Steve Hsu has been on a tear lately. Giving talks about IQ, here and here, and partnering with BGI to sequence the genomes of “high cognition” individuals in a quest to solve the giant “problem” of IQ. This effort has hit Vice magazine, Slate, and, more recently, NPR. To give you the CliffsNotes version of Hsu’s argument: IQ is a quantitative trait, just like height and can therefore be selected for improvement.
If you don’t know Hsu, he is the vice president for graduate admissions and research at Michigan State University. He has input into the direction of MSU’s research efforts and whom MSU admits to its graduate programs. .
Obviously, Hsu isn’t the first to claim a method of ranking humans according to cognitive endowment, nor will he be the last. The first attempt was Spearman’s 1904 paper in which he noted a positive correlation in schoolchildren across seemingly unrelated subjects. He called this construction “General Intelligence.” Hsu’s attempt is one of the latest and in keeping with intellectual fashion, he has substituted “Genetic Architecture” and a series of quantitative trait loci for Spearman’s construction, but otherwise their respective projects follow the same intellectual current.
I will raise three lines of objection to Hsu’s claim to have found the “genetic architecture” of high IQ. The first objection is that the tests Hsu uses to determine IQ are culture bound. That is, they reward some types of test takers more than others. Second, Hsu’s model assumes that certain types of knowledge require more cognitive ability to master than other forms do. Third, Hsu falls victim to the utilitarian fallacy. I’ll briefly discuss the first two before turning to the third.
First, a well-worn criticism of Hsu’s work on the genetics of “higher cognition” is that the SAT, which he uses as a proxy for the g factor (see Gould for a thorough debunking) is slanted towards rewarding wealthy test takers. This is a well understood phenomena. The more money one’s parents make (or the more academic their jobs are!), the better one’s chances of succeeding on the SAT.
Hsu, for his part, has acknowledged the culture bound nature of his quest, but seems to believe he can get around the unfortunate fact of the SAT with a “culture-neutral” test, though he does not actually have any concrete plans to administer it and his work uses the SAT extensively. Unfortunately for Hsu, people who think in “culturally neutral” categories are about as common as Giants on the plains of La Mancha.
Second, in this paper, Hsu attempts to link certain majors (physics and mathematics) to “cognitive thresholds.” In doing so, he assumes a natural order of cognition running from fields requiring advanced mathematics to those do not. There is no need to do too much here work tying this up with Victorian conceptions of the savage and the civilized. Suffice to say there is a long body of work within anthropology (and cross-cultural psychology) which explodes this assumption. What is important is context. Some skills are more important, and hence likely to receive more development in certain contexts as opposed to others. Hsu is simply mistaking an epiphenomena of formal schooling in the early 21st century for an eternal human truth.
For example, in 1904, Spearman concluded that the most powerful correlation for “General Intelligence” was excellence in Classics, followed by Common Sense, Pitch Discrimination and French. Mathematics is on the list and and correlated positively, but the highest correlations were dominated by language. It is unsurprising that among English schoolchildren in the first half of the 20th century, language and music would be highly valued within formal schooling while among American college applicants in the early 21st century, mathematical ability would be highly valued.
In each case, the sample subjects are cultivating historically and socially contingent subjects taught within a powerfully hegemonic institution. What makes Spearman and Hsu irresponsible social scientists is i), their unreflective assumptions of these categories as eternal and unchanging and ii), their use of these categories to rank and sort humans in a manner that closes off their possible futures. In this way, both hew closely to deficit models of school failure.
Third, the utilitarian gambit is a staple of quantitative approaches to human action, and as with any mathematical model, must make some assumption about motivation as a start. Hsu simply assumes everyone who takes the test tries to get the best score. He uses the brute fact of admissions based on the SAT to model a market for IQ, which sorts test takers according to their potential with the underlying assumption that test takers do their best to gain high scores. Thus, a political economy is formed whereby high scoring test takers are slotted into the most competitive majors (Hsu thinks some majors require more cognitive ability than others) at the most competitive universities.
