I love Christmas. I really do. Lights in snowy darkness, and music and parties and a tree (a tree!) inside your house, just dripping with baubles. Oh, and presents. I love giving presents. Receiving them is nice too, but there's a very ingratiating part of my personality that makes me warm and fuzzy when someone reacts happily to something I've given them.
As secular as Christmas has become (thank goodness), it becomes impossible to escape the presence of tradition around this time of year. We take comfort in ritual as we try to assess what's going on, and how another year could have possibly passed so quickly.
At the dark end of the year, we try to sum up what's past into a coherent package and charge it with meaning. Maybe you'll use it to inform how we live the next year. Or maybe this is the sort of package you can't wait to get rid of.
More packages (and modules!) after the jump.
I tend to start thinking about what I believe, and have believed, and how much merit those beliefs have. Which ones are irrational? Which ones are useful? It interests me that those two categories sometimes overlap. For instance, I believe that I hold few irrational beliefs (a meta-belief). It's a point of pride, and I try and try and try to make it true, but I know that it isn't, not entirely. It may be more true of me than of most people, but there are still exceptions, so it's still a false categorization. I have my dogma, my doctrine, my rituals and superstitions, just like anybody else. I have restrictions, places my mind won't go because I've fenced them off for one reason or another. But flattering myself into thinking that I am an open-minded, reasonable creature helps me get through the day.
That I-don't-believe module is inseparably interconnected with the ones containing my dogmas about religion and intelligence. My own distaste for organized (and unorganized) faith and my high regard for my own intelligence interact in a not entirely attractive way. It seems to happen that way for a lot of people. We all have our own dogmas about intelligence, most of them wrong-headed and self-serving, but there are people who have devoted their lives/careers to sorting these things out.
A few days ago, Quiche Moraine posted a hot steaming pile of links on intelligence - what it is, how we measure it, and what those measurements actually mean.
This one is an overview of intelligence testing and theories about the structure of intelligence. The most prominent one of recent years is Gardner's "multiple intelligences" theory. He identifies eight different kinds of intelligence. These intelligences are not necessarily correlated with each other and it would be extremely rare to find a person high in more than a few of them.
- Linguistic intelligence (“word smart”)
- Logical-mathematical intelligence (“number/reasoning smart”)
- Spatial intelligence (“picture smart”)
- Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (“body smart”)
- Musical intelligence (“music smart”)
- Interpersonal intelligence (“people smart”)
- Intrapersonal intelligence (“self smart”)
- Naturalist intelligence (“nature smart”)
This one is the report of a task force established by the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association in 1995. It's a long, detailed report, but they start out by acknowledging the incoherence of our definitions of intelligence.
Individuals differ from one another in their ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought. Although these individual differences can be substantial, they are never entirely consistent: a given person's intellectual performance will vary on different occasions, in different domains, as judged by different criteria. Concepts of "intelligence" are attempts to clarify and organize this complex set of phenomena.
The report addresses psychometric methods of testing intelligence, genetic heritability, environmental factors, social factors, and gender differences, and concludes with more questions:
- Differences in genetic endowment contribute substantially to individual differences in (psychometric) intelligence, but the pathway by which genes produce their effects is still unknown. The impact of genetic differences appears to increase with age, but we do not know why.
- Environmental factors also contribute substantially to the development of intelligence, but we do not clearly understand what those factors are or how they work. Attendance at school is certainly important, for example, but we do not know what aspects of schooling are critical.
- The role of nutrition in intelligence remains obscure. Severe childhood malnutrition has clear negative effects, but the hypothesis that particular "micro-nutrients" may affect intelligence in otherwise adequately-fed populations has not yet been convincingly demonstrated.
- There are significant correlations between measures of information processing speed and psychometric intelligence, but the overall pattern of these findings yields no easy theoretical interpretation.
- Mean scores on intelligence tests are rising steadily. They have gone up a full standard deviation in the last fifty years or so, and the rate of gain may be increasing. No one is sure why these gains are happening or what they mean.
- The differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites (about one standard deviation, although it may be diminishing) does not result from any obvious biases in test construction and administration, nor does it simply reflect differences in socio-economic status. Explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far have little direct empirical support. There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential.
- It is widely agreed that standardized tests do not sample all forms of intelligence. Obvious examples include creativity, wisdom, practical sense and social sensitivity; there are surely others. Despite the importance of these abilities we know very little about them: how they develop, what factors influence that development, how they are related to more traditional measures.
And this is the wiki page for Stephen Jay Gould's book, The Mismeasure of Man, which takes a critical look at the human tendency towards biological determinism: the idea that society reflects biology. In the introduction to the book, Gould references Socrates' conversation with Glaucon about the citizenry of Athens. Reluctantly, Socrates tells Glaucon of his plan to construct an enduring social order, based on a necessary lie.
Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled fold, wherefore also they have the greatest honor; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children...
Glaucon responds with some shame, saying that there was no way to make the current generation believe this myth, but that their children, if taught while young and malleable, would learn and internalize it. "Metals", Gould says, "have ceded to genes". I'll have to actually read this book at some point.
Enough for now. Now it's time for lying around in front of a fire and drinking until I can't knit anymore.
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