not the truth?"

Asks Andrew Sullivan, looking at the outcry against Jason Richwine, "effective fir[ed]" from Heritage on accounted of his Harvard dissertation about race and IQ.

Richard Zeckhauser, the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Political Economy at Harvard, is on record as saying that “Jason’s empirical work was careful. Moreover, my view is that none of his advisors would have accepted his thesis had he thought that his empirical work was tilted or in error.”...

One particularly disturbing statement came from 23 separate student groups at Harvard:

We condemn in unequivocal terms these racist claims as unfit for Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard University as a whole. Granting permission for such a dissertation to be published debases all of our degrees and hurts the University’s reputation …

Is truth the highest value in our society? I think Sullivan assumes it is, but it most certainly is not. The question is: How can we be smart and scientific and truthful about this truth about truth?

Teaching critical thinking: What if you had to argue the other side of an issue?

What if you were teaching critical thinking and the issue you assigned the students to argue the other side of was something that it would be very difficult and uncomfortable to have to argue? Would you think you'd come up with an excellent assignment or would you find yourself under attack in the national news and in danger of losing your job?

What if you had to argue that the high school teacher who assigned his students to justify the Nazis' antagonism toward the Jews had come up with a pretty good assignment or at least an acceptable assignment, especially since he asked the students "to imagine that their teacher was a Nazi and to construct an argument that Jews were 'the source of our problems' using historical propaganda and... a traditional high school essay structure"?

Your essay must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion,” the assignment read. “You do not have a choice in your position: you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!”

What if you had to argue that the teacher did not display "a severe lack of judgment and a horrible level of insensitivity," as charged by Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard, the Albany, NY superintendent of schools? What if you had to argue that Wyngaard's reaction is anti-education and anti-academic freedom and destructive of the very mental powers that, if developed, enable a citizenry to resist government propaganda of the kind the Nazis deployed?

“The assignment is flawed in its essence,” Rabbi Eligberg said. “It asks students to take the product for a propaganda machine and treat it as legitimate fodder for a rational argument. And that’s just wrong.”

What if you had to argue that Rabbi Eligberg was wrong to say that's wrong, because students will be subjected — throughout their lives — to propaganda that is much less obviously wrong and that will seem like rational argument and that working from the inside of creating propaganda from bad information, making it seem persuasive, is how you strengthen your power to resist propaganda and to dismantle it?

Nick Brino, a 10th grader, said he had heard about the assignment from a classmate. “I thought it was wrong,” he said. “But she was flipping out, saying if anyone was going to do it, she wasn’t going to be their friend.”

Ninth-grader Jyasi Nagel, though, said he thought the teacher was not anti-Semitic, but just trying to teach different points of view. Jyasi’s father, Moses Nagel, who is Jewish, said that he was not in favor of a harsh punishment for the teacher, but that another topic might have provided a more palatable lesson.

“It just seems like there’s a million other examples to use rather than going there,” he said.

What if you had to argue that requiring "palatable" lessons will make the students' minds flabby and lazy?

"By age 3, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in his home environment..."

"... than a child from a professional family. And the disparity mattered: the greater the number of words children heard from their parents or caregivers before they were 3, the higher their IQ and the better they did in school. TV talk not only didn’t help, it was detrimental."

There are some big correlation/causation problems lurking in there, obviously.

"Cartoons were already my nemesis. I didn’t like them, although they were ubiquitous on TV...."

"Was that because I wasn’t interested? Or was it because I was repelled, or because I was particularly cartoon-challenged? Probably a combination of all three, because the phenomenon persisted into adulthood and involved even some cartoons whose content didn’t especially repel me....  Sometimes there’s too much going on visually in cartoons, too; I get distracted. I sometimes fail to get the joke in non-animated cartoon squares (like the ones in a magazine) because I focus on the wrong detail or misinterpret details in odd ways."

Ironically, I'm distracted by there being too much going on in this blog post. It combines the discussion of animated movies, single-panel New Yorker type cartoons, and comic strips. These are completely different to me.

The blogger (Neo-Neocon) has a special problem with the way panels in a comic strip tell a story. (She was once given a devilish IQ test that required putting scrambled panels in the right order.) It that is your issue, read "Understanding Comics."

And I don't like mixing up the topic of scoring on an IQ test with appreciating a type of art. The example of the IQ question at the first link is such an ugly example of a comic strip. In or out of order, it's repellent. It's like having to edit an atrocious sentence. What does it prove?

Warren Lee Hill was sentenced to death for bludgeoning Joseph Handspike with a nail-studded board.

Handspike, Hill's fellow inmate, had been sleeping and other prisoners begged Hill to stop. Hill "was already serving a life sentence for murder in the 1986 slaying of his girlfriend, Myra Wright, who had been shot 11 times."

The Handspike murder took place in 1990, 23 years ago, and just as Hill was being prepped for the lethal injection, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay, so that it may be determined, after all these years, whether Hill is — as his lawyer put it — "a person with mental retardation."

Hill has received support from various activists and from former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn.

"Georgia should not violate its own prohibition against executing individuals with serious diminished capacity," President Carter said in a statement....

Georgia passed a law in 1988 prohibiting the execution of mentally disabled death row inmates, and the U.S.Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that the execution of mentally disabled offenders is unconstitutional....

Before trial, Hill's family members described him as "the leader of the family" and "a father figure," the state notes. He was not in special education classes and served in the Navy, where he received promotions, the state said.

"I don’t endorse the argument of the philosopher John Rawls that no one is entitled to a high income because..."

"... even characteristics that we think internal rather than external to a person, like IQ and leadership skills and athletic skills and energy and good health, are ultimately the product of luck. Therefore, Rawls argued, no one should be allowed to keep more of his earnings than necessary to 'incentivize' him to exert himself in a way that will maximize the social product."