However, we know from a wide and deep body of literature within the Anthropology of Education that not all test takers apply themselves equally or are motivated to do well on tests they know are of little use to them. Hsu knows this as well, but he chooses to ignore it with his work on genetics and IQ. However, in an interview with Psychology Today, Hsu gave the following answer to a question about Richard Feyman’s allegedly low IQ score:
3. Is it true Feynman’s IQ score was only 125?
Feynman was universally regarded as one of the fastest thinking and most creative theorists in his generation. Yet it has been reported-including by Feynman himself-that he only obtained a score of 125 on a school IQ test. I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton. It seems quite possible to me that Feynman’s cognitive abilities might have been a bit lopsided-his vocabulary and verbal ability were well above average, but perhaps not as great as his mathematical abilities. I recall looking at excerpts from a notebook Feynman kept while an undergraduate. While the notes covered very advanced topics for an undergraduate-including general relativity and the Dirac equation-it also contained a number of misspellings and grammatical errors. I doubt Feynman cared very much about such things.
How the world has changed since 1904!
Hsu is more than eager to judge you based on your SAT, ACT, GRE, IQ, or Wonderlic score, but for his personal hero, an excuse must be made. And the excuse he makes for Feynman exposes the assumptions underlying his theory. Feynman, of course, is gambling that he can afford not to care about some things. But, he isn’t alone. Everyone gambles on what they can and cannot afford to care about.
One of Hsu’s examples of an acceptable SAT substitute is the Wonderlic. The Wonderlic is perhaps most famous for its use in the NFL scouting process. Morris Claiborne, a cornerback from LSU, infamously scored a 6 on the Wonderlic. What does he say about the IQ test?
“That test don’t tell me who I am and what time of guy I am and what kind of ability I have. That test can’t drop me.
“They say it’s an IQ test. I came to the combine for football. I looked at the test, and wasn’t any questions about football. I didn’t see no point in the test. I’m not in school anymore. I didn’t complete it. I only finished 15 or 18 questions.”
Claiborne was selected number 6 in the NFL draft and signed to a contract worth several million dollars. Obviously, Claiborne plays football and does not teach theoretical physics, but his comments are illuminating for a powerful reason.
Claiborne is just like Feynman in that he has the good sense to know what not to care about, and where to focus his attention. In fact, the logical justification Claiborne uses in blowing off the test and the logical justification Hsu uses in explaining away Feynman’s relatively low IQ score are almost identical.
Hsu on Feynman:
I doubt Feynman cared very much about such things.
Claiborne on Claiborne:
I’m not in school anymore. I didn’t complete it.
What Feynman and Claiborne are doing is deeply playing with the boundaries of their respective fields. As Geertz observed in a Balinese cockpit deep play is two things. It is 1) instructive work and 2) metasocial commentary. That is, it is a set of instructions about how to do the thing we are now doing and what the consequences might be (or might not be) for doing it wrong.
Though these two examples are playful in the sense that the stakes are low and nothing much is to be lost or gained by a CB who refuses formal logic or a physicist who takes an eccentric approach to spelling, they both point to the metacognitive nature of intelligence and the difficulty of pinning down something like the “g-factor” without recourse to the messy details of context or taking into account the inevitability of self-reflection. Such as: Why am I writing this post?
Postscript:
I sat on this post for a long time. I thought perhaps it would be better to take another direction. But this morning’s news carried the tale of Jason Richwine and a reminder of why I might write about IQ and not something else. Richwine is the co-author of the Heritage Foundation’s new report on immigration and the author of a Harvard dissertation titled “IQ and Immigration Policy.” Here is the abstract:
The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market. Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.
In a few days, I will set Richwine (and Hsu) in the context of the Culture of Poverty debates. Suffice to say, they offer nothing new to debates over IQ, or poverty or immigration. Their innovation lies in the naked, unreflective application of a naïve sociobiology to policy debates over access to democratic institutions – citizenship and public education.
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