I.Q. (Intelligence Tests and/or/as Political Dissent)

check one two three how y'all doing guys
i got a question from the audience in theory you could have already read this in the description of this video as i took a moment to copy and paste it and the question basically was pushing me on a subtle distinct distinction that i allowed to be implicit in my earlier video talking about the nature of intelligence and the politics of what we do with iq tests other measures of uh both accomplishment and so-called intelligence now let's i think i have to actually close the window we have a dog barking nearby um so the question i got from the audience that you can see in the description according to here verbatim was what do i mean what do i have in mind when i contrast so-called meaningful measures of intelligence to oh james newman comments this is some late broadcasting it depends what time zone you're in i am a little bit interested in that question i generally do broadcast earlier in the day because i think a large percentage of my audience is in europe i think i have more viewers in europe than i have in maybe canada the united states combined um but you know i do have some i do have some viewing members of the audience in new zealand and australia so on and so forth so sometimes i always just try to mix it up and see what see who shows up and by the way guys if you hit the thumbs up button it helps other people discover the broadcast and join us i'm on the west coast time zone so it's not too late for me the sun is still shining here in the middle of our june heat wave which is another reason to broadcast later in the day all right so return to the top of this video here but guys as you can see if you want to comment all right so lydia comments that she scored very high all right so let's let's start with some androids here so lydia do you want to tell us a little bit about how you wrote the iq test and under what conditions because what people's motivations are for writing these tests is also a very interesting thing why would you write the iq test was it to get a job was it to get into the military you know so on and so forth okay so the quote oh it was a joke unfortunately so you haven't not that many people rated an iq test why would you under what circumstances would someone write all right i guess i'll start this way look guys um when we think about intelligence most of us are talking about completely subjective measures of intelligence that really have to do with how much sympathy we have for another person or how much common ground we have for them i have had some pakistani taxi drivers who say racist things while they're driving the taxi they may say racist things they may say homophobic things they may say things from a conservative muslim perspective that are shocking to me but at my advanced age in life i can appreciate that the extent to which i sympathize with someone politically the amount i have in common with them has absolutely nothing to do with how intelligent or unintelligent they are now this same taxi driver perhaps if the test of our intelligence is to uh you know drive a car through an obstacle course there's a there's a test of intelligence set up that requires us to do a number of things let's just say it's not it's not just driving let's say we also have to memorize a map and move between a series of points on the map in an intelligent sophisticated way and makes strategic decisions you know these are skills he's built up over many years driving a taxi if i go and drive through this same obstacle course with him what do you know he seems tremendously competent he seems tremendously capable he may certainly seem much more intelligent than i am this is his this is his forte this is her expertise now the particular taxi driver it may be that my five-minute conversation with him i i happen to be talking to him about his area of greatest weakness like he happens to be racist he happens to be homophobic he's not terribly uh anyway he's not he's not uh on the ball about 21st century politics from my bias perspective at least but you know what if he took the time and got to know him you might learn more about his life maybe he started off as a farmer he knows a lot about farming and then he went to school to become a pilot and he became a pilot in pakistan but he decided he really wasn't satisfied with social and political conditions in pakistan maybe he can say some very intelligent things to you about politics in pakistan and politics in india i'm thinking of particular taxi drivers i've had i've had some interesting conversations with taxi drivers about the politics they were escaping from and he decided you know what he's better off driving a taxi in canada than flying an airplane in pakistan maybe he can tell you some really compelling things with us and now you start to gain an appreciation for the man and maybe now if you've developed the friendship a bit maybe you start to challenge him on his racist homophobic statements and you learn a little bit more about why he says these things or how it really feels oh so now we have a whole relationship with someone and we have some kind of appreciation for their intelligence in real life when there are no tests involved when there aren't numbers being assigned to people to quantify or measure their intelligence this is what intelligence is for us intelligence is for the most part and index just of how much common ground how much fellow feeling we have with someone it's very 18th century uh turnip phrase fellow feeling stepping beyond this when you're talking about meaningful measures of intelligence we have to disaggregate them into three very different strata first thumbs up for the video so here's one day i shout out to you guys you're skeptical as an audience you've been listening for this long five minutes anything maybe the thumbs up maybe sorry i don't care i gotta say what i have to say either way shout out to freda shout out to james shout out to wow the guy's name as well it looks like every comment is beginning with the word wow but no it's just someone who's name as well shout out to tristan nice to see y'all here um some he's messing he's saying that he recognizes that phrase fellow feeling from uh from the translation of max sterner into into english yeah that has to do with a translator um i've been reading a lot from the period of the american revolution and the 10 years leading up to the writing the constitution that states america so i don't think i honestly do not think it has influenced my writing style or my speaking style but i've been seeing a lot of the peculiar turns of phrase that were used in that epoch in that era by erudite gentlemen who consider themselves in a position to rule the world frankly the yeah the megalomania of the uh authors of the constitution that would be a great book unto itself so i um yeah i got i got i got to start throwing up my ideas for ma theses and phd thesis here on live stream there's a lot of stuff that tempts me to work more and to work on to work on the chinese perception of the american revolution in american constitution and the chinese perception of the french revolution and the way in which these revolutions are intertwined with each other um you know pardon me anyway i'm i'm tempted to devote 10 years of my life to several different areas of study just now when working with uh history the american revolution running a constitution okay so i said that if we want to get serious about meaningful measures of intelligence first of all we have to disaggregate them into three very different strata so i was asking lydia before what were your reasons for writing an intelligence test now one reason in canada for writing an intelligence test or having a specialist conduct an intelligence test is to establish whether or not you are so mentally disabled that the government will never expect you to have a job never expect you to attend school and will provide for you paid benefits for the rest of your life this is very real now i think in many countries with a sort of generous social system uh there are these kinds of tests so that's this is an intelligence test but this is an intelligence test to establish whether you are employable whether you are capable of attending primary school like grade one two three four five like a normal school for normal children or not this is a very serious very important form of intelligence test now i i was generalizing but to say canada in canada it's divided into several provinces so it will be different in quebec different in ontario but we don't have a single national standard for these things but i had a friend and his sister was objectively mentally [ __ ] due to a health condition her mother had during pregnancy so it was an impaired pregnancy or wherever you want to put it due to the mother's illness during pregnancy it's definite that the daughter had severely reduced mental capacity uh but perhaps she would have been a genius if her mother didn't have this health problem during pregnancy because she was given all of these tests at many stages of her youth and then as a teenager and she never qualified as mentally disabled she never qualified as [ __ ] she simply qualified as a very very stupid normal person now you can imagine for the whole family this was in part a triumph but in part a tragedy like the parents both of the parents were school teachers incidentally they were quite proud that they'd given their mentally disabled daughter enough education and enough encouragement that she qualified as not mentally [ __ ] that she was over the line into being a normal person but of course they had also in effect swindled her out of a lifetime of benefits she now had to enter the workforce and find a job and go to school and compete with other people and so on and she wouldn't get any of the help she would have gotten you know she would have been sent to special education and so on she would have been given special education special benefits if she had scored a little bit lower on these iq tests now i've spoken about this many times i can't put enough emphasis on this first point that if you're going to talk seriously about meaningful measures of intelligence we have to disaggregate the low end of the scale when we're calibrating tests and we're testing people for these kinds of reasons to establish for example mental competence to be a witness in a court of law sometimes mentally [ __ ] people are witnesses to a crime and by the way each country handles this very differently if you think the standard is the same in japan as it is in louisiana or something and you know some people they are mentally disabled and they're capable of witnessing something and telling you it wasn't there but maybe they are so simple-minded that a lawyer can bully them into saying something else like they'll respond to that kind of coercion can this person really give a deposition in court is there eye witness is their eyewitness testimony legally valid so there are intelligence tests to establish these things is someone intelligent enough to drive a car should they be regarded as two mental disabled driver car and just recently i've already talked about this i read a book a dedicated book on the use of intelligence tests in the vietnam war is someone intelligent enough to do military service to hold a gun to participate in warfare are they too mentally disabled um to take up such responsibilities these are very very serious questions and this is these can be certainly meaningful intelligence tests and i don't think it's out of incompetence that right-wing demagogues misrepresent what intelligence tests are and what their political significance is in this way i don't think it's possible for someone to misrepresent whether it's the use of the iq test or the raven squares test or any of these other things uh or indeed even the military aptitude test or the sat test you know the university admissions test and this kind of thing to misrepresent data that comes from evaluating the low end from evaluating capacity and and disability and you to misrepresent that as if it tells you something about the high end um how many people you have who are capable of being great poets or great painters it's so ridiculous this is what i'm gonna get to that later you know what is our concept of greatness or genius or advanced intelligence uh or i mean you guys already know i've i've just been questioning i've just been mocking the extent of which we assume that someone who works on the stock market as a stock broker represents a very high level of intelligence but the extent to which we can we can look at this kind of data that's developed from these types of measurements calibrated in this way as something meaningful about the average the second segment or the people at the at the extreme high end and then again part of what i'm questioning here is what do we mean by the high end right now there's another kind of gap here and that is the gap between objective measurements and subjective measurements as i said before subject measurements have a lot to do with fellow feeling with compassion with sympathy with common ground even just with political and ideological agreement um there was a time when the president united states was george w bush and i often had to explain to people that i'm i don't say that he's stupid because i disagree with him or because i think he's wrong about some policy choice i really genuinely think george