Category Archives: IQ

Maladaptive Perfectionism

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Most of my readers should also read this excellent, long article on–basically–IQ, conscientiousness, anxiety, standardized testing, and medical school. Maybe the title should be enough to persuade you: “The Stanford Marshmallow Prison Experiment.” But if not, read this:

There’s a type of joke that I think of as the “white people” joke, although it’s rarely funny and it doesn’t have to be about someone who’s white. The joke is about a mid-40’s housewife who is way too well-educated and bored to be a housewife, and so she tries to find the Grail of healthy food (organic, GMO-free, low acidity, one diet after another) and she plants a garden, and she adopts pets, and she joins nonprofits, and she joins the school board, and she reads every novel on NPR’s end of the year list, and she gets weekly therapy and monthly massages (to about the same effect), and she meditates on the present, and she achieves peace with the past, and she contemplates the future, and everything is feng shui, and yet, despite all this, she feels restless, anxious, unhappy, and she dreams of some sort of vacation.

Or sometimes the joke is about an elderly businessman on his second hair transplant and third cardiac stent and twenty-billionth dollar, and his kids all have grandkids and his wife is deceased, and when he goes out he he orders scotch more expensive than houses, but that isn’t too often—he’s seen enough parties, he’s seen enough people, he has no strong affections, and he works round the clock fighting tooth-and-nail for his billions, because he’s not sure what else, exactly, he’s supposed to be doing.

And the joke, which you hear on forums or sitcoms or in crowded sports bars, goes: “Haha, even though these people are successful, they’re still dissatisfied.”

And I’m here to tell you that this joke is totally backwards. It’s because these people have always been dissatisfied that they achieved success.

If you like that, you’ll probably also enjoy The Last Psychiatrist. Whenever I read Zizek (or indeed many of the French inheritors of Althusser) I think that he’s taken us off the path of melding psychoanalytic insights with marxian political economy. These posts strike me as routing around the damage he’s done. This is the direction I wish philosophy was headed, making sense of the problems at the intersection of our lives, our political economy, and our self-deception.

On Minority Genius in Philosophy

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Is this what genius looks like?

There’s a lot of reasons to worry about “genius” and other evaluations of general intelligence. My own character skepticism militates against the notion of measurable general intelligence, or even field-specific genius. But the report last month that women and racial minorities in the humanities are less likely to be described as geniuses is another such reason: it looks like genius is often merely a way of saying “white male.” Thus perhaps we should give up on genius and cultivate other virtues, especially if we want to create diverse faculty communities.

And yet.

My experience in philosophy has usually been the opposite: women and African-American philosophers have usually struck me as brighter, more insightful, and making a greater contribution to the discipline than their male and white colleagues (including of course myself.) I wrote my dissertation on a woman, Hannah Arendt. I’m frequently struck by the amazing work done by women and Black philosophers like Elizabeth Anderson, Angela Davis, Christine Korsgaard, Elizabeth Anscombe, Kristie Dotson, Karen Stohr, Chris Lebron, Shannon Sullivan, Sharon Meagher, Charles Mills, Noëlle McAfee, Anthony Appiah, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Tommie Shelby, Rebecca Kukla, Elinor Ostrom, and Jacqueline Scott.

And so I wonder if the error is the language and preference for genius or our poor ability to recognize it. That is: is the problem that philosophers and folks in the humanities think that genius exists, and it doesn’t? Or is the problem that philosophers and folks in the humanities think that they can detect genius, and they can’t?

There’s a plausible explanation of the feeling I have of being awed by women and Black philosophers, of course: in a field that values genius but has a bias against believing in the genius of women and Black philosophers, the only women and Black philosophers who survive the gauntlet of graduate school and job market will be those who can project that genius. They’ll be exceptions that prove the rule, tokens that demonstrate that the whole business of evaluating genius can’t be flawed because, after all, we recognized the greatness of these few scholars.

Moreover, the failure of all the mediocre and merely above-average women and Black philosophers will go unmentioned. We’ll rarely ask: why is it that almost every minority scholar is a genius? Why are all the merely-really-good and maybe-slightly-below-average scholars white and male? One possibility is that genius (of the particular sort preferred by humanities scholars) is unevenly distributed to non-white and non-male scholars: they bring a perspective that comes naturally to them (by virtue of their exclusion from the majority) that makes it especially easy to make outsized contributons. Another possibility is that average scholars are ignored when they are women or Black. What’s more, both of these explanations could hold for part of the injustice we observe: we might need to start talking about the comparative effect size of each of these explanations and not an exclusive disjunction between them.

There’s been a lot of work, lately, chipping away at the sense that the university is meritocratic. Far fewer are working on whether merit is even a meaningful characteristic to evaluate. That still seems like an important question to ask, an insightful and bright question. But I’d also like to see more people take genius as a possibility, to be “genius realists” and question whether the current crop of white, male elites just don’t have it or the ability to recognize it. I am suspicious of the effort to withdraw the merit that accrues to great philosophical scholarship just as women and Black philosophers are eligible to claim it in larger numbers. (The solution to unjust distributions of the pie is not always to throw out the pie.)

Perhaps we shouldn’t give up on genius just yet: perhaps we just need to accept that we’re not smart enough to recognize it when we see it. And perhaps, too, we can give up on the innateness of genius in favor of an account of intelligence as plasticity, as the result of environment and treatment: perhaps philosophical geniuses are not born, but trained and prepared.

Let’s Put Some Money on Introduction to Philosophy

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Here’s a bet I’d like to make: a good introduction to philosophy course will do more to increase students’ critical thinking abilities than a good course in logic or critical thinking.

Here’s what I think I’d need to get this bet off the ground:

First, we’d need a stable student body and a randomly selected assortment of students. I offer my own university and our required course in Logic as a possible set of human subjects for our researches.

Second, we’d need a stable measure of critical thinking. The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking test used by employers is probably a stealth IQ test, while the Collegiate Learning Assessment is valid when applied to individual performance, only at the institutional level. Something like the British A-levels in critical thinking might be appropriate. For now, I think the CLA is good enough: we’re testing an institutional approach, after all! So: the second step is to institute pre- and post-testing on the Collegiate Learning Assessment.

Third, we’d need to split students randomly into a control group, getting the best critical thinking and logic instruction available, and a test group, getting good philosophy instruction with a few papers. I usually run my intro classes with three papers: an analysis paper where they’re tasked with reconstructing an argument, an opposition paper where students take up a position they oppose and defend it against objections, and a synthesis paper where they try to offer a novel argument based on the semester’s readings. (It’s about fifteen pages total.)

So, here’s my bet: the students in the test group of sections of Introduction to Philosophy would beat the students in the control group in the Logic sections on the CLA score-improvements at the end of the term.

Who’s in?