1) This is a thread about intelligence, specifically some things that ought to be included in our assessments and discussions of intelligence. This is also a partial critique of IQ.
2) Proponents of IQ’s superior explanatory value too often dubiously fit IQ to a particular kind of political program, with serious gaps in evidence. That program is roughly described as ‘greed is good.’ What I mean is...
3) ...we can tout IQs explanatory value by noting its correlation with, e.g., earnings. The assumption is that we all train whatever brain power we have at our disposal on the pursuit of maximal salary and wealth. But of course people train their brainpower on other priorities...
4)Which is to say the ‘greed is good’ political assumptions that both underwrite and follow from correlations between IQ and earnings are sometimes instances of the tail wagging the dog. That’s enough to consider what else we train our brainpower on.
5) Altruism can be both rational and self-serving. Walking in a crowded area while preserving space for others, for example, requires cognitive work. Moral reasoning that arrives at the conclusion that life is about more than taking everything I can is cognitive work.
6) Yet proponents of IQ—seemingly revitalized when they can dubiously link it to race and ways that justify prejudice—use IQ as ex post facto rationalizations of forms of selfishness and greed that reflect a *lack* of sound reasoning and a deficit of brainpower.
7) Trump, for example, is kind of the ultimate signal of the explanatory failure of IQ where IQ is tenuously linked to a politics of greed and exploitation, intelligence as pursuing greed more successfully than others assumed to be greedy too but not as good at it.
8) Trump’s own people claim he’s basically incapable of analysis, reading, learning, conceptualizing the counterargument or the divergent experience. And what does Trump do? He brags about his high IQ, and people believe it. ‘You can’t get that rich if you’re not smart,’ etc.
9) Consider the obvious counterfactual: how rich would smarter people get if they trained their brainpower on ruthless exploitation of others rather than, say, teaching physics or curating exhibits at the Smithsonian? If they didn’t inherit millions? Etc., etc.
10) There’s a place for instrumentalization. But it has its limits. If you’re prepared to reject empirical evidence of the countless and devastating cognitive shortcomings of ‘high-IQ’ champions of greed, you’ve lost the thread of analysis. /end