w bush is stupid it's quite a separate matter like evaluating his intelligence obviously the vast majority of people who condemn george w bush or donald trump or um back in the day bill clinton a lot of people thought bill clinton was a tremendously stupid man they are really saying that they morally condemn him that they disagree with him that they don't support the same quality choices that they don't have this kind of common ground so to say if you step into the taxi and your taxi driver makes a series of racist remarks homophobic remarks and let's say politically provocative remarks let's say your your taxi driver is a donald trump supporter who says some very shocking things to you while he's driving the taxi and let's say you get upset and say well you know you must be a tremendously stupid man and the tax driver turns around and holds up his iq test for you you know i mean he scored some he's in the top one percent of scores he says oh you think i'm stupid well i can prove it i can prove it my intelligence you know and of course mensa and these other institutes exist this reason how how would you respond to that how would any of us respond to that there's this strange sense in which uh everyone who cares about this issue or everyone who pretends to care about this issue struggles with the gap between the significance of these subjective measures of intelligence which is what we tend to really care about and objective measures of intelligence however yes ultimately and especially at the low end um there are there's tremendous importance to having objectively real measures okay so i'm just going to read some uh uh questions behind us and i'll continue here so frida says that the country she's living in there are people who pretend they have some kind of baby syndrome to get government pensions so yeah meaning that they pretend that their their child is disabled when it is not yep um you know anyways um well it gets darker than that there are also people who actually injure their own children who actually disable their own children and i've read accounts of that too if you're serious about political science that's exactly the sort of thing you're supposed to study in political science and it's no surprise that there's incredibly little uh research of that kind that goes on in departments of political science uh ronald says so ronald's been a long time viewer and support the channel ronald sims i think i think i've seen you here for five or seven years man anyway shout out to ronald we're broadcasting a good time for him and he says he was tested as a kid uh because of autism during his youth so ron that's an interesting question so if you tested positively for autism during your youth did you later test negative is that you felt those tests were inaccurate or or do you feel they were accurate but you've been able to cope sorry i'm asking a sincere interest um i will not digress well i could i could digress and do this later if people are interested but you know we certainly have a phenomenon now with over diagnosis of autism in the same way that we have over diagnosis of adhd attention deficit a hyper deficit attention deficit hyperactivity disorder um you know and i i it's not that i presume that it's not a real problem i think that autism is a real problem and whatever name you're going to call it under people certainly struggle with inattentiveness and hyperactivity and we have to make up a name for that apparently but the extent to which these things become just patterns of behavior leading to a diagnosis that changed someone's life forever without for example an mri scan without a physically real verifiable set of criteria um there is certainly now over diagnosis of autism and the only thing i'll say again i related already the story of my friend who had a mentally disabled sister um often the only help the family can get is by achieving and achieving a positive test result of that that kind you know that if his sister qualifies as mentally [ __ ] they're going to get government help and if she doesn't they're proud of her because she studied hard and worked hard she passed the test but now you don't get any government help so i mean likewise a diagnosis even whether it's autism or attention deficit disorder or even if it's a completely false diagnosis that could be helpful to the family because now they're getting forms of support otherwise they wouldn't get with somebody some kid who had some problem but it may not be autism it may not be adhd sat-12 comments that right-wing demagogues seem to like the concept of meritocracy and that is because it is a very exotic and foreign concept yes meritocracy um it's because it's something they've never experienced and never seen in their lives that's what makes it seem so appealing yeah so frida comments i mean this is a simple comment but it's very true that she has met a person that she thinks is stupid but he plays the guitar very well he has a great voice and writes songs maybe he is just dumb at everything else you know well exactly what if people who are stock brokers what if people who make a lot of money on the stock market are dumb at everything else you know this is human nature writ large what can i tell you so someone else here commented that he knew a security guard who was a member of mensah he said he didn't need a lot of money so if you guys don't know what mensa is m-e-n-s-a it is basically a special club for people who get very high scores on iq tests and they have their own intelligence test which is normally called the mensa test um tell you a short story about that too i i had a friend and um people had always told him he was some kind of a genius he was some kind of unusually intelligent guy he now has a phd and you know i knew him well he was in some ways a talented person and in some ways not so much and he he applied to join mensa he had a series of experiences that kind of led up to this moment in his life where he said okay he would take the test to join try to join mensa and um it was something like after three weeks they were supposed to send you the results in the mail and so he wrote the test and three weeks later uh he hadn't gotten any results and he waits and he waits and some obviously i forget the precise nervous like six weeks later he he got in touch with them over the phone he said hi you know i was wanting to get lost in the mail you know whatever test results and the person on the phone said um yes you see uh we have a policy that we don't like to send the results when the score is quite this low because they're afraid that the person would commit suicide that they'd be so discouraged by getting a low score yeah so if you gotta if he was just a little bit below you know um so anyway uh richie says that he knew a security guard who was a member of med said he said he didn't need a lot of money well okay let me let me ask you something so again if we're talking about the low end of the spectrum the middle of the spectrum and the supposed high end of the spectrum you can think about what i did in the last year guys i red appian red machiavelli there's a lot of other books here off camera oh i've got xenophon over here um i've been reading a lot of meaningful things i've been thinking about a lot of people things i've been writing i've been talking about meaningful things what if i had spent the last year just drilling the mensa test again and again and again the word drill is now very rarely used this way you used to use that all the time in english sorry if you read stuff from the 1930s or 1950s by drill like i mean we could i got an open schedule i could set an alarm wake up at 6 00 a.m drink red bull cola or something drink some highlights in the morning drink and every morning at 7 a.m sit down and write the mensa test i could do it every day and for a year i could practice every day doing that kind of problem solving that kind of written answer does anyone here doubt that i could pass the med desert maybe even set a record i mean i i the only reason to be honest the only reason i think i would not set a record is i think there were a whole bunch of guys who already did that i think they did that they practiced every day for 10 years or whatever just to try to get into the guinness book of world records or something if you actually practiced this particular set of skills that are reflected on the test now it's been a while since i've looked at test questions for mensa but i remember this is an example that stayed with me because it is so peculiar and it described you know a man is walking down the sidewalk with a pair of flat loafers flat shoes on and he steps on a bug or a strawberry or something and it's on the front left side of his shoe and then when he he turns his shoe up to look at it like what side will it be on relatively it was one of these things where you had to in your mind visualize when the shoe got turned around and sorry maybe i'm slightly misremembering the question like maybe it's that he stepped on wet paint that was the letter r or something and then when he turns the shoe up why was it gonna look so something like this we had to visualize how the image would get turned around in your mind and then answer the question for which way would be up and which way would be down so this would be very difficult for someone with dyslexia sign now you know what what are you testing here are you testing my intelligence are you testing my interest in you know practicing this particular way of thinking and you know sorry i am self-critical i haven't been studying chinese lately as soon as i finish writing my book i'm planning to return to studying chinese in a big way the particular skills that are involved in chinese i'm not call kind of good or evil you know they're not they're not one the other but you know they have very little to do with reality in the same way like okay i'm going to practice writing the same character again again i'm going to remember how it sounds and wrote it using a sentence i have to ask my lovely assistant to pass me something to drink i'm not used to performing in this heat you want to give me that do you want it okay all right if you if you were to make a trip to the fridge you would be exposed on camera your yeah okay all right we'll share share a jar so anyway guys um i i honestly i could tell i anticipated all day i think uh if you've been watching my channel for a million years like ron sims as you've heard me talk about the intelligence chest used by the canadian military more recently i was reading about the intelligence chess used by the american military i read a whole book about that but i took the intelligence test for the canadian military myself when i signed up to join the army and a lot of the questions were getting at dyslexia a lot of them were about rotating things and remembering how things are oriented and which way is up and which way is down spatial puzzles geometric spatial puzzles and apparently i'm good at this or i'm good enough at i've never practiced this in my life but you know you can recognize this like if you wanted to set a record and get the highest score anyone had ever gotten on the canadian intelligence test you could just practice this you could just wake up every day and practice doing these stupid puzzles and they have no applicability to real life okay sorry let's be clear sorry i shouldn't say there is zero applicability to your life this type of puzzle it eliminates two types of people one it eliminates people at that low end that i opened the video talking about it's so important right like the military really has to eliminate people who can't even read the instructions that are on the cartridge of ammunition where they can't read things they can't they're whether due to lack of education or real mental disability they're not at that level of confidence and again i read a whole book dealing with what happens when you have people in a battlefield situation who are below that level of mental confidence and it gets it gets real scary you know something like can you operate a radio while afraid for your life you know on a battlefront where there are bullets have been around you you know can you calmly and with a focused mind operator radio dell some people are too you know mentally able to do this um sorry we had an off-camera sneeze delay and now a word from our sponsor anyway [Laughter] um yeah uh on the one hand the military is testing for this kind of low end fundamental competency and then above and beyond that i did some reading about the canadian test and they had a lot of problems with people with dyslexia and people who lacked this kind of spatial awareness where when you handed them a magazine of bullets to put into a rifle or something they would put it in upside down and backwards and they'd stand there for 60 seconds trying to get it to go in so there are some people apparently and by the way that may not be dyslexia it may be a different condition or problem but there are some people who will just never get it with the orientation of object geometric objects this way apparently and that was a special problem that encountered they started to design the test to reflect that so my point was initially i was suggesting a lot of the things on these tests are really unrelated to competence and intelligence in any meaningful way however we should recognize the very limited way in which they may reflect some kind of intelligence or some kind of confidence that we might