Index of Intelligence Adjusted Adult Years

Life expectancy at birth has long been viewed as a useful index. The increase in life expectancy worldwide experienced over the last century is clearly a good thing. The World Health Organization some years ago added another health indicator, disability adjusted life years (DALYs). It recognized that a healthy year is better than a year in which a person is sick, and a year in which someone is in command of all functions is better than one in which that person is disabled in some function as a result of some earlier disease.

I wonder if an index of intelligence adjusted adult years might also be useful.

Intelligence is not fixed at birth. We believe that poor nutrition and frequent illness in infancy can interfere with the full development of the brain. Indeed, it seems that a child's brain needs stimulation to develop; kids whose parents talk to them a lot generally turn out to have better language skills than kids whose parents don't.

The Flynn Effect has also been observed. IQ tests, well designed, have results with frequencies that display the well known bell shaped curve (normal distribution). The average IQ is 100, and known portions of test populations fall above and below given values of IQ. The tests are periodically revised and scores are standardized accordingly. IQ tests are perhaps most useful when used for young people, and can predict something about their likely success in schooling. It has been observed that young people on average score higher on earlier tests than they do on the current IQ test. This is the Flynn Effect, a general creeping up of IQ scores in this limited sense. Still, the Flynn effect suggests that each generation is likely to score higher on average on the same IQ tests than would the previous generation. Somehow, IQ's seem to be increasing.

We also know that older people, especially those afflicted by some form of dementia, show a decrease in mental abilities.

What if the IQ distribution were measured for age cohorts of adults, weighted by the size of the population in those age cohorts, to develop an adult distribution of IQ scores. Could that be tracked? measure changes in the IQ of the population?

Of course, as implied in the previous paragraphs, different public policies could influence population IQ in different ways. Medical intervention to prevent dementia or to slow the progression of dementia would affect intellectual abilities in older people; early childhood care could help assure full brain development in children. Indeed, interventions encouraging parents to talk to their preschoolers seem to be useful in developing language skills in their children. I suspect that schooling is needed to fully develop intelligence for people with potential for high IQ scores.

Perhaps it would be useful to have an indicator that would track the evolution of the intelligence of the population, and that would encourage interventions to increase adult intelligence.

We need a precise vocabulary for signals intelligence.

How about this metaphor? A women shopping for clothes will go to a store with a broad selection, any item of which she may purchase. She will pass quickly by most racks of clothing; that might be called "acquisition" and "initial screening". She will, however, go to some racks and examine the contents piece by piece; that might be called secondary screening. A few things will make it to the changing room to be inspected on in a mirror; tertiary screening. Finally she may purchase a piece or two and take them home; storage. Reviewing the purchase with friends and family may result in rejection of some purchases (and their return to the store) and addition of others to the wardrobe; analysis, acceptance and utilization.

A thought about Turing tests.

What if an extraterrestrial visitor gave you his equivalent of the Turing Test and decided that you could not pass for an intelligent being?

Source 

Intelligence Correlates Negatively with Infectious Disease Burden

"In a correlational study lower average regional intelligence was found to be linked with higher infectious disease rates. Perhaps because the metabolic demands of the brain are great and resources are diverted to fight disease. Karen Hopkin reports."

Scientific American, July 1, 2010

The article website also provides a podcast and link to the original scientific report.

Comment: Correlation does not mean causality. While it seems reasonable that kids who get sick often may not develop their intelligence as much as do healthier kids, there are other possible relations. It could be, unpleasant as it is to contemplate, that less intelligent families are less able to protect themselves from disease. It may be that there is some underlying factor for both ill health and poor performance on intelligence tests; both might be symptoms of poverty. Indeed, there might be complex viscous cycles among ill health, intellectual ability and poverty.

Collective Intelligence

"Spies, torture and terrorism: The dark pursuit of the truth"

Source: The Economist, July 30th 2009

I quote a long passage from the article:

People familiar with the inner workings of intelligence suggest a more ambiguous story. Intelligence, they argue, is about piecing together fragments of information and building up spider diagrams of connections between suspects. “Intelligence is grains of sand; you don’t usually get the whole beach,” says one veteran.

It is true that in 2001, a time when the CIA and other agencies were woefully ignorant of al-Qaeda’s methods, the prisoners captured after the overthrow of the Taliban were the first rich source of information to help “map the enemy”, as one intelligence source puts it. But, says a former counter-terrorism official, the most valuable information from Mr Zubaydah’s capture came not from his interrogation but from his address book. With Mr Mohammed, says another analyst, the most important factor in stopping further attacks on America was not what the terrorist said under duress, but that he had been captured in the first place.

