"Doing research on intelligence is fascinating, and also sometimes frustrating. Like being a meteorologist, when you tell someone you work on intelligence you find that they start telling you about your own topic. So, Prof Ian Deary of the University of Edinburgh thinks that it is useful show people some real data that come from intelligence tests; opinions can then be founded on data, or at least one can query the data-gathering or its interpretations.
Without making assumptions about what intelligence tests measure or why people differ in their scores, he presents some results and invites people's reactions to them. He is still surprised by the fact that sitting down with one of these tests for three quarters of an hour or so and getting a score can have such far-reaching predictions, and cause so many arguments."
Great stuff. This bit about 1:04:30 in was gold:
ReplyDeleteDeary: Who's read Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man? Yeah, what did you think of it?
Audience member: Hmm, it was twenty years ago, so…
Deary: I read it twenty years ago. TERRIBLE, that's what it was.
Interesting remarks at ~36:00 about the effect of IQ on longevity. The professor studied people born in 1921 who took IQ tests at age 11.
ReplyDeleteIn women, an advantage in 15 IQ points at age 11 yielded a 20% increased likelihood to survive t age 76. An advantage in 30 IQ points gave a 50% boost.
The same was the reverse for men, because that cohort of Scottish men was prime age for WWII. Higher IQ men were more likely to die in the war, he says. (As, is true, anecdotally, in so so many wars).