indeed be uh be testing for whether it's the military or whatever so ronald sims did reply ronald wrote back saying those tests were positive until he graduated high school and then again when he graduated college um so the state he lives in has complicated rules about the diagnosis of mental illness this is interesting here on i would be interested here if if you believed that the tests were correct or incorrect in the first place i mean no it's certainly uh i've already indicated that i'm open-minded about that but um it is certainly possible in the year 2021 for someone to be diagnosed with autism just because they're a jerk or just because they were a jerk on the particular day of the test even you know it's because a lot of these are just based on observable behavior and they shouldn't be but you know i've spoken to several people who thought they had autism and as soon as i started listing off the hard criteria they were like oh well no i've never done anything like that i've never felt i was like well okay looks like you've been reading articles in cosmopolitan magazine or something you've been reading magazine articles talking about high-functioning autism and you've been ignoring what the criteria really are supposed to be first option someone has that's the condition anyway i i've already indicated i have sympathy for people on all sides of that i think people struggle people struggle with diagnoses and people struggle without them you know so uh but there are certainly a lot of false pauses there i have not heard a lot of complaints about false negatives with the diagnosis for autism okay i'm just reading through your comments here guys so anyway there's a lot of things here guys so i'm not saying this to insult you but a lot of you haven't thought this through enough i was fine that's why you're here on youtube listen to me um so you know sat12 says creativity uses intelligence but is not synonymous with it okay what's what's creativity you know um i already pointed out with the example of pop music that the rolling stones a white british band imitates black american music i mean directly their early work their first album their first several singles 100 a knockoff of an imitation of what african-americans were already doing and this is considered creative this is creativity right now me i'm a white jewish person from toronto probably if i as a fashion designer started imitating traditional japanese clothing this would be perceived as creative and someone from japan would say well what do you mean he's just copying what here is a well established recognizable thing now maybe i'm wrong maybe the fashion world is is too too critical for me to get ahead in this way maybe maybe this is an interesting contrast mainstream rock and roll and what it takes to get ahead and be perceived as creative in fashion but you know the perception of creativity what we measure as what we refer to as creativity well if imitation can be perceived as creativity you know what what isn't what's not creativity so the idea that we can calibrate any test or even just an evaluation of someone's character as to how creative they are it's certainly a very difficult thing so okay another another great question um plant-based powered asked do you think vegan gains is intelligent so this is a digression but it's not too much about aggression so i've known richard for years and obviously we stopped talking after he and his and or his wife decided they hated my guts as i recall i think his wife hated me first and she was really against me and it took him about a year to catch up with her or something but i have known of richard and i've known richard and i've interviewed richard and so on you know so today in 2021 of course richard's a stupid person because he lives his life in a stupid way right now the question that's really challenging and hard to deal with is how intelligent could richard be today if he had stopped making excuses for himself say seven years ago i think i think i first got to know richard about seven years ago now um you know i don't want to simplify this too much but you know what if richard had stopped playing video games he just reached a point in his life seven years ago where he said well this is something i did in my childhood but it's now meaningless it's holding me back gonna stop playing video games what if richard had stopped doing bodybuilding and weightlifting he thought well this used to be a part of my life but just told me back now there's a much broader and deeper sense in which i can ask what if you stop making excuses um you know he could have developed in many different ways one of his interests obviously had to do with the health sciences he could have gotten formal education in the health sciences even in food science or nutrition or what have you you know there are many different ways he could have developed he obviously someone who's always had an interest in politics he could have really become a very well-educated person follow seven years so long time um he could have developed himself many ways that's what we don't know and one of the reasons why okay you know what it's not one reason the reason the reason why i judge others so harshly is precisely that i'm an optimist in this way it's precisely that i still believe in their positive intellectual potential now a another example so we just talked about richard vegan gains another example is jaclyn glenn uh so i i've i've probably known about jackman for 10 years so i think it's even longer than richard you know she and i have never spoken on like rich however we have communicated with each other indirectly she has made youtube videos responding to me i have made youtube videos but it is it is quite clear that she knows my work uh yeah um and i know her work also you know of course today in 2021 it's very easy to say jaclyn glenn is an imbecile she's an idiot you know why is she stupid because she lives her life in a stupid way and after years it catches up with her but to ask that question where could she be today what was she capable of intellectually if 10 years ago she'd quit drinking quit smoking marijuana quit using drugs like ayahuasca quit making excuses and really devoted herself um in any which way to developing herself intellectually i mean i'm i'm not presuming one narrow path you know she could have read appian for all i care i may not whatever you know she could have gone into classical greek and latin than anything and and sorry so let's be clear you know when i talk about someone like jacqueline glenn why do i have this optimism well i don't think she's in that she's in that lower end of the spectrum where you're evaluating someone to see whether or not they can be competent to testify in court i mean she's someone who fundamentally has all the working parts required to be an intelligent person but she didn't make any of the decisions necessary to become she didn't make any of the sacrifices necessary to become an intelligent person and there are there are sacrifices it comes at a price i'm using up fluids over here but yeah i hope you guys this is one of the great things about about live streaming and about making videos is that i think you guys can feel my sincerity and saying this stuff like i'm not just hating on her or insulting her or something that it actually comes out of a position of real you know sympathy or empathy and i think you know the reverse argument could be true of me also i wonder all the time what if i joined the army when i was younger i mean if i had joined the army at 18 years old like maybe it would have really arrested my intellectual development i would have ended up being an idiot for the rest of my life you know really i i am not joking i really wonder if i had made just slightly different choices in my education and my career how much stupider i could have turned out now as an old man you know and i'll never know that either if i'd continued drinking and womanizing something i basically only did when i was 16 years old or 17 years old or so you know my interest in that ran out really quickly but you know i believe me my father encouraged me my father completely assumed that i was going to remain a you know alcohol drinking womanizer for the rest of my life and plenty of his other sons did you know um but no i mean i i moved over i got over and moved on but you know i could be i could be an idiot today if i if i continue living that way so you know i say it with that sympathy and again i have to look at these other people have known in my life you know my own brothers my own sisters and just my contemporaries people who went through school with me i can see how they've lived and i've seen to see how they've turned out and you know if they'd made different choices just over five years if you're really working hard you know five years a long time and sir and again let me just say i say this to most all the time with melissa i know i'm talking about four years rather than five years but i say all the time look i've learned so much in the last four years i'm really aware of it like you know my sophistication my level of education my level of understanding i learned a lot just in the last four years i didn't stop learning you know when i finished high school or university or something so that goes both ways i'm also aware of how much more ignorant i was four years ago eight years ago 12 years you know so yeah i'm sorry i realize this is a long answer to a short question but that really is that really is my sincere answer when we're talking about people who are in the middle range people who aren't dealing with fundamental disabilities that impair their ability to read you know their ability to even sit in a chair i've known people with uh nervous system conditions you know where they you know they have seizures and jumping and they can't sit and read for that reason you can have all kinds of disabilities that really limit you know how well you can develop yourself and so on but um when we're talking about the middle range sure i'm i'm fundamentally incredibly optimistic about what people like vegan gains could have done with their minds what people like jacqueline glenn could have done with their minds and that's part of why i judge them so harshly for having squandered uh tremendous opportunities opportunities that many of you in the audience you know don't have and will never have i mean i know just just poverty just poverty and being busy all the time you know um i'll i'll just say this okay examples were held up to me as a young man of people who were poor and busy and hard-working and who nevertheless hit the books and developed and cultivated themselves intellectually and lived that meaningful life and i think my parents didn't realize how this would backfire because i just completely bought into it i was like well of course i was like well of course so you can work on a construction site and read you know you can read appian on the bus on the way to the demolition shop you know of course it can't and you know it's true of me i'm that kind of guy you know i mean i know it's incredibly rare and you know i was given these other examples kind of of uh i i won't say who it was there's a particularly there was a virtuous uh oh god was a virtuous waitress in an old-fashioned diner and she educated herself i think she got a master's degree while waiting tables i don't think she got a phd which got a master's degree and you know she didn't remain devoted to life the mind while doing this kind of you know unglamorous uh not in intrinsically intellectual work and you know of course you know you're not stressed out by that kind of job you're not running of course you can do the right and you know my parents were completely horrified when you know during my own university education i was talking about this as my own future that i was gonna i was gonna finish you know my university degree and i applied for a job working on a demolition crew uh in in construction this is the work i was applying for i applied i formally applied to become a bricklayer so that that it's a little more complicated you don't apply for the job you apply to get into a kind of training program which is linked to a construction site you do the training and within like three days you're doing the job it's not like going to university you get like three days you know kind of unpaid work and then you're then your own thing that was the stuff i was applying for and i talked about becoming a postal worker and things and my parents were completely horrified you know they had i could say they had to admit to themselves but nobody has to diminish themselves but i mean i think on some level they weren't comfortable with the extent to which they assumed that would pursue a life of bourgeois success and bourgeois education and that i wouldn't take seriously that no that type of accomplishment is really meaningless and you know they'd proven it to me and i'd seen it all around me in the site i knew how worthless master's degrees and phds were i really knew how worthless the university system was i was like well this is what awaits me as a life whether as a you know whether as a bricklayer or as a yeah the other one you guys probably know this one was becoming a um an emt an emergency medical technician which basically means you work in an ambulance you know and my parents were horrified they totally opposed this they they actually intervened to prevent me from getting any of