The Mismeasure of Man
The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve. How smart are you? If that question doesn't spark a dozen more questions in your mind (like "What do you mean by 'smart,'" "How do I measure it" and "Who's asking?"), then The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould's masterful demolition of the IQ industry, should be required reading. Gould's brilliant, funny, engaging prose dissects the motivations behind those who would judge intelligence, and hence worth, by cranial size, convolutions, or score on extremely narrow tests. How did scientists decide that intelligence was unipolar and quantifiable? Why did the standard keep changing over time? Gould's answer is clear and simple: power maintains itself. European men of the 19th century, even before Darwin, saw themselves as the pinnacle of creation and sought to prove this assertion through hard measurement. When one measure was found to place members of some "inferior" group such as women or Southeast Asians over the supposedly rightful champions, it would be discarded and replaced with a new, more comfortable measure. The 20th-century obsession with numbers led to the institutionalization of IQ testing and subsequent assignment to work (and rewards) commensurate with the score, shown by Gould to be not simply misguided--for surely intelligence is multifactorial--but also regressive, creating a feedback loop rewarding the rich and powerful.
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22recommend
73mentions
53people
2009–2026years
34% recommend37% neutral29% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > Out of curiosity are you espousing that differences in intelligence don't actually exist, or just that we need to come up with better ways to measure them?
Yes and No to both.
Simply put;
1) There is nothing called "General Intelligence" beyond what enables a Human to survive in his/her environmental niche (including cultural/social since we are social animals). Leaving aside obvious biological retardation, if Extraversion/Introversion, Agreeableness/Disagreeableness, etc. enables one to survive, they are equally "Intelligent". Trying to rank these attributes on a ordinal scale and do quantitative calculations on them is nonsense. See Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man) for convincing arguments.
2) Humans are highly adaptable and exhibit dynamic behaviour in different contexts. This "role" and hence the "exhibited intelligence" is specific to that context but if that adaptation subsumes the need for another related context then obviously one will be intelligent in both the contexts. For example London Taxi drivers actually grew their hippocampus and became more intelligent in both spatial navigation and memory recall - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memor...
3) We know that gene expression can be influenced by the environment via Epigenetics over generations (see the documentary The Ghost in your Genes). Environment (cultural/social/nutritional/economic) now becomes of paramount importance and thus a person's "fitness" for a role is dependent on Nature, Nurture and his unique Family Past history. He will now be intelligent in certain roles not so in others.
4) Wrong understanding and misuse of Statistical methods in the above scenarios. This is where Taleb's writing/videos help one to separate the wheat from the chaff.
- Notes on Taleb's article - https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Taleb:_IQ_is_a_pseudoscientific_...
- IQ is a dismal measure of intelligence - https://supermemo.guru/wiki/IQ_is_a_dismal_measure_of_intell...
- You are right to be skeptical. Charles Murray is not the most reputable of scientists, and his book The Bell Curve is full of bad science to say the least, used to advocate for conservative (if not racist) policies.
A fairly quick summary is available on the Wikipadia page for this book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Reception) where you can dive deeper by looking into the reference (I particularly recommend S.J. Gould which addresses scientific racism in length in the book Mismeasure of Man). There is also a long video essay by Shaun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo) —if you have 3 hours to spare—which does an excellent job of summarizing the bad science and political agenda of The Bell Curve.
- It is true it is a bit unfair to claim that the policies Murray were racist without providing context. Some of the research he used to back up his case definitely were but the policies he advocated for were for sure conservative but only racist by association (which is why I put it in parenthesis). Conservative values in the 1990s America were really really connected to race. The whole debate about “inner city crime” and the notion of the “welfare queen” were largely a dog whistle. And conservative policies which advocated for “tough on crime” and welfare elimination were most often doing so against a largely racialized group.
I admit this is far fetched and maybe unfair. However I’m hardly the only one to accuse this book of being racist. The Wikipedia page is full of accusations, ranging from the aforementioned data from racist studies used unapologetically, to its advocates receiving funding from organizations associated with white-supremacy.
EDIT: I also want to address why it is totally fair to advocate Mismeasure of Man as a counterargument to The Bell Curve. There is a level of scientific rigor which The Bell Curve fails and Mismeasure doesn’t. For example the studies used in The Bell Curve were—to put it bluntly—bad. The Bell Curve failed to go through peer-review, it misused concepts, relied on unbacked assumptions, reached a conclusion unrelated to the premise, etc. You might find that some of these criticism applies to Mismesure, but hardly all, and not nearly on the same level. As an objective—albeit arbitrary—measure, just look at the ratio of the Wikipedia articles for each book which is devoted to criticism and controversies. Almost the entire article about The Bell Curve goes into some controversies. If both books were criticized and surrounded in controversies, one was definitely worse then the other.
- You may wish to read Gould's Mismeasure of Man, and about thw fallacy of reification.
And brain plasticity, and the characteristics of high performing groups or institutions.
Changing the way your group works together is going to have a more profound difference on the outcomes than focusing on individual performance.
- This is a clever, but terrible idea.
I have had over 100 different direct reports over my entire career, and in all cases, I think having this number would have been a counterproductive distraction.
In a sense, this is how gig economy workers are managed now. They don't have a human manager, they interact with an app that evaluates them based solely on objective metrics. It's a kind of sociopathic management style. To the company, these workers are only people in the abstract sense. Practically, they are machines from which a specific output is expected ad measured.
OK, let's apply this to other kinds of work. Once management (or people in general) have a single number that ranks quality, it will be used. It will be relied upon. It will be gamed. Even if they start out as honest signals, they will be corrupted.
We humans are messy.
We have a long and complex history of trying to rank each other in "simple, objective" ways and it almost always ends badly.
The seminal work on this subject is Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. I can't recommend it highly enough. It's one of the handful of books that really changed how I look at the world.
Months after I finished it, new "Hey, wait a minute!" thoughts kept bubbling up at random times.
- > Wilson’s far left colleagues Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould was a great man, a great scientist, a great writer, and my personal hero. He wasn't from the "far left"; he was intellectually honest and consistent. He spent an inordinate amount of time fighting the teaching of Creationism in US schools.
He also wrote The Mismeasure of Man which rubbed proponents of IQ measurement the wrong way (the Wikipedia article covers the debate quite well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man) and which I think was and still is an important critique of biological determinism.
I don't know much about E. O. Wilson or his life or politics (I will try to learn more), but if you're prepared to dismiss Gould in a side note like this, it probably means you're on a mission and not very honest yourself.
