HAT Forum: Can Intelligence be Quantified?

The Humanist Association of Toronto
http://www.humanisttoronto.ca/

Every Saturday we meet on Zoom to discuss a topic decided upon the previous week. These are topics of humanist interest, from a humanist perspective.

The topic of the discussion will be decided in a prior meeting, usually two weeks in advance. This week’s topic is: Can Intelligence Be Measured? By Paul D. Kaplan
“The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of the intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.” Alfred Binet, creator of the first IQ tests, 1905.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Mark Twain, 1907, attributed to Benjamin Disraeli.
"If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything." Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, French psychologist Alfred Binet devised a set of tests to be individually administered to children to determine which ones were in need of remedial education. These are considered to be the first IQ (intelligence quotient) tests.
Some psychologists in the United States developed tests like Binet’s, but did not heed his warning in the first quote above. Rather, they assumed that there is such a thing as general intelligence and that it can be quantified on a linear scale. Furthermore, without any evidence, they assumed that general intelligence is innate and completely hereditary.
During WWI, written tests were developed and administered to American soldiers. This led to a vast dataset from which all sorts of “facts” were established. Completely putting aside all of the anomalies in the data, some American psychologists verified “scientifically” their prejudices about race, ethnicity, and intelligence. Their “findings” were used to support elitism and eugenics, and to argue against democracy. These ideas led to restrictive immigration policies in the 1920s.
The inferences about intelligence, race, and ethnicity from the WWI army test results were not the last word on the subject. In 1994, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray published The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life which supposedly presents evidence for some of these ideas. However, the eminent evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, wrote a critique of this book, stating that the “authors omit facts, misuse statistical methods, and seem unwilling to admit the consequences of their own words.” (“Curveball,” The New Yorker, November 28, 1994. See also the 1996 edition of Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man for more details.)
The idea that general intelligence can be measured on a linear scale and that it is innate and hereditary continues to this day. Currently, some believers in this idea are sounding the alarm that people of low intelligence are procreating at a higher rate than intelligent people, leading to world overrun with unintelligent people. This not a new concern. It was raised in 1916!
Recommended video: “The Dark History of IQ Tests” by Stefan C. Dombrowski. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2bKaw2AJxs

Questions for Discussion

1. What is intelligence?
2. Is there such a thing as general intelligence that can be measured on a linear scale?
3. To what extent is intelligence innate and hereditary?
4. Is intelligence multifaceted, and therefore “not superposable” as Binet put it?
5. How should we regard IQ tests? What do they test?
6. How can we safeguard ourselves from allowing our preconceived ideas from entering into the interpretation of data and statistics?

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