these jobs they really freaked out and if my father were alive i i don't know i guess he'd deny it or something i should be interested to see how he reacted being confronted with this but um they were incredibly i mean they they were not at peace with themselves and dealing with that i just say they were really in this very strange kind of cognitive dissonance situation where it's like they taught me all this stuff kind of glorifying the humble life of the proletariat if you don't know the word proletariat don't look it up it's a it's a communist catchphrase but you know being a working class poor honest person who doesn't care about getting a master's degree and a phd but who cares about being a real intellectual and that ideally being a real revolutionary too or not being a real political dissident and for me i i just i took that on sincerely that they never had and they were shocked when i was talking about getting a job on a democrat also you know i like to like to work out i like to exercise but those days not a gym i was i was not into going to formal gyms i'd do uh push-ups and chin-ups and things but i did i wouldn't go to a gym i thought well this is great i can build up my physical strength you know doing uh doing a job that's not mentally exhausting what's physically exhausting and then i can do all this other stuff anyway sorry again a long answer to uh to a simple question but what can i tell you it's uh i thought this is this is worth worth speaking on all right so yeah there's there's a quotation here sorry i'm quoting it's a question here um sat 12 says nobody says mick j jagger or keith richards are particularly intelligent like stephen hawking or einstein right this is true but you see how easy it is for musicians to present themselves as slightly mysterious and then ineffably brilliant right for me so there are also innumerable musicians who really just by uh remaining silent at interviews through long and meaningful pauses i think bob dylan himself is an example of that where people create this intellectual mystique around bob dylan even though there's no reason to think he's intelligent anyway whatsoever um including his views on religion by the way um continuing to read your questions here oh okay um all right so intelligence tests and the politicization of the concept of quantifiable intelligence the first and most fundamental thing is to talk about how intelligence tests are quantified at the low end of the spectrum well point zero was to draw our attention to the gap between subjective and objective measures of intelligence and for the most part subjectively when we think someone's intelligent it's just because they have a lot in common with us if somebody states the same political beliefs you happen to hold you're inclined to regard them as intelligent if you meet someone who sincerely supports donald trump someone who sincerely supports george w bush your first assumption will probably be that they are stupid if you oppose these people politically it might take quite a lot of evidence to convince you that instead they are brilliant but evil think about how difficult it would be to convince you today or if you got a time machine and went back to the period of george w bush how difficult would it be for me to convince you that the protesters sir was it january 9th got the date wrong january 6th um january 6 2021 the protesters who were supporting donald trump that these people were not stupid that they were not naive that they were not manipulated by rumors on the internet et cetera but in fact like particular people in this crowd and particular artists that in fact they were brilliant brilliant but evil brilliant but bad intentions it's very difficult for us to know maybe we can present some evidence maybe one of those people can turn around and show you their iq score show you their mensa membership i doubt it but you know my point is we have this very very powerful inclination to evaluate people's intelligence really just in terms of how much they have in common with us and when they don't have things that come with us ethically morally politically even aesthetically even style of clothing people are dressed in a way you find funny and don't sympathize with we will judge them to be stupid and it will take quite a lot to to convince you that they are intelligent or brilliant but they have their own strong reasons for why they disagree with you and they think that those reasons may be idiosyncratic they may be eccentric or they may actually be evil another interesting digression here plant-based shall i read your full name plant-based power asks do you think jfk was intelligent so i'll just say this about that um when you're judging the intelligence of historical figures uh whether it be jfk or say napoleon it's very important to consider the man's whole life and i think you know i was tempted to digress and at this point in my earlier video where i made the comparison between bob dylan and someone who's become a multi-millionaire on the stock market doing um what was a hedge fund management you know okay the fact that someone is a hedge fund manager and that they've made correct decisions in managing the hedge fund and have been paid very handsomely for this okay that tells you something about them but if you actually get to know this guy if you listen to him for just 30 minutes talk about his life perhaps he's going to tell you about i gave examples um his first marriage and why his first wife divorced him after he cheated on her sleeping with a stripper uh perhaps you know he has a history of having a cocaine habit perhaps he's made a long series of really bad choices in his life and when he tells you about them you start to reflect perhaps this person is not so intelligent now this comes back to what i said earlier um you know perhaps your reason for judging him as being stupid now is simply that he doesn't have very much in common with you perhaps if you had more of those experiences yourself you'd be inclined to appreciate it more perhaps if you also had slept with a stripper and had your wife leave you for that reason you might sympathize more with you know really i'm joking but i'm i'm entirely serious to what extent is this just falling back in the same kind of uh subjective judgment in this same way um if you're going to evaluate the intelligence of jfk or napoleon or any other historical figure like this you have to kind of behold the man uh all in all you know um you can't just look at his accomplishments you can't just look at you know what he did in the stock market and you know i do think that napoleon's sex life tells you a lot about who he really was as a man you know everything you can also read about napoleon's relationship with his mother and napoleon's relationship with his brothers and the points of relationship with his kids i mean we know a lot about every aspect of that guy's life um napoleon's relationship with black people let's put it that way i think you know yes it would take a kind of brilliant free thinking man to live in that culture at that time and really conclude that racism against black people was bad and evil and wrong but guess what there were men around like that there were guys like condorcet who were alive who figured out that enslaving black people was bad and evil and wrong and that black people were fundamentally equal it didn't it didn't take a genius um you know another one of course is for example anti-semitism you know who figured out and who didn't the extent to which anti-semitism is [ __ ] in that culture you know even if there's even if there's a kind of intelligence test there that's a good way to put it you know it would have been an intelligence test for napoleon to you know overcome the prejudice against black people in a society but other people in that society were intelligent enough to overcome that prejudice you know the same way if you know someone uh in a predominantly muslim predominantly anti-semitic society where they're raised surrounded by anti-semitic masters like on television from news broadcasters all the time and from their own family nevertheless some of those people are going to be intelligent enough to overcome those things anyway sorry i'm digressing to illustrate but my point is you know if you want to know how intelligent someone like jfk was or someone like napoleon was you look at the person's whole life and in both cases frankly jfk and napoleon i think you come to some pretty dismal conclusions um one one final note on that too though also with hedge fund managers um how much of their accomplishments in life are truly their own accomplishments with modern painters in the 21st century there was a scandal a while back because it was revealed that a certain modern artist most of his painting wasn't done by him he employed painters to paint the things he was asking them to paint um and you know he responded this controversy by completely dismissing it as an old-fashioned concern you know he said no he said he thinks of himself as a conceptual artist and you know sometimes he does sculpture and sometimes he does installations and when he does paintings he asks other people to do the actual work but that's not what matters it's his idea you know he's the one in charge he is he is a kind of uh executive producer's role like in cinema and so you know this is of no significance whatsoever but you know we presume when we look at a painting that we're we know the man we know the one man who did all the work that may not be true it may be a whole studio of people work together to produce this painting well if you think the brilliance of napoleon is proven by his legal reforms the code napoleon i got news for you he's barely responsible for two sentences of it i mean basically i give napoleon no credit at all for the coach napoleon i mean probably probably a little bit of credit it's deserved for him but you know he he really that's really not his work but his name is on it he presided over the finalization of that set of legal reforms it started long before he came to power it was a very different set of people who were really the authors and the negotiators who created it i rest my case but you know obviously it is not easy to attribute any accomplishment to jfk whatsoever what is it you would have you would attribute to jfk and say that he he uh he did of his own brilliance or of his own intelligence um as opposed to being other people uh surrounding him all right mr reading here all right so another great question sir it's good guys i like doing these things spontaneously you could probably tell i could have done this video just as one continuous monologue um somebody asks quote do you think iq is inherited because parents have learning disabilities okay so i'm sorry i slightly rephrased your question okay this is precisely what the right-wing demagogues try to weaponize into a political platform right so some some disabilities are hereditary not all right so some distortions in your iq statistics will show up as being hereditary now you guys probably know certain impairments of vision are hereditary for example certain things that will impact your ability to learn and achieve things in life are hereditary disabilities and others are not you know others are for example caused by a nutritional deficiency and some are some disabilities are caused by a car accident including mental disabilities i knew someone who had her head caved in in a car accident had reconstructive surgery but you know she qualified as mentally disabled forever after um so i just say you can be mentally disabled for reasons that are not genetic and not hereditary right but again something i warned about in my earlier video is the extent to which tests that exist for and are calibrated for evaluating people at the low end of the spectrum are misrepresented in politics as if they're meaningful for the full spectrum now i knew one guy who told me that his mother had been a a crack addict during pregnancy i knew one very different guy who told me that his his father had been a heroin addict right up to his conception and birth but i think not his mother um you know the effects on the intellectual development of a child if the parents are drug addicts um especially the mother during pregnancy but even if even if not dream crazy what if the mother becomes a drug addict six months after she gives birth to the kid well she's still a drug addict in terms of the whole parenting and nurturing role thereafter um obviously any of us would expect that a meaningful test of intelligence you may not be but a meaningful destination is going to show negative effects from this right and again if just talking it through in two sentences you can immediately understand what that is and understand that it's not an argument that supports scientific racism or anything else but it's an argument that immediately draws our attention to incredibly important social problems that if we don't solve you know rapidly get worse and saddle us with a huge population of people who've grown up in deprived circumstances and you know can barely participate in our society and so on and by the way it's a huge problem here in canada i mean so drug addiction is at epidemic levels and we have kids who grew up even if the kids do not become drug addicts themselves they grow up in an incredibly depressed incredibly deprived state because their parents are drug addicts or alcoholics or both you know and this is not a black