See what happens where in the brain when certain tasks related to cognition are performed by subjects. See if there’s a satisfactory consistency of these results among a significant amount of subjects.
Those aren’t abstract concepts, those are clearly defined concepts.
What I mean is that one may report that their findings prove that a loved child does better in school than an unloved one. But that would be too vague to be meaningful. Does that mean mere mental affection towards the child with no physical contact? Does it mean protection? Does that dedication to protection have to be recognized by the child? Does it mean verbal affirmation?
So if there is, on average, more activity in a certain part of the brain while the subject is working on a particular cognitive task, it would support the hypothesis that intelligence can be measured?
Clearly defined in science.
Anyway, I take it you disagree with the following two statements:
Menem yellum, calm down. Efen if a particular idea might have a racist basis, there is a lot of racism that is not a deliberate effort to oppress people, but simply the results of different people allowing preconceived ideas to interfere with their logic.
Barring direct evidence that Lynn and Vanhanen are racist, it would be better to not assume that they are motivated by racism, but siomply that they have been misled by other factors. Similarly, there is no reason to presume that any poster, here, who has accepted or defended the work of Lynn and Vanhanen is motivated by racism. Thus, repeated accusations of racism do nothing but pour emotion into a thread that could be handled without encouraging a lot of personal animosity.
I am not suggesting that you do not find IQ and the Wealth of Nations troubling or even insulting. I am pointing out that bringing your feelings into this thread will do nothing to persuade anyone to your perspective.
Beisdes, it is much more effective to demonstrate the Lynn and Vanhanen simply made a lot of rather dumb mistakes than to sidetrack the issue with cries of racism.
For example, I suspect that we might, indeed, be able to correlate IQ (not intelligence) and wealth of nations. Unfortunately, Lynn and Vanhanen simpy reversed their cause and effect: wealthier nations are more capable of putting in place the societal infrastructure to produce higher IQ test results than are poorer nations. IQ does not predict wealth; wealth predicts IQ.
No. Not only is an actual, comprehensive definition of intelligence put forth (the first I’ve seen in these discussions. Usually it’s, “you know it when you see it”, which is completely unacceptable), also unattached are assumptions about it being inherit or even fixed. It’s still not something concrete enough to be considered “hard science”, but it works in a social, real-world sense.
I am (painfully) aware that correlations of IQ and/or intelligence, and success of a population or nation in any given arena is likely to be met with the sort of reaction you have expressed here.
This is the Straight Dope board; I’m uninterested in whether or not an idea is “racist” or not. I am interested only in whether it is correct or incorrect. Should you have evidence something is incorrect, I will certainly read it if you decide to post it. Contrary to some of the insinuations of Pizzabrat, I do not consider the intelligence of an individual or a group to be an accomplishment of any kind, any more than height. No one chooses their genes or place of birth and few have much control over what environment nurtured them.
Nah, doesn’t really work that way - especially if in the end, intelligence is nothing more than an abstract concept that can’t seriously be quantified. I’m not a scientist, and I’m not stating that intelligence can’t be measured. That I can’t put forth a specific model of measuring it in a hard scientific sense in the way one can measure, say, calories doesn’t mean I can’t question whether it ever could. You couldn’t tell me how to quantify objectively a single aspect of your definition of intelligence either, unlike force and energy.
Why should I calm down? Give me one good reason why I should even entertain such stupid ideas? Why should I be civil to such ignorant fools who talk endlessly about a country or people they know nothing about or have never encountered? Why should I defend my own mental awareness, acuteness, or simple basic normalcy?
If someone (who have never even met a Jew) swears to you that they have horns growing out of their head, what can you do with such a stupid remark? You show him your head and then say that he is a stupid nut. But if he still continues his crap? and then shows you pity? What then?
I am telling everyone here: Ethiopians (or any other Africans) are not retarded or mentally defective!
Well, you should probably calm down to avoid having an aneurism by letting your blood pressure rise uncontrollably over what amounts to some disembodied persons passing around ideas that have no direct affect on your life (or theirs).
You are not required to entertain the ideas. You are, however, expected to behave in a civil fashion in this Forum.
You do need to be civil in this Forum for three reasons:
those are our rules;
you will utterly lose any neutral audience you might gain if you behave in a rude manner, thus failing to persuade anyone else of the correctness of your position;
insulting other people will never persuade them to change their views and you really do not have enough information to know whether your claims of racism are actually correct (when their comments might be due to any number of other sources, to say nothing of motives, that have nothing to do with racism), even if the effect appears racist.
As to defending your own sterling qualities, they have not been attacked. Even the flawed claims that various countries demonstrate substandard IQs is directed toward some sort of median or mean IQ scores, not to individuals who are quite capable of being in the top percentiles regardless where any arbitrary group into which they are boxed may test out.
If you will note, I do not agree with Lynn and Vahanen or, by extension, with the ideas of posters who rely of Lynn and Vahanen for their arguments. So please do not confuse my directing you to be civil with a defense of that position. However, it is my obligation to make sure that this Forum does not become (more of) a preschool nursery (than it already is).
Therefore: [ Moderator Mode ]
You are now being formally informed that name-calling is not permitted in this Forum, Continued references to other posters as “fools” or other derogatory comments will jeopardize you ability to post, here.
