Tag Archives: intelligence

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IQ and Poverty

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One of the big taboo ideas in political discourse is the idea that some people are poverty-stricken not because of the way they are brought up but because they just are not very clever.

Deborah Orr has written a shocking and interesting article in The Independent about this:

fiveI think that you would be churlish indeed to assert that whoever set the ball rolling, and whoever dribbled it to the here and now, the 30 years we have just spent “managing the transition to a skills-based economy” have not resulted in happy and universal inclusivity. The bare fact is that not everybody is intellectually equipped to make for themselves a place in such an economy.

…

If they are not looked after by their family, then the less bright, it is surely safe to assume, are often excluded from society because of their inability to make intelligent choices. Our refusal to look sympathetically on lack of intelligence as a real encumbrance in the modern world – or sometimes even to admit that it exists – is unfair on those who labour under that disadvantage.

Yes – it is in itself very stupid to claim that stupidity is the only cause of social blights and it is seemingly impossible to write about intelligence without coming across as an arrogant twit – but lack of intelligence is something that is almost never mentioned, because discussing it inevitably comes across as patronising, rude, and pointless.

Orr includes all the usual hedges about the dangers of generalisation, but what she is saying is genuinely important. The big problem is that intellectual disadvantage, either through genes or upbringing, is supposedly an intractable problem. Some are smarter than others.

Transhumanism then, is the ultimate expression of freeing the individual from tyranny. Throughout the Enlightenment new ideas challenged old dogmas. Superstition gave way to rationalism and empircism. Tyranny gave way to democracy.

And now Ray Kurzweil is challenging the greatest of all the inequalities: the skills and propensities we are born with.

[story via The Independent][image from woodleywonderworks on flickr]

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Plastic Fantastic: Developing Fluid Intelligence

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A recent topic of interest in the reputable journals of opinion, including Wired Magazine and The Independent has been the possibility of artificially enhancing human intelligence. Methods suggested include Viagra for your Brain, or nootropics: drugs that are thought to enhance intelligence and cognitive ability.

Examples include ritalin, a drug used primarily to help ADHD sufferers which is also claimed to promote alertness and concentration in healthy people, and modafinil, a drug designed to combat sleep disorders but which is also being used to extend the period for which people can stay awake and active.

Fortunately there are also options for squares like myself who don’t have the guts to pop pills bought on the Net: algorithmic approaches to learning, and most recently the possibility of boosting IQ by enhancing fluid intelligence:

Most IQ tests attempt to measure two types of intelligence–crystallized and fluid intelligence. pillsCrystallized intelligence draws on existing skills, knowledge and experiences to solve problems by accessing information from long-term memory.

Fluid intelligence, on the other hand, draws on the ability to understand relationships between various concepts, independent of any previous knowledge or skills, to solve new problems.

The research by brain boffins Susanne M. Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl appears to occupy the class of scientific experiments entitled confirming the bleedin’ obvious (facetiousness aside, this is of course as necessary and laudable as any scientific endeavour :-)) :

Researchers gathered four groups of volunteers and trained their working memories using a complex training task called “dual n-back training,” which presented both auditory and visual cues that participants had to temporarily store and recall.

Participants received the training during a half hour session held once a day for either eight, 12, 17 or 19 days. For each of these training periods, researchers tested participants’ gains in fluid intelligence. They compared the results against those of control groups to be sure the volunteers actually improved their fluid intelligence, not merely their test-taking skills.

The results were surprising. While the control groups made gains, presumably because they hadneurons practice with the fluid intelligence tests, the trained groups improved considerably more than the control groups. Further, the longer the participants trained, the larger were their intelligence gains.

“Our findings clearly show that training on certain memory tasks transfer to fluid intelligence,” says Jaeggi. “We also find that individuals with lower fluid intelligence scores at pre-test could profit from the training.”

So practice makes you better, if not perfect. As I’ve mentioned before, combining a better understanding of learning methods with drugs that have a direct affect on cognitive ability will have a huge impact on life over the course of the next century, even changing what it means to be human.

[main story via PhysOrg][other stories from The Independent and Wired][images by e-magic and LoreleiRanveig]

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Man defeats constant government surveillance with his own constant surveillance

Elahi showing his work at a conferenceArtist Hasan Elahi was wrongly arrested by the FBI in 2002. He found if he called and told them before each of his many flights, he wasn’t troubled again. So he decided to beat Big Brother in the most brilliantly counter-intuitive way – by photographing everything about his life.

Elahi uploads hundreds of photos a day and a tracking bracelet on his ankle gives a constant update of his wherabouts. So it seems the way to stop overzealous intelligence agencies falsely accusing you is to give them all the information about everything you do, all of the time.

[via collision detection, image by open content]

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CIA director investigates his own investigator, may start using doublethink

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In a bizarre case of Orwellian doublespeak, the CIA director today announced that he was going to investigate… the man in charge of investigating the CIA director. Inspector General John L. Helgerson and his office are responsible for oversight and internal investigation of the intelligence agency. Over the last few years a series of intelligence blunders has led the office to take a higher profile than usual, including work on extraordinary rendition, unauthorised wiretapping, torture methods at Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay as well as the calamity of the Plame Affair and criticism of the agency in the lead up to 9/11.

This story is so bizarre it leads my head in circles, making me feel like I’m in a Phillip K. Dick novel. So the director is investigating the inspector general who is investigating the director… Now we just need the news tomorrow that the inspector is mounting a counter investigation into the investigation of his investigating and besides, what is Ubik?

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Edelman dissects the Bourne Trilogy

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David Louis Edelman, author of Infoquake, has an excellent blog post today about what Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass’ work on the Bourne trilogy of films implies about the American view of its own government. The complicated paranoia of current world events and the question of how far do you break the rule of law to get the bad guys is one of the key moral choices of the new millenium and near-future SF writers like Edelman are an important part of understanding what’s going on now and what’s going to happen in the future.

[via Pyr editor Lou Anders’ blog]