issue and it's not a white issue ever heard of ireland i mean there are plenty of white people in ireland who are alcoholics and drug addicts you can go to countries where all these problems exist and they're not divided on racial lines you know um you ever been to south korea wow what a culture of alcoholism south korea's anyway sorry um oh somebody in the comments says that is his girlfriend is fetal occlusion well and your girlfriend admits it that's the more rare thing fetal alcohol syndrome is at epidemic levels in canada i remember an important article back during the peak of the hysteria over hiv aids i remember reading an article here in canada that was saying look when you really consider the numbers honestly canada doesn't have an aids problem we have a fetal alcohol syndrome problem you know alcoholic alcohol drinking mothers during pregnancy that's a real epidemic that's going to you know ruin the next generation and just the number of people who have aids and the number of babies being born with agents these are this is a really small problem you know numerically so anyway oh great comment from the audience hashtag irish sobriety anyway guys so look it's it's great talking to you guys i think i've covered a lot of the ground kind of spontaneously in this way um you know if you guys have more questions ask more questions because i i do enjoy answering them if more of you guys could hit the thumbs up button it'll help more people discover the video i do think my youtube channel is pretty thoroughly shadow banned right now we we get if you guys are members of patreon i posted this screenshot yesterday the day before yesterday oh you know what that's actually on my blog too so here you can see it if you're not a patreon subscriber i just said look if if this isn't permissible what is if this is the level of uh censorship and the limitation on freedom of speech you're gonna deal with on youtube you know what am i supposed to do here guys but anyway yeah um if you guys hit thumbs up it helps more people discover the live stream especially while we're still going oh if someone joins now i don't think they'd be too confused about what it is we're talking about frankly i think i think you could jump right in here at the uh the 56 minute mark and understand what it is i'm going on about with no problem at all okay so what i've been hinting at having established um oh do you mind elaborating on that cbc picture you posted on the blog uh you're gonna have to fill me out of the details i'm not sure which one you're which one you're talking about um perfectly reasonable question all right sorry back to the top here okay yeah melissa has filled in the blanks for us yeah well that whole video itself so yeah it's it's terrible but nevertheless contains uh profound and disturbing wisdom so there you go the taxonomy of canadian democracy image there you go i'll provide the link for any of the audience who wants to be in on the inside joke there okay guys so i've already talked about the extent to which a lot of the right-wing demagoguery about iq statistics relies on us suspending our disbelief and pretending that problems at the low end of the spectrum are problems throughout the whole spectrum and i've formally studied social science statistics but this will be immediately apparent to you if you don't disaggregate data what does this fancy word disagree mean separating the data into columns into separate segments whatever we're going to use here that it's it's going to be tremendously misleading if you have so look i just mentioned you could do this with neighborhood rather than ethnicity right if instead of looking at the contrast between black students and white students getting into universities obviously if you looked at wealthy neighborhoods versus poor neighborhoods you know you could look at all the disadvantages poor white people have in contrast to poor black people and whatever you could you can disaggregate the data in other ways and yes it may be that when you're looking at poor households and poor families you're looking at more people who have some of these disadvantages that put them into the the bottom end of the spectrum but once you've removed this once you're evaluating people who are in the middle or people in the top you're certainly not looking at any of these considerations anymore you're not looking at the question of whether or not someone is for example mentally capable of doing military service we're now asking questions about whether you would make a good architect or a great architect that is something very very different to try to test for to try to calibrate a test to say look do you really have the potential not not to sit at a desk and listen to a lecture and take notes at all right like that's that's a serious area of scientific research a serious area of public policy look some people whether through mental disability or lack of education or disadvantaged circumstances or injury or what have you some people are not capable of attending classes and looking at what's on the board and listening to the professor and taking notes and then later writing an essay so you know okay that's one way to calibrate the test but you are telling me that you were going to create a test that instead is going to evaluate people in the middle or people at the high end to talk about what kind of intellectual potential they have whether they would be a good architect or whether they would be a great architect ah so now we come back to the fundamental question here um of why okay let's let's repeat let's repeat the original question that started the video right what would be a meaningful test of intelligence right so we have disaggregated this there are meaningful tests at the low end it really matters like whether or not you have dyslexia whether you have other mental disabilities that again may disqualify you from doing military service even they may disqualify you from all kinds of jobs man just qualified from college ah but now you want to talk about a military attack pardon me you want to talk about a meaningful test of intelligence that will separate someone who will only ever be a mediocre architect from someone who has the potential to be a great architect now why do you want to devise this test presumably it's because you only have 40 seats available you can only admit 40 students into your university of architecture and you want only the students who really have the potential to be great architects not just good architects ah interesting now look is this does anyone in the audience believe this is really difficult does anyone believe this this is kind of coming down to the myth of of meritocracy you know colleges want money they want students who can pay if you're terrible at it that's better because you're not going to ask any questions you're not going to cause any problems with the professor they don't want brilliant architects if you're a brilliant architect don't even go to don't even come to our school oh great you're brilliant go go go make your fortune go have a great the the attitudes that actually exist in these institutions are not at all of trying to encourage or recruit the people of the best officers okay but if you were to devise now let's try so if you're gonna devise a meaningful test let's ask what that is but can we all admit to ourselves if you wanted to weed out if you wanted to remove the people who would only ever be a good architect and not a great architect does anyone believe the iq test would establish this to anyone does anyone believe that the type of math puzzles and logic puzzles and geometry puzzles in the iq test is going to distinguish the difference between someone not someone who currently is a good architect versus a great architect but someone who has the potential in future to become a great architect and all you guys know right now if we round up the 20 most successful architects and again what makes a good architect what is we have long discussion forum what is creativity how do you maybe if i as a white canadian start imitating traditional japanese pagodas traditional japanese temple architecture people will regard me as tremendously creative they might even think i'm a great architect and someone from japan says what this is like a second-rate rip-off of our traditional architecture what are you guys getting excited about it's very believable i think things like that i haven't argued about that oh oh so the fact that i'm successful therefore means i'm creative and therefore means i'm intelligent it doesn't it does the fact that somebody got rich on bitcoin doesn't mean they're intelligent guys the fact that someone got rich on the stock market you know and it's not even necessarily luck right you can get rich on the stock market just because you got good advice and you followed it you know someone told you you would make money if you bought this stock and you believed them and listened to them and bought the stock it's all it takes to be successful in the stock market right um anyway okay so um is it possible to test someone's current potential to become a great heart attack is it possible to evaluate the difference between mediocre good and great architects people who've already become a couple let's say they're all 55 years old they're toward the end of their career oh architects come with those 75 i guess at age 55 after they've already had decades of work in the field if we gave them an iq test do you think this measure of so-called intelligence is going to distinguish if we gave them the u.s military's intelligence test of the canadian military's intelligence or or oh great example what if we at age 55 we got these distinguished architects and we forced them to write the s.a.t test again we forced them to write the university entrance testing and they'd always say they're going oh i don't remember any of this stuff this crap i was forced to learn in high school that i've never used as an adult never using her oh and now you're going to evaluate my intelligence on this basis this is terrible i once sat down and i was given a primary school a grammar test you know for english grammar and it made me want to never have my kid in a school in canada it was so i was like wow this is the test used and the con it was terrible and the the answers were so poorly phrased i didn't i didn't know the answers it was so unclear and i'm fussy targeting it's like giving it's like which one of these is the best example of irony and like all five examples are terrible it's like well you think any of this is a good use of irony like you know do you know the media i know the meaning of the word irony it's like it's a grammar test i think for grade six students or something anyway just saying but you know if if you in the audience were forced to go and write a test for school children or a test for college you might not seem so intelligent distinguished ah but when we're talking about the middle range and the upper range what are meaningful tests of intelligence right and the simplest answer again and again and again is to make the test resemble the type of competence you want to measure and to admit to yourself that measures of competence will never be measures of intellectual potential they will only and always be measures of your present capability created through past hard work and to some limited extent innate talent i suppose not that we can ever you know disentangle those two how much of this is hard work wait if you want to test how good someone is at flying an airplane what do you do do you give them an iq test would anyone here want to choose a pilot or trust a pilot or treat someone as a reliable safe pilot and risk your life oh yeah here's my iq test here's my mensa test oh yeah this question on the mensa test of like if you take your shoe off turn it upside down and backwards and then look at the letter on it which way is up on the letter yeah yeah bro i practiced every morning i woke up in the morning and did these geometry puzzles i got this great score in my iq test i got this great score of my i met said that can you can you bro can you fly a plane bro really really what do we do what do we do to test that someone can be a pilot we put them in a computer simulation it looks like a metal box on four crooked legs you know this box and when you're in it it shifts around to give you the feeling of an airplane shifting and we test them again and again and again in a simulation that resembles a real aircraft as much as humanly possible the actual steering wheel and the buttons everything's the same the test mimics the real challenge we talked years ago on this channel about a test that was trying to pin down so-called critical thinking what is critical thinking how do you measure critical thinking what do they do this is also related to airplanes coincidentally well they gave students a set of eight or 12 newspaper articles about airplane safety and what to do about airplane crashes and each article was kind of advancing a different perspective a different possible proposal to amend what the american government was doing about airplane safety and each of them had different advantages and disadvantages it's like well we could probably reduce the number of airplanes crashing by two or three airplanes a year if we did this however it would delay each aircraft taking off by 20 minutes and a 20 minute delay equals so many million dollars per year this kind of thing so you imagine it was presenting a complex unclear set of considerations and the student was asked to sit down read all these articles in whatever order they wanted they weren't numbered one designer saying look at all the articles and then here's a series of questions where you have to make an informed evaluation of what the governor should do you have to write a kind of set of policy recommendations balancing different contradictory information i think also some of the articles contradict each other like some articles said the other article is lying kind of thing oh well the other article says is this intelligence you know is is this critical thinking is this what are you measuring here now i think probably based on that description all of you people could say oh well this is a meaningful test of something you know coming back to the example of that taxi driver you know the guy who drives the taxi and has these political penis maybe he would not do well on that test you know what i mean like maybe he's not the kind of guy who can sit down and give you a balanced nuanced analytical view a bunch of complex you know overlapping mutually contradictory information each piece of information has advantages and disadvantages it's not like oh there's one there's one simple solution to this problem and you have to say what it is in a you know there are four options a b c d which one is the correct answer well there is no correct answer the question is how correctly can you argue your point of view and support it given complex contradictory uncertain information ah so now we're getting into meaningful tests of intelligence they have to be meaningful relative to some goal relative to some outcome relative to some form of competence right and for that same reason that we have to recognize the gap between present competence and intellectual potential or what we think of as this static entity called intelligence yes someone in the someone in the audience is using the term general intelligence that's what that's what the proponents of the iq test like to use and pretend that there's this innate characteristic that's measurable intelligence now again general intelligence at the low end when we're calibrating for mentally disabled people to figure out how disabled they are whether or not they can speak in court of course that matters of course it does okay if i take 10 people from the audience right now and i have you write a series of tests it doesn't really matter if we do the iq tests some we do some set of tests to say okay we're going to do this intelligence test guys and then i'm going to decide who among you has the potential to be a great architect all right so we got 10 people at the audience and you don't have time to prepare to write the test right you always say okay guess what guys we got winners and losers you you and you you three people you got the highest scores you're gonna be great architects we're gonna take you we're gonna put you into this architecture program okay so seven people fail the test and three people pass oh to the seven people who failed right there are different ways you can respond to this right but we all know one of them is i'll show you i'll show you who's going to be a great argument i'm gonna work 10 times as hard and think about this if you came to that moment in your life where you write this intelligence test and you fail and someone tells you you're never going to be a great architect do you think the rational thing to do is for you to double down and study twice as hard for that intelligence test knowing that the intelligence test has absolutely nothing to do with the type of confidence or the type of creativity necessary to be a great architect or the type of experience there's also just hands-on workplace experience like if you say if you say okay i've got one year now i've got a gap year between high school and college and i want to go and be a great architect do you think you should take that one year to travel the world and visit important buildings and learn about architecture or do you think you should spend that one year practicing every day for the sat test and the iq test for these kinds of standardized tests who do you think is going to be a better architect and so let's just say it's it's not just tourism you guys might not have seen this i've seen this when i've when i've traveled i go to very strange places but you know like i've sometimes been to buddhist temples or even modern architecture and there's a guy there who's like he's like a tourist but he's sitting there with a professional drawing board doing the elevation plan he's really studying the architecture he's really studying he's taking sketches and taking notes on how the different parts of the building like if you're really interested in the structural aspects of architecture you can go there you can see that you can get motivated get inspired you can learn about these different things and then you know when you're in the architecture of the university you can say the professor like you listen to the birthday well you know that's interesting but when i was in milan what i noticed was this you know like you actually have some experience that's relevant to architecture right who who is going to be the better architect the person who who studies for one year drilling doing the questions again again to get a great sat test to get a really high test on the iq test maybe we can throw in the mensa test they have a really high score in the met's test or someone someone who's out learning about architecture we could throw in also what about someone who spends a year working in construction let's say his uncle has a you know construction company he's actually getting hands-on experience with structural steel with you know how the actual process of building of building something works and then he's going to be able to apply that knowledge maybe that guy maybe it's not one year maybe it's 10 years maybe he spent 10 years working construction and he maybe this particular guy has been 10 years in a construction state maybe he's not real good at writing iq tests maybe he's not real good at writing the stds maybe he doesn't have a lot of patience for it because he has real life experience hands-on experience with what architecture really means and then you sit him down and say okay well we want you to do this bunch of geometric puzzles we want you to answer a bunch of logic questions and completely meaningless you know questions that supposedly test your intelligence and he's sitting there his pistol man i don't even want to spend five minutes dealing with this because he he feels confident he knows what architecture is he knows what the job is he's not going to let this that's good people can just have that attitude and do badly on the test right okay but if we i'm i'm saying this to reach out to you in the audience and say if you wrote this test you might feel one of these ways and maybe not maybe out of the seven people who failed one of them just believes in the test they just say well you know i've heard jordan peterson talk about iq tests i've heard jordan peters talk about the s.a.t test you know and this this really judges me and that's it you know this piece of paper has established that i don't have what it takes to be a great architect so i'm out and they would just internalize that self-doubt and self-hatred you know and they would just consider themselves permanently inferior and permanently disadvantaged incapable of getting over the hump right but some of you some of those people out of the 10 people some of you would respond to this and say damn it i'm going to be a better architect than those three losers who won the test they know how to write this test but i know how to design a building i know how to put i know how to make a window look beautiful whatever it is i know how to assemble you know uh structural steel into something that that people really want to live in and people really want to buy i'm going to make my mark in the world of architecture and maybe that person goes to a second-rate college and maybe they go to a third-rate college instead of going to an ex more expensive college or instead of having a you know and maybe they succeed anyway maybe their brilliance their acumen their hard work pays off right and if it doesn't you know do you really think the people who try and fail do you think any of them have to say that they just weren't smart enough in any field of endeavor how many people try to make it in architecture and fail or the outcomes are mediocre and they just say you know what the problem was i just didn't have what it took to do these math puzzles i didn't have what it took to score so high you know uh in these in these on paper tests okay guys that's the conclusion in my video for me i mean um i i if you guys have any more any more questions i'm happy to take them and then we can we can wrap it up um ghizaru writes in saying that some white people in his area weaponize ideas of iq against native americans specifically as a reason that we shouldn't care about them politically i wonder if you've noticed this elsewhere so yes gizarro [Music] that is sort of the ultimate taboo in canadian politics i would say i don't know how things are in in alaska by contrast or different parts of the united states where the same issues could could exist so i'll say something about first nations are indigenous people and then i'll contrast this to a totally different situation the other side of the world that's nevertheless roman so i'm going to give you one specific example but this happened throughout the canadian administration of first nations there was a reservation in saskatchewan where the canadian government separated the native people living on that reservation into the people they considered genetically superior and the people they considered genetically inferior and they gave them separate land and as a social experiment tried to prove that within the native population there was this kind of eugenic difference in uh racial superiority and so to my knowledge this wasn't a special area of study for me but as you can understand it's a highly politically contentious and interesting area for researchers and historians today um they pretended that these people were selected on the basis of objective tests like iq tests for their intelligence but to a large extent these so-called superior people were selected because they more resembled white europeans that it was primarily a racist criterion of who was who was superior and who was inferior and it had terrible consequences for those native people themselves and for their descendants who are still alive today so there was one specific experiment like that in saskatchewan that i knew a fair bit about um how many experiments of that kind were there throughout the british empire the idea and you know we had sorry without getting into the whole history of our residential school system but yes throughout the british empire the idea that you could use iq tests to decide you know policy for conquered peoples um this has it's nothing really that has a long history it's just that that history it's not that many hundreds of years it's not we're talking about the last 100 years maybe 150 years or something it doesn't go back that far but that's the the shadow of that still hangs over uh politics today and you know again sorry something i didn't talk about this video it could be a whole separate video one of the reasons the most important reasons why iq does not equal intelligence is just that your motivation and your attitude the time you write the test it reflects so much in the score the same person can write the iq test three months apart and get totally different scores and any of you can relate to that um you know if you of so sorry a great example i won't digress into this long when you have people who are applying to enter the diplomatic service in almost any country you can united states england you get people who are highly professional highly trained highly educated highly motivated and they're applying for a job that they imagine at least will be very high paying and you get people who are incredibly focused so for example you have a test for diplomats for how well they speak chinese like this is here in canada how well do you speak chinese or how well do you speak italian or something and you have these kind of superhuman performances these people seem to learn languages in three months this is an illusion but you can imagine these people are really motivated in someone and uh some you know some tests and some circumstances you have people who are extremely highly motivated to write an iq test consumers but you have people who are demoralized and really literally oppressed being forced to write intelligence tests you know for example in the history of our first nations and so on people who resent being there people say why am i being forced to take this test and where there is no reward i mean you know i just say there are factors like that too to be considered this is for all discussion of intelligence tests and aptitude tests and so on and it's again i find it difficult to imagine that people are being sincerely incompetent in ignoring those factors you know how different the the issue of motivation and again the same person can write the same test a few months apart and double their score and quadruple their score because and they'll say why well they was like oh well the first time i didn't care