Intelligence officials maintain that detainees under interrogation provided as many, perhaps more, specks of information as other sources of intelligence on terrorism, including signals and agents. The question that nobody can answer is how much of this could have been obtained without torture.

Let me juxtapose this information with Ben Bernanke's statements on the way the Federal Reserve makes decision (in an interview on PBS News Hour). He said he receives economic reports many times a day and receives anecdotal information filtered up through the Federal Reserve Banks such as opinions of key informants. There is a very strong staff which provides analysis and interpretation. And the decisions are made by a panel of experts, representing the regional staffs, each supported by an expert staff. He pointed out that there is no one indicator that serves to tell the Fed what will happen in the economy and what needs to be done. Rather it is necessary to see the big picture provided by all this data and analysis to draw conclusions.

We know that even the Fed is sometimes wrong, in spite of the importance of their decisions and the seriousness of the decision process.

In both the intelligence business and the economic policy business the key to success is getting a huge amount of information, doing extensive analysis, bringing together a critical mass of experts, and using good group decision making to try to understand the big picture, recognize its critical aspects, and to identify the best alternative decisions.

How seldom do we take decision making comparably seriously, even for important decisions in our personal or business lives.

"Can We Increase Our Intelligence?"

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is the neural site of working memory, intelligence loaded tests, abstract thought, adaptive decision-making, deductive and inductive reasoning. It is the major site of our thinking or rational brain.

Source: Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, The New York Times, March 10, 2009

"A key contribution to this subject comes from James Flynn......Flynn first noted that standardized intelligence quotient (I.Q.) scores were rising by three points per decade in many countries, and even faster in some countries like the Netherlands and Israel. For instance, in verbal and performance I.Q., an average Dutch 14-year-old in 1982 scored 20 points higher than the average person of the same age in his parents’ generation in 1952. These I.Q. increases over a single generation suggest that the environmental conditions for developing brains have become more favorable in some way........

"Flynn has pointed out that modern times have increasingly rewarded complex and abstract reasoning. Differences in working memory capacity account for 50 to 70 percent of individual differences in fluid intelligence (abstract reasoning ability) in various meta-analyses, suggesting that it is one of the major building blocks of I.Q....... This idea is intriguing because working memory can be improved by training."

Comment: I don't think it is at all surprising that the ability to take I.Q. tests improves visibly over a period of decades. Society changes, and different abilities are developed over time. It is no more surprising that kids have been getting less exercise or that they are getting fatter on the average. (No, I don't think all these trends are equally desirable!)

The idea that working memory can be improved by practice is also not surprising. My Dad who went through Irish schools that emphasized rote learning had a great memory, and I always attributed it in significant degree to the training he had received as a youth, perhaps developed by continued building on a good base.

On the other hand, I had not realized that working memory capacity is related to analytic capacity. I do recognize that experts tend to have very good working memory with respect to their areas of expertise. A chess master will be able to recreate his recent games in detail, as a bridge master will be able to recall all the hands of a recent tournament. One of the characteristics of expertise is that the expert can recall the stuff that matters. (I suppose that neither the chess nor the bridge master would be any better than average in remembering the clothing worn by his/her oponents.) JAD

"All Brains Are the Same Color"

Source: RICHARD E. NISBETT, The New York Times, December 9, 2007.

This old article seeks to debunk the idea that blacks may be less intelligent than whites. He writes:

The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia. This means that for the poor, improvements in environment have great potential to bring about increases in I.Q.

Comment: I.Q. is, of course, that which is tested by I.Q. tests. The score on one I.Q. test is most useful in predicting the score on the next I.Q. test. Which is not very useful in the real world. For what its worth, I think race is a rather silly way to estimate competence. The differences within groups swamps that between groups. It is also obvious that what we learn has huge impacts on what we can do and how well we can do it whatever our genetic endowment. But think for a minute about a ten percent difference in genetic endowment. Think about someone who is 75 inches tall versus someone ten percent taller, or 79.5 inches tall. Is a basketball coach going to be more interested in someone 6'3" tall or someone 6'10 1/2" tall? Now think about how much practice and coaching a guy 6'10 1/2" tall is going to get to develop his natural talent. A ten percent difference in height may lead to a radical difference in the time and effort devoted to developing basketball skills, which in turn may lead to a career in the NBA rather than one limited to a high school team. Very few of us can excel in basketball to the degree of playing pro ball, but most of us could excel in something if we found a comparative talent and developed it fully. The shame of it is that far too often people are deprived of that opportunity because of some prejudice. JAD

"Report on Detainee Abuse Blames Top Bush Officials"

Image source: Cazhenshaw’s Weblog

Source: Joby Warrick and Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post, December 12, 2008.