I don’t know why people always turn to intelligence in discussions like these. You can easily explain the advancement of certain nations with regard to others by looking at history and economics.
Patents & Subsidies: Technological research requires money. You can either have the government provide money or you can implement a patent system, which allows private researchers to recapture the cost of their research in the market. Most of the advanced nations in the world have long taken both approaches to enabling research. Both Japan and Korea have had patent regimes and subsidies since after World War II. Southeast Asia, because it is communist, doesn’t really have what we think of as a patent system, so research is directed and paid for by the government. And a government which rules over a primarily agricultural economy is not going to be interested in building supercolliders.
Japan and S. Korea also subsidize research directly, particularly through their universities, which also has enabled them to come up with innovations.
Most countries now have patent systems because of the WTO, but this is really a recent development. Perhaps in the next hundred years, we’ll start to see technological innovation come from a wide variety of countries.
2) Economic Mismanagement: The communist countries of Southeast Asia have had very different economic systems than either Japan or S. Korea (obviously). While Communism potentially has the ability to industrialize a nation fairly quickly, it doesn’t create the sort of widespread prosperity which creates excess money available for non-critical research. Particularly for smaller communist countries, this means that technological innovation will be scant. The USSR had a massive economy, which gave it the funds needed to do scientific research. Vietnam, with a much smaller economy, would not be able to pull of the same feat.
Japan and S. Korea have operated with a crony-capitalist cartel system since WWII. This has allowed quick growth across a wide range of industries. Combined with access to the export market in the US (something which most communist countries were deprived of), this has created an economic environment in which research is favored.
History: Most of these countries have suffered severe setbacks historically. There is the legacy of colonialism. In Africa, China, and SE Asia, there were devastating wars (which Africa still has an ongoing problem with today). China severely contracted its economy during the Cultural Revolution. Now, of course, Europe was ravaged by war 60 years ago, but combined with my explanations above and the one I’ll give below, I think it’s pretty clear why Europe, Japan, and S. Korea ended up differently than the other countries.
Western Aid: The US infused massive amounts of money into both the Japanese and S. Korean economies in the form of military spending. I’ve heard the Korean war referred to as “Japan’s Marshall Plan.” There simply has never been anything approaching this level of aid for a number of countries in the world, and I think the way in which foreign aid has been dispensed has certainly played a role in post-WWII development.
I haven’t discussed a number of SE Asian countries in my post, but I can do the same type of analysis for any of these countries.
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I’ve also noticed that many of the countries with these fancy gee-whiz mobile phone networks are geographically smaller than places like the United States. It’s a lot easier to set up mobile coverage to provide service for all the populated parts of Norway than it is to do the same for all of the populated parts of Texas just because Texas is a lot more spread out, with little strings and clusters of populated areas all over the damn place.
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china, which is about 10% larger than the US, now has over 500 million mobile phone subscribers.
True story, about 18 months ago I was travelling in Tibet. A place that previously had no road, but if you wanted to go there 20 years ago, then it was a 3 day bus ride from the nearest airport, and then a pretty good hoof. Anyhoo, when I was driving there, I called a buddy of mine from the US with whom I had travelled in at area 20 years ago. His cell connection in the Bay Area kept dropping out, while mine had 3 bars and I was also posting on the Dope.
Population density in Tibet is as a guess lower than in Texas.
Well, I can’t really say. Malaysia, China, India, and Vietnam all look to have the potential of significant economic growth. All of these countries have undertaken signficant economic reforms, they have stable governments, and the likelihood of war is low.
But who knows? There’s a huge monkey wrench floating out there in the AIDS crisis. AIDS has already contributed to severe economic dislocation in a number of African countries, and it could do the same in Asia. Some people think China might dissolve into civil war–which would contract economic growth. I think the likelihood of this is remote, but it could happen. Maybe Cambodia’s peace accord will collapse into civil war again. There’s any number of things that could happen that would disrupt economic growth.
Here’s the thing. If we’re going to go with innate intelligence as the reason for wealth, then someone is going to have to explain to me how the Europeans suddenly got stupid during the Middle Ages, and how they managed to get smart again after the 1500s. Someone is going to have to explain how the Chinese and the Indians were the smartest people on the planet, only to suddenly get less smart around the 1800s. You simply can’t explain wealth from a historical perspective by using innate intelligence. If the Chinese are the wealthiest people on the planet in 50 years (and they very well could be), does that mean they suddenly got smarter than everyone else? Were the Spanish smarter than the rest of the Europeans during their colonial heydey, only to get dumber than them up until 20 years ago? This is silly.
I should also point out that there is no viable genetic theory, that I’ve heard, that would explain how sharp differences in intelligence could spring up between all these populations. There has been consistent genetic intermingling pretty much between all humans up until relatively short times in the past (in terms of genetics).
True, but if you can’t use your explanation to make predictions that might falsify or undermine your explanation, then it’s more of a “just so story” than an explanation.
I agree. As I said earlier, I think that (innate?) intelligence is just one piece of the puzzle.
As opposed to Norway, with little strings and clusters of populated areas all over the damn place and great honking big granite mountains in between them? :dubious:
Only about 5% of Norway is inhabited (very little of the rest is inhabitable). Population density is 12.0 persons per square kilometer, as opposed to Texas’ 34.7. For the record, our equally cell-phone-crazy neighbors in Sweden and Finland have population densