Boris Johnson's IQ comment

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25135225

What do you think about his comments?

I personally do not find it that immoral to say that some of humanity are clever than others. If someone has spent years researching and writing a book, they are in my opinion far cleverer than somebody who sits on their sofa all day watching Jeremy Kyle. That sounds like an awful thing to say and many things may be preventing the latter person from attaining their true level of intelligence but I do feel our obsession with moral relativism has reached the point in which even saying that people are unequal in terms of intelligence some ghastly thing to say. Saying this however, I do not believe IQ should be the only way of testing a child's intelligence and children who are creative and musical and so forth should also be considered of worth to our society. However, I am NOT saying that this means those who suffer from disabilities and so forth should not be given any economical attention since I believe while we may be not equal in intelligence, everyone is equal in regards to the most basic human rights such as water, food and shelter and so forth and it should be our duty as well as the governments duty to make sure such minorities can live in acceptable conditions and not exploit the notion of elitism to justify dismantling the social welfare state. In no way, should his comments on IQ justify any form of fraudulent economic culture that makes the poor poorer and the rich richer and pretend that this is because the rich are somehow more clever. I hope I am not being too confusing and sound completely right wing. I can assure you I am not. Anyway, sorry for the stupid post.

The thing with intelligence is there are all sorts of it.

Yes very true. It is just that people are saying that he is a 'nazi' because he believes more attention should be given to those with high IQ's, which seems dramatic and hyper-bolic. I disagree but do not find it as shocking as most people, especially those on the left find it to be.

Actually, that is (mostly) incorrect based on the currently available evidence.

The reason why IQ tests are designed to capture a single component - "general intelligence" or g - is because different measures of intelligences are correlated with each other. Furthermore, there is insufficient empirical evidence to suggest that multiple intelligences even exist.

http://www.iapsych.com/articles/deary2010.pdf
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 9606000201
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 960600050X
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 6903004422
http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ746453
http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ746454

An example:

Emotional intelligence and general cognitive ability (measured by g) - often thought to be diametrically opposed - appear to share the same neurological basis.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23171618

The way I see it, the "multiple intelligence" view is mostly a politically correct term to give the impression that everyone is "just as smart" as everyone else. Kid is a math wiz? Then surely, he or she must be emotionally stunted, artistically unsophisticated and as clumsy as a drunk elephant. However, the evidence does not support this view.

More on the same subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_ ... _reception

I don't think he actually said more attention should be paid to those with high IQs.

Pretty much everything he said in that speech was right-wing drivel, but he didn't say "leave the thick to die". He did say the exact opposite.

Yes, some experts prefer to restrict the definition to a very narrow range of mental/cognitive abilities that seem to fit under one neat category, but what about social intelligence and the sorts? As someone with Asperger's, would you say (from personal experience) that social intelligence tends to correlate with the traditional construct of intelligence (academic, intellectual, whatever)?

But if, say, you don't consider social intelligence a type of intelligence, but rather something else, then what would be the justification for it?

From the same Wikipedia page you linked to, Gardner writes "I balk at the unwarranted assumption that certain human abilities can be arbitrarily singled out as intelligence while others cannot." Why is that an unreasonable claim in your opinion?

http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/ ... itics.aspx

So what about his speech did you find right wing drivel? Surely if he said the opposite of 'pay more economic attention to people with high IQ's', it was the opposite of right-wing drivel and about supporting social welfare programs and those who are less capable than others. Sorry if I am being pedantic or not making sense.

Social intelligence and emotional intelligence are more or less the same thing. Here is the link to the full study from my previous example of emotional intelligence. As demonstrated within, the two are often used interchangeably.
http://www.decisionneurosciencelab.org/ ... nss124.pdf

And g is not a "very narrow range" of mental/cognitive abilities. It is the exact opposite: If a task involves the use of mental ability (be it math, language, music, humor), then performance on that task is very likely to be correlated with g.


Anecdote. People on the Autism spectrum make up 1-2 percent of the human population.

Psychopaths, who are estimated to make up 1 percent of the human population, generally demonstrate superior social intelligence, but I don't use them as a model for human cognition either.


See my previous reply. Social intelligence is intelligence, but it is just a subcomponent of g.

In mathematics, being good at differentiation is theoretically distinct from being good at integration, but if you have high mathematical ability, you are likely to be good at both.
In intelligence, being good as socializing is theoretically distinct from being good at mathematics, but if you have high intelligence, you are likely to be good at both.


Because Gardners theory of multiple intelligences has been systematically derided in the scientific literature for lacking empirical validity, as per my previous links.

And because g has demonstrated (1) high predictive power in many areas, including education, occupation, health and crime, and has been shown to (2) have a significant genetic component (at the very least 40-50 percent in the most recent Genome-Wide Association Studies).

Sorry being rather simple minded. I understand that neurologically speaking to be good at something like maths implies that you will also be good at socializing or emotional intelligence and you do not have to sacrifice one or the other, however what evidence is there to show this? Is it because neurologists have proven that they stem from the same part of the brain or is it through statistics showing that people with high IQs also passed emotional tests very well? Is it one of these or is it only theoretical at the moment.

I did say "pretty much everything"

He made a passing reference to social welfare programs ("we should tolerate equality only on two conditions- that we help those who cannot compete and we provide opportunity to those who can"). He made similar passing references to "Julian Assange wasting police time", "the entire population of Transylvania pitching their tent a Marble Arch", the BBC playing a song that reached #2 in the charts, and the WTD. He made repeated references to bringing back grammar schools, and to his pet project of an airport in the Thames Estuary (to be fair, the latter isn't really right wing drivel, just Boris spouting his opinion). And he also made multiple references to cutting taxation, even when the economy recovers.

(All "quotes" paraphrased)

Yes to both questions. The study I linked to demonstrates that (1) general intelligence predicts emotional intelligence and (2) that general intelligence and emotional intelligence are linked to the same areas of the brain.

From the study:
"Regression analyses revealed that latent scores for measures of general intelligence and personality reliably predicted latent scores for emotional intelligence. Lesion mapping results further indicated that these convergent processes depend on a shared network of frontal, temporal and parietal brain regions."

http://www.decisionneurosciencelab.org/ ... nss124.pdf

Don't care.

"Intelligence" is an arbitrary concept that means whatever whomever is talking about wants it to mean. Usually, people will just cling to whatever definition of "intelligence" most closely matches their own profile of cognitive abilities. In terms of social "worth," there's a lot more to a person's economic "value" than a number on an IQ test. Being "successful" has been shown to depend on many more factors than just IQ (and it's debatable if IQ is even the most important factor).

Personally, I think it's just one more example of social posturing by monkeys who are trying to grab more resources for themselves.

My disagreement has nothing to do with whether or not emotional and "traditional" intelligence work together. This study you link to demonstrates that they, indeed, work together and are not as distinct as is commonly believed to be (I'm sure Gardner himself would agree with this as well). However, this does not mean that, therefore, they must all unquestionably be lumped into one single category.



I'm going to have to do some research on this to see how accurate your claim here really is. But either way, there are many examples that show that unifying them all into one overall intelligence does little to explain why people often display different relative levels of adeptness for different skills/abilities/intelligences.

Savants are one good example. People with autism are another. As you mentioned, psychopaths as well. And many other examples.

Also, why is it that IQ tests test for more than one subcategory of general intelligence if they may as well be all under one category instead? And why is it, when doing IQ or other similar tests, that some people score low on verbal intelligence but score quite high on quantitative (or math-related) intelligence?

For the academic STAT test (similar to IQ test), I scored very low on verbal (percentile rank below 50) but got an extremely high score on quantitative (in the high 90s). Even if I am an outlier in this case, this does suggest that the theory of one intelligence is too simplistic to account for these discrepancies. And some explanation is needed.

Also, consider Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia. Why is it that when one part of the brain is damaged, only one or two types of cognitive/mental abilities seem to be affected while others aren't?



Is this anecdote?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10336657

Link to full study:
http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/pa ... l_FMRI.pdf

Seems like there is a worthy distinction to be made between social intelligence and what is termed general intelligence. This also confirms what many people with autism actually have to struggle with despite often high general intelligence.



Are you saying that we shouldn't look into why the discrepancies since they're just "outliers"?

I would expect the existence of psychopaths, savants, and autistic people to actually provide fuel for more personal inquiry into what exactly really goes on within the human brain when it comes to intelligence. They are all still human beings at the end of the day and, therefore, share many common brain regions and neural pathways.



No contest with that. I totally agree. The question isn't about whether the correlations are significantly high, but whether there is enough justification to keep them all under one category given the observed discrepancies in adeptness levels for multiple intelligences among many people.



Derided sounds like an exaggeration. Many experts and academics in psychology agree with the plausibility of multiple intelligences. Even if they aren't exactly as categorized by Gardner himself, there is strong evidence that multiple intelligences are real, and the irony is that even proponents of one intelligence theory would easily agree should they discard the arguments of semantics and focus on what exactly is being argued.



But this is not what is being argued. So I don't even need to comment on this one.

Shared does not mean exactly the same.

Disregarding your last statement, this is exactly what I believe.