So says Richard Posner. His objection is:

That treats people like the cells of an animal’s body, or the ants in an ant heap. Rather my point is that, to the extent reducing income inequality increases overall social welfare, there is a case for programs, financed by the well to do, that increase overall welfare by more than the cost of the programs. There is no reason to think that the cost would impose a crushing burden on the well to do, a result that would be objectionable quite apart from the costs in diminished incentives, and related costs such as tax avoidance and emigration.

Chew on that. I was distracted by "ant heap." Who says "ant heap" rather than "ant hill"?  I'm more the literary type than the economic. But speaking of departmentalization of each of us having our various skills and predilections, whether inborn or cultivated, my searching for the answer to my heap/hill question brought me quickly to this Robert Frost poem, "Departmental":

An ant on the tablecloth
Ran into a dormant moth
Of many times his size.
He showed not the least surprise.
His business wasn't with such.
He gave it scarcely a touch,
And was off on his duty run.
Yet if he encountered one
Of the hive's enquiry squad
Whose work is to find out God
And the nature of time and space,
He would put him onto the case.
Ants are a curious race;
One crossing with hurried tread
The body of one of their dead
Isn't given a moment's arrest-
Seems not even impressed.
But he no doubt reports to any
With whom he crosses antennae,
And they no doubt report
To the higher-up at court.
Then word goes forth in Formic:
"Death's come to Jerry McCormic,
Our selfless forager Jerry.
Will the special Janizary
Whose office it is to bury
The dead of the commissary
Go bring him home to his people.
Lay him in state on a sepal.
Wrap him for shroud in a petal.
Embalm him with ichor of nettle.
This is the word of your Queen."
And presently on the scene
Appears a solemn mortician;
And taking formal position,
With feelers calmly atwiddle,
Seizes the dead by the middle,
And heaving him high in air,
Carries him out of there.
No one stands round to stare.
It is nobody else's affair
It couldn't be called ungentle
But how thoroughly departmental

Put that in your Rawlsian/Posnerian analysis.

"When vague desire is the fire in the eyes of chicks whose sickness is the games they play..."

"And when the morning of the warning's passed, the gassed and flaccid kids are flung across the stars."

Along Comes Mary... and then nothing more comes along.

“He used to tell me the music got better the longer he stayed awake,” said Thomas Bernath, a bass player who occasionally rehearsed with Mr. Almer and who is now cataloguing hundreds of tapes found in his apartment. “He didn’t feel like playing until he had been awake for two or three days.”

Mr. Almer often read books on science, and he began attending local meetings of Mensa — the high-IQ organization — in 1977. Several people said he had occasional long-term girlfriends, but he never married.

“He wasn’t shy at all,” Bernath said. “He was, unbelievably, a happy guy. There was never any complaining or gnashing of teeth about money. He was so sensitive — not in the way of having his feelings hurt. But I almost felt he could read my mind. I’ve never been around anybody who was that perceptive.”

Although he briefly drove a taxi and had a job building computer circuit boards, Mr. Almer lived almost entirely on intermittent royalty checks. 

Tandyn Almer died last month at the age of 70. Via Metafilter which also links here, where there are many interesting video clips related to Almer and "Along Comes Mary" and some nice detail about Leonard Bernstein's fascination with the song. ("Along Comes Mary, in the ancient and honorable Dorian mode — the same mode we just heard in Debussy and in the plain-chant. Now who’d have thunk it?")

(You can pre-order "Along Comes Tandyn.")

AND: You can buy a box set of Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" — 9 DVDs, 1500 minutes, only $84. (This seems to be 25 of the 53 shows he did for TV.)

"A minor war has broken out south of Qunfudah in the village of Kiad where large groups of hungry baboons from nearby valleys are attacking residences..."

"Hussein Al-Barakati, a resident of Kiad, said that he feared for his mother’s safety as she lives alone near the valley...."

Adel Medini, from the town of Helli, has his own take on the recent scourge of baboons: “It’s a daily game of hide and seek. The baboons are targeting empty houses and are well aware of what they are doing. The assault on the village is not random, as some believe. They proceed according to studied plans. That’s why their attacks do not fail. For example, imagine a resident who is absent from their home for a period of time. Even though it’s just one day, he is surprised to return to find his home in disarray. Some people in this situation thought that thieves had broken into and ransacked their houses … The problem is that the village’s houses are old and non-roofed, and our daily guest is hungry.”

Salem Al-Barakati said that the main reason that the baboons are difficult to stymie is because of their high intelligence. They easily match wits with those out to drive them away.

Via Walter Russell Mead:

It’s not just in Saudi Arabia that baboons see human beings as a prey animal. At the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, there is a parking lot for tourists coming to see the beautiful wild landscape where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. Baboons lurk on the edge of the parking lot, watching tourists come and go. They look for car doors that aren’t locked, windows that are left opened, absent-minded tourists carrying food....

[T]he baboons in that parking lot... clearly felt only contempt for their squishy, soft, clawless and short toothed cousins. You could see it in their hard and glittering eyes.

They easily match wits....

Was Hagel "just not very bright" or "too professorial"?

Weird that both things are being said... 

.... unless you think professors are not very bright....

... which actually does make a certain kind of sense. (Professors may employ their brightness to delve into some intellectual matter, leaving behind the world's practical affairs, which are geared to and conducted by men and women of average and just-above average intelligence. Academia is a comfortable cul-de-sac for the over-smart, taking them out of the running so that humanity's shared enterprises — business, politics, culture, family life — will be suitable for the vast majority of people. That's my theory anyway. But I'm saying that as a professor, and I'm really out of touch, here in my comfortable cul-de-sac, where I can only be right paradoxically.)