and then the second i went i studied and i prepared and i took it seriously and you know it's not so mysterious but you know if you think this is measuring an innate trait and innate ability this is really ridiculous um okay sorry so i'll just reset the question so gizuru is asking about uh or or perhaps so many ways to pronounce your name uh this member of the audience is asking about the weaponization of iq tests against native americans i used to live in cambodia okay um cambodians get much lower scores on intelligence tests than people from thailand next door people from vietnam on the other side now the actual tests that were being used at that time were not iq tests they were math and language aptitude tests i think honestly they're based ultimately on a japanese standard not a european standard but there were some kind of standardized school tests that were given to some people to measure how how awful the education system was in cambodia and um how stupid and ignorant would you have to be to imagine that you're looking at a genetic difference between cambodians and vietnamese people and between cambodians and thai people when you're looking at the fact that cambodians at that time were performing much worse on these intelligence tests you know it's again like if you actually reify this as if this is a measure of genetics in these people um again partly again there's this issue of measuring the low end measuring the middle and then measuring the high end and what our assumptions are built into the high end you know what does creativity mean what does it mean to be a great architect what does it mean to be a successful startup stockbroker and to what extent is being a successful stockbroker or a successful musician like bob dylan rely on factors that have nothing to do with your intelligence especially not hereditary intelligence you know this is all these all these uh problems but you know in case you hadn't heard you know cambodia was a much more war-torn and poverty poverty-stricken nation than thailand and it was even much more war-torn and poverty-stricken than vietnam long story short the war ended in vietnam earlier that it ended in cambodia vietnam and a number of other advantages in terms of education and just literacy and what have you you know anyone who had visited these countries and just read a tourist guidebook about the history of these three countries how could anyone in their right mind think that intelligence tests whether it's the iq test or you know a school app dude oh cool thing this is reflecting a genetic difference between cambodians these other people now you know beyond that i mean if you were talking about a real genetic difference between people what if you had two populations one population of whom had a higher rate of down syndrome than the other and then that's what's showing up in these tests is the number of people at the bottom end are skewing the testosterone that way i mean hypothetically you could have that sort of thing some some you know genetic disorders i remember i used to live in scotland people were talking all the time about the genetic disorders that the scottish people had more than anyone else on earth yeah i just mentioned there were a bunch of them it's just the way dna works if you're born scottish there are a bunch of bunch of problems you have to watch out for um that you may have inherited and they all knew it you know and they talked about it you know you you could have hypothetically at least a population of people with a higher rate of down syndrome babies and then those babies born with down syndrome score lower on iq tests or standardized aptitude tests or school tests and then that affects your your average score would you really make a racist argument about genetic inferiority on this basis that what you do with this data what you make out of this you know that that's the part that's so it's pseudoscientific and it's also just you know fundamentally mean-spirited so you know again i won't dig question this much further but so with with native americans obviously you're looking at these differences in terms of poverty and so on and so forth but of course the other one is nutrition i used to live in laos i used to do humanitarian work and research in laos laos is just north of cambodia you got a nerd and you know there were people who were mentally and physically disabled for life because of lack of vitamin a you know they've avoided the vitamin a and it they have impaired vision for the rest of their lives i think it is and there were people who were disabled for the rest of their lives by an amazing array of of nutritional deficiencies that you just couldn't believe existed in the 21st century and as i lived there more and i understood the culture because it wasn't it wasn't absolute scarcity guys it wasn't um i started to understand how it was possible for people to have these nutritional deficiencies that that impaired their intellectual development so there are mangoes everywhere and you have people eating a 100 meat diet you know i'm not i'm not joking i wish i was you know you have a culture that doesn't value eating vegetables and fruit even though they're they're like poor people can afford deep mangoes in that climate you know us they may even resent it i remember people saying that to me the certain kinds of tropical fruit going they're like oh i was forced to eat this during my childhood because it's cheap and now i never eat that stuff anymore it's like that's how you feel about fruit measurement people really seriously where the only food they value is eating buffalo meat and especially eating raw buffalo meat and this is a tropical country with no refrigeration this kind of mind-blowingly unhealthy diet you know and so again apart from i mean it's it's not absolute poverty it's the combination of poverty and ignorance and cultural values and lack of knowledge and nutrition but you know they're they're so there are nutritional differences oh sorry i mean the ultimate one is of course being iodine deficient you get mental impairment from lack of iodine and laos was one of the countries that struggled with that mongolia struggled with that um depending on what's in the diet iodine deficiency might or might not be an example so look this is this is the tragedy of this in situations where there really is a sort of quote-on-quote genetic basis for inequalities in iq where it's not as obvious as the difference between thailand and cambodia in the 20th century which has knocked on effects in the 21st century obviously like it's not it's not as obvious the difference of whether or not a school exists whether or not books is i'm sorry but i've lived in these conditions there i met people i've told the story before i know i met a woman she didn't have a school she was literally educated in a cave there was no school they had one chalkboard she was educated in a cave by members of the communist party while the americans were dropping bombs outside literally those were her conditions growing up now i made a resting moment too she eventually got a university degree in berlin uh under communism that was east berlin back when there was separate east berlin and west point anyway um fascinating character but you know obviously these conditions are going to have knock-on effects on uh on iq scores or university attitudes course what have you and if you actually lived there and worked with them and cared about them and cared for them you would have some nuanced understanding of what the factors are that with any particular group of native americans is you know weighing down on their accomplishments academically shall we say or in terms of how they get ahead in informal education and sorry in canada of course there's also just the quality of the schools themselves which i could now digress that they're giving a lecture about uh but yeah obviously the quality of the school you have access to so sorry long long answer to a long question but look let's turn it around let's argue against my position here are thai people racist against cambodian people yes they are do thai people commonly commonly believe that cambodian people are genetically inferior yes they do do thai people routinely say that cambodians are genetically incapable of higher levels of knowledge yes they do china versus mongolia do chinese people commonly believe that mongolians are genetically inferior or inferior in terms of iq if you're in german yes one of the most widespread forms of racism that exists in china is the belief that mongolian people are mentally inferior to chinese people genetically so to argue against myself the point is that it is very common in the mass of humanity to make exactly these kinds of of racist and racializing uh judgments so i suppose this is part of the uh part of the tragedy of life on planet earth in the uh in the 21st century so a couple other interesting questions obviously i'm assuming i'm going to wrap it up um someone asked have you seen sean's video on the bell curve yes as i recall that was years ago but yes i have and do you follow nassim taleb i did buy and read naseem tellab's book eight years ago approximately so that is an interesting factoid i listened to one of his lectures delivered to the london school of economics and i i read his book so deep cuts interrupt interesting that you asked that um but that is that is one of the few contemporary authors i i have indeed read so i'm just reading through your questions guys great question what was the last animal you ate except really would have to search my memory for that you know what i'm thinking i actually i think i can remember actually i think i can um anyway uh uh uh sorry there was another great question in here oh so totally different topic but a great one to speak on briefly plant-based power would ask why did we lose the war in vietnam hey what do you mean we i mean we why did we lose the war in vietnam uh he says we had the technology uh or was that war just to make money so um gee is there any book i can recommend on this i don't think so sorry ever so often people ask me before i can recommendations yeah but i've already mentioned it it's not on this it's not stuff well you know what babe it kind of is you know what you're right i guess i guess this is the book to recommend okay guys you're gonna see the camera move because this book is underneath the camera here so yeah totally off topic but maybe a nice nice little degree i should end it so this is a book on the history of the milai massacre that i myself like to mispronounce sometime so there you go um history of the me line massacre and the reality is with this event being of unique and tremendous historical significance but this was not the only uh such event the united states got demoralized and gave up um it is true that the actual organization of the army was inept it is true that in many important ways the americans were both politically incompetent and tactically incompetent that is true however fundamentally the vietnam war stopped when americans stopped believing in it they lost faith in the project of the vietnam war and i think people could ask quite righteously at many a point during the vietnam war what the hell are we fighting for what was the purpose of this war and obviously there was a failure on the part of political leaders to actually create a meaningful sense of what the purpose and objective of the war was and that it could be accomplished so on and so forth but a series of scandals and i would say again the single most important being the uh discovery of the melane massacre not when the massacre happened when it came to be discussed uh by american journalists and so on became common knowledge uh led to americans losing faith in the war project and then demanding an immediate end of the war so that's also an aspect of democracy and um you know uh america is partly a democracy and it's in very large part not a democracy it's a hybrid it's a mixed system it's a mixed society but one of the rare examples of democracy at work is that the american people demanded a sudden immediate end to the vietnam war and eventually they got it so that was an example of uh democracy in the in their in their house of commons shall we say overcoming uh what other parts of society silly mannelly asks a very telling question he says if you used to live in scotland what is the national beverage apart from beer question mark hint it's orange so i know the answer to this but i would assume melissa for example does not so sillyman here is your i answer i think they have an love mess aaron so yes i really did live in scotland and i could not believe how absolutely horrible um the taste of iron brew is so that is a drink that is only sold in scotland and many people told me that if you didn't grow up drinking it you would always hate the taste a uh an assumption i can only agree with so free to ask may have been a nice question to to close on is so one's intelligence can only be measured by your choices so no i don't i don't believe that at all freedom i wouldn't agree with that at all so listen dude you have a response to that bib so you i yeah so i mean yeah i mean you can see what she's getting at i'm i'm not actually not that pessimistic so go ahead what would you say yeah so i mean so so to relate it i mean so if i agreed with frida here we might say like for example that what i was saying about napoleon is you know looking at his choices in life looking at