Excerpt:

In the most comprehensive critique by Congress of the military's interrogation practices, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report yesterday that accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the authors and chief promoters of harsh interrogation policies that disgraced the nation and undermined U.S. security. The report, released by Sens. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), contends that Pentagon officials later tried to create a false impression that the policies were unrelated to acts of detainee abuse committed by members of the military......

The administration's policies and the resulting controversies, the panel concluded, "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."

Click here to see the website for the Committee Report.

Comment: This blog focuses on knowledge, and in that respect the conclusion that the administrations policies "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence" is most worthy of note. It seems clear that those policies have been responsible for many people joining insurgencies and terrorists to fight against the United States. Even if that were not true, they are morally wrong. Thanks to the Senate Committee for the investigation, and thanks especially to John McCain, the ranking Republican, for not covering up the mistakes of the Republican administration. JAD

The Generation Between?

Source: "THE DUMBEST GENERATION: The Kids Are Alright. But Their Parents ..." by Neil Howe, The Washington Post, December 7, 2008.

The cohort of Americans born in the late 1950's and early 1960 shows up worse on average than previous and subsequent generations in the historical records of the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the SATs.

Americans born from 1958 to 1962 have the highest share that has never completed high school among all age brackets between 25 and 60. They also have the lowest share with a four-year college degree among all age brackets between 30 and 60, and they're tied for lowest in graduate degrees.

The author suggests that this cohort tended to include more later children in large families than earlier or later cohorts, suffered from schools that were not as effective as those "enjoyed" by other cohorts, and faced significant career challenges following the "Baby Boom" generation. The author points out that there were of course outstanding people, including Barack Obama, in this cohort.

One wonders whether there are comparable experiences in other countries. Do we expect the smaller families that came in the wake of family planning programs in developing countries to lead to better intelligence and educational outcomes? Certainly it seems reasonable that better schools (and better teaching) will lead to better educational outcomes.

I would note that the cohort involved lived through strange times in the United States, with the anti-Viet Nam war movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Hippie counterculture, the expanded use of recreational drugs, the improvements and increased utilization of contraceptive technologies, etc.

Counterpoint: Two Stories Caught My Eye Todaly

Bob Woodward in the Washington Post:

Throughout much of the past two years, U.S. surveillance of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, his staff and others within the Iraqi government has given the Bush administration a transparent view of the prime minister's actions, according to officials knowledgeable about the intelligence gathering.

"We know everything he says," said one source, who, like the other officials, declined to speak on the record because of the highly sensitive nature of the subject.

From the Economist:

VIEWED from any angle, the revelation that Abin, Brazil’s intelligence agency, recorded a conversation between Gilmar Mendes, president of the Supreme Court, and Demóstenes Torres, a senator, is ugly. Either someone told the agency to bug the highest judge in the land, or the senator’s phone was bugged—or an agent was freelancing. Any of these scenarios would be bad enough. But according to the source who handed the transcript to Veja magazine, the agency has also bugged the offices of the president and his chief of staff, as well as numerous congressmen.

In response to the news, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on September 1st ordered an inquiry and temporarily suspended Paulo Lacerda, the country’s chief spook, and senior officials in his agency. Mr Lacerda denies that his men bugged Mr Mendes. He has Lula’s backing, for the moment. In the meantime, all three branches of government—legislative, executive and judicial—are wondering whether they really were spied on, by whom and for what purpose.

Comment: Right to privacy, where privacy can be expected, should trump the desire for information on others. Getting caught invading someones privacy may, as Bob Woodward implies, by worse than ignorance. JAD

Culture and Intelligence

Dov Henis left a long comment on a posting on a blog focusing on UNESCO's education and culture programs. In that posting he comments on the link between intelligence and culture. He got me to thinking.

I rather like the definition that "intelligence is that which is measured by intelligence tests". Many people have commented that tests of intelligence are culturally loaded, and that they tend to discriminate against people from less affluent strata of the society in which they are developed, since people growing up in those strata tend to be deprived of cultural experiences that are assumed common by those of upper strata (who devise intelligence tests and against whom those tests are "validated").

Intelligence tests are supposed to be predictive and as I recall are validated against school performance. One might assume a better validation would be the ability to create new knowledge, as measured for example by later publications in a scientific career. Of course, one does not want to wait for a generation for the data to validate a test, even if the test designed for one generation would be assumed valid for the next. But I suspect that that which is measured by common intelligence tests is little related to the ability to create new knowledge.

More fundamentally, if we assume intelligence is the ability to create good solutions to real problems, it seems likely to me that different cultures would have different kinds of intelligence. Does it not seem likely that the abilities that would lead to successful problem solving might be different in a hunting-gathering society, than in a rural agricultural society, than in an urban, white-collar setting?