No, not that Jason Collins, but the Jason Collins who blogs at Evolving Economics:
I agree with [Andrew] Sullivan that red flags should go up around intellectual freedom. ...
There’s a few things I’d change with Sullivan’s piece. I’d weaken the skepticism about whether racial categories can be made of the “DNA salad”, the basis of IQ and whether ‘g’ means anything. And I certainly would have not used the beagle/poodle analogy. ...
But there is one point in Sullivan’s piece that I found particularly interesting. Sullivan writes:
I believe IQ is an artificial construct created to predict how well a random person is likely to do in an advanced post-industrial society. And that’s all it is. It certainly shouldn’t be conflated with some Platonic idea of “intelligence.”
I don’t consider IQ to be a social construct. However, let’s suppose that Sullivan’s statement is true. The interesting thing is that under that definition, IQ remains a big deal. We’ve passed a point where more than half of the world’s population is living in post-industrial societies. Those numbers are increasing every day. And success in those societies affects poverty, inequality and the success of those societies themselves. This would be a construct worth measuring.
Further, even if IQ were just a construct of this nature, Richwine’s argument would probably not change. After all, Richwine’s argument (whatever its merits) is not about creating a highly intelligent race. It is about creating a successful post-industrial society. IQ as a social construct is still of use.
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So the question remains, if as he says, IQ is only useful to predict how someone will fare in modern society, why should we consider letting immigrate those who will more likely than not fare poorly in modern society?
The only proper place for intelligence tests is in the comments section of internet blogs. Political foes are given IQ tests and pronounced morons.
Let's keep things where they belong.
It's funny then that IQ test pre-date post-industrial society. It's also funny that you can take people with a high IQ and put them pretty much anywhere on the planet and they do OK. For something that's a social construct, it's a pretty useful one. Isn't society itself a social construct? IQ tests were not invented so that people could act snooty and brag that they belong to Mensa. They were developed so that the military could sort people in a useful way.
Richwine's analysis is about healthcare costs being unaffordable due to immigrants. The IQ controversy is a trap being used to distract from the healthcare issue. Given all discussion is now about IQ, a successful distraction. The IQ issue could not derail amnesty, healthcare costs could.
Jensen in "The g Factor" argued against calling it "intelligence" at all, instead arguing that it should be called "mental performance" or some such. "Intelligence" as a word has so many meanings and interpretations that it tends to confuse things.
That social construct thing sort of makes sense, but on closer inspection it falls apart. It is a half-truth - yes, IQ predicts reasonably well which individuals will do well in an advanced post industrial society. Obviously, in a hunter gatherer society, IQ is not going to be a great predictor - other factors like "EQ", strength and personality are going to dominate.
However, if IQ were indeed a social construct, there is no reason to see only high IQ individuals doing theoretical physics, philosophy and literary criticism.
Those fields which are traditionally considered the domain of those endowed with "Platonic ideals of intelligence" are also those in which high IQ individuals predominate. So yes, IQ does correlate to the Platonic idea of intelligence.
This, really, is the more interesting observation here. IQ predicts who does well in society because modern society is constructed around IQ, by people with high IQ, to benefit people like themselves and their progeny.
Sullivan has got the causality reversed.
If hunter gatherer tribes were the dictatorship of the strong, today's societies are the dictatorship of the smart.
"Obviously, in a hunter gatherer society, IQ is not going to be a great predictor - other factors like "EQ", strength and personality are going to dominate."
I doubt that's even true. We were hunter gatherers from the time we split off from the great apes, and before that time too. Over that time we got smarter until we figured out agriculture.
It's true that IQ can be seen and used as though it were a proxy for effective functioning in a modern society--and that that in itself justifies its existence as a mental construct (this by the way is an instance of philosophical Pragmatism as William James understood it). But IQ test results also behave like a category of mathematic equations that display characteristics that allow researchers to say "Aha!, these test results cluster in ways that allow me to treat them in the same way I treat other (less socially volatile) phenomenon which have been thoroughly studied." In other words, they display inward consistency and are coherent. From the lawful modeling of the distributions of scores etc., mathematicians can make accurate predictions about outcomes even if they had no clue about the content the data represented. This is the other leg the argument (for the reality of the Platonic Idea of "g") stands on and is the point liberal arts majors in Ethnic Studies simply cannot grasp.
It's a social construct based on biological truth. Social construct need not be a castle in the air made from thin air. For example, 'love' is a social construct in the way we define it, romanticize it, prescribe and proscribe it, idealize it, poeticize it, etc.
BUT love is rooted in real sexual feeling and in our basic attraction to beauty(which too is both psycho-perceptionally real and a social construct, as different cultures/individuals have different ideas about beauty).
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