you afghanistan you look at the choices they've made and then you judge the person to be intelligent enough on the basis of the stress i don't i don't think that's true look even at at christianity in people's lives that people believe in a religion for so many years and so on you know and to some extent those choices are made for you or yeah yeah no i'm you know i wouldn't say that but also the point is that intelligence can only be measured by your choices that's what she's just i don't feel that way at all i think we can measure intelligence i think with all of the caveats that i've stated in this video and all the warnings against the way in which data about intelligence is misused no you you absolutely can um you know the warnings are considerable however you know um you you know let's say this too i mean most of these fields of endeavor are very fundamentally corrupt um if you really did develop yeah so freida i think we understood your point so she was just she was just reiterating you know like making bad choices in life so whether you choose to become a cocaine addict whether you choose to cheat on your wife with a stripper and again we're assuming you don't sympathize with that i think there are a lot of people who would say well you know strippers are people too you know maybe this guy had a really wonderful love affair with a stripper maybe this stripper understood him in ways his wife never did like maybe that was the most meaningful relationship of his life was you know why have these bad assumptions he cheated on his wife with a stripper and he got a cocaine habit but you know maybe that's the best thing he ever did in his life and not the worst right like we have a lot of judgmental assumptions you know built uh built into this um no so i mean you know i'm joking around but again i'm really serious like you know oh sorry let's give a great example melissa just made a video maybe so you guys have seen it maybe maybe you haven't but you know talking about her decision to not go to medical school now someone could just judge that as wrong and bad and the sign of limited intelligence they say oh well obviously there's that that was dumb or something you know you're that you're just a dumb person because you didn't become a medical doctor maybe maybe that was the right decision for her like for a lot of people someone else who was mentioned in this video jaclyn glenn jacqueline glenn started on youtube uh as a medical school student she was in med school in training to become a doctor and she dropped out now some people would say that was the wrong decision or that even proves that she's stupid as if there's this inherent thing well you know she also had a background in theater she also wanted to be a comedian she had other interests in life and other talents in life and you know maybe she's too stupid to be a doctor like we're talking about jacqueline glenn here no offense you know knowing her as well as we all do now maybe it would have been really awful for her to keep on struggling in medical school maybe she would have been a terribly inept and terrible daughter maybe that would have been a really bad password in other words too so i mean you know we can go on and on about this but looking at these choices people make in life as if there's a very simple self-evident difference between good and bad smart and stupid oh look so let's turn why did i become a scholar of buddhism and why did i quit is it smart or stupid so right now i have the option guys you can vote on this should i go back to school and get a phd in buddhist philosophy phd in buddhist i can i still got it i still got the talent believe me i've still got what it takes gonna beat you but you know is that a good or a bad decision is that a smart or a dumb decision if i go back and get a pg in buddhism maybe that's the stupidest decision i could ever make in my life and other people you know especially there are people who write to me who've read my scholarship of buddhism from that period in my life and they say look this was really brilliant you're really wasting your own uh you know uh wasting your own potential in life you know uh there are people who think it's stupid that i ever stopped being a scholar of buddhism that the most intelligent the most positive thing i could do um would be go back to school and and get get a phd related buddhism or buddhist philosophy and and spend my life scholarships so no and we freed up i'm taking your question seriously both ways you know it's it's not easy and look i mean you know i've got to tell you i don't believe i don't believe all these things are subjective i do think you can really look at adolf hitler and judge that he was stupid in his life i do think you can look at napoleon and judge that he was stupid and i do think that some decisions are so morally wrong or so tactically wrong that it's not debatable you know not all these things are subjective available but i'm still really signing this this series of warnings about the extent to which that subjective issue where we're just presuming the amount that this person has in common with me the amount they agree with my politics it's to that extent that i'm judging them to be in the right and to be intelligent and smart and and you know and and superior to other people which is ultimately what we're what we're talking about here people look sorry the other huge factor here though is just money okay i mean so if you could evaluate who is a good architect and who is not now that's not too hard to imagine you have a specialized test it's not the iq test and you have to give them a bunch of problems and okay calculate the load-bearing wall and okay here's a here's a blueprint where are you going to put the electrical wiring you could let's say it's a five-hour exam yeah like the uh like that finance exam forgetting yeah like the cfa exam for finance you could have a really in-depth thorough exam that really is calibrated to test the upper limits of architectural ability objectively like in an objectively verifiable way and nobody else is allowed in the room you sit there and there are security cameras and nobody can help you and nobody can talk to you and there's no cheating and this is really testing your mastery of architecture at a high level why doesn't that exist why doesn't every country in the world have why isn't it on tv every year like the olympics can you imagine a parallel universe a different culture where every year the competition for who is the most brilliant architect is a popular tv show it could be you know why not you know why who wants to watch football this is ridiculous who wants who wants to watch baseball let's watch people compete over their ideas of what is great architecture and improve their their confidence and mastery of this art form that affects all of our lives why not so i'm just saying despite all the warnings or you know coming together with with all these warnings about what's what these tests do and don't prove and so on you know no i i i do think you could test you know ability as an architect and you know again was just the point that this is not your innate or inherent intelligence it's what you've accomplished up till this moment you know which will partly reflect your past intelligence zone and so forth right um but nobody wants to right nobody wants to because all that anyone is interested in is money right what if the most famous uh architect in the world the most successful architecture like frank gehry so i'm getting into getting into the six degrees of separation um frank gehry is a very famous architect okay what if we can prove that frank gehry is an idiot this is a his buildings are worth millions of dollars his contract is an arctic worth millions and millions of dollars everyone wants to build up the mystique and the illusion that he's a genius so frank again i i know people who know people all right he has this trick he does to make him look like a genius where he signs his name with two pens simultaneously he has a red pen and a blue pen he brings his hand in both hands simultaneously he signs his his his name and this amazing swirl of activity what dexterity what acumen what brilliance and of course people who've never tried it think wow this guy's a genius it's true he's the greatest architect of the century or something you know if you sat down and practiced doing that every day at 6am for a month you could sign your name with two hands also it's just completely you know what i mean oh we have to create this mystique we have to prac we have to publish books saying that he's a genius i remember there was a book this is a credit to frank gehry and most of the book was photographs of his architecture with quotations from people saying he was a genius but he actually included some quotations of people saying he was an idiot as i remember there's a quotation it was just from another architect who said you know the thing i appreciate about the thing i appreciate about frank is that he can create these insane spaces that are really unexpected you know when you walk into the room it's not what you're expecting the room to look like but aside from that i think his whole philosophy is is [ __ ] i mean the guys are cranking this just [ __ ] and they included that in the books you know it's great too but you know note there's an industry to make the university's degree in architecture seem like it's worth a million dollars there's an industry to make the building look like it's worth a million dollars or the contract with the arctic absolutely nobody is interested in an iq test if it proves that this great architect is an idiot absolutely nobody's interested in a test of architectural ability architectural intelligence architectural acumen you know because we could test that but nobody's interested in it if it proves that frank gehry is not a very good architect you know who knows who knows what the impacts would be you know what if it proves that the most expensive college is not producing the best architects if there's a cheaper smaller state college that actually produces people who do better on this test now we got a problem oh but this is the great school of architecture at this expense of college you have to respect us no we don't now we have an objective measure of who's learning how to be a good architect and who's not so yeah with all these caveats um having been having been stated i do think there are meaningful tests of intelligence they can be meaningful at the low end they can be meaningful at the middle range and they can be meaningful at the high end also but you know we have to question seriously the motivations of the people who are designing these tests the motivations of the people writing them and we just have to have a sincere sense of trying to help others of trying to make the world a better place and engaging in this kind of research you know absolutely you could do detailed intelligence tests in cambodia to find out what the problems in the education system are and where they are and how they're distributed and to identify the problems even ethnic minorities within cambodia have because by the way there are multiple ethnic groups in multiple languages than cambodia it's not all one ethnic group absolutely and some of that stuff might even kind of sound racist if you talked about it in an insensitive way but you could get out and you could do intelligence testing that would turn up problems you could do intelligence testing that would turn up where the clusters of drug addiction are you know like oh well look it's turning up here we have a lot of parents are doing a lousy job raising their kids because in this particular area there's chronic drug addiction like if you were doing it in a sensitive compassionate helpful way you know yeah you could you could you could measure intelligence in a way that's really intended to help people and that's really intended to improve society i have never once heard of a university doing intelligence tests to figure out which students need help what if we do an intelligence test like for learning chinese look and guys maybe this is where i don't i don't really think i'm that gifted at learning chinese i don't but all kinds of professors say oh wow then i'm amazingly gifted at learning languages i don't believe it i don't separate topic i don't believe it but other people perceive me as if i'm incredibly gifted learning languages well what if you test the intelligence of the students we're all paying the same amount of money like i'm so gifted well i'm paying five thousand dollars to take this chinese course all these idiots are paying five thousand dollars also well if you test their intelligence because you're actually trying to help them you could test them and figure oh look this guy over here he can learn the new vocabulary in just one week but we got these other students and they need a month to learn it well then what can we do to help them never once in my life i've never heard of intelligence testing i've never heard of aptitude testing that's intended to help people you know it shows how how sad and sick the whole province of pseudoscience is you know so yeah of course of course we could test attitude of course we could uh we could test ability and of course we could make the world a better place through well-intentioned sincere social science research that's ultimately linked to to political changes in policy thank you guys very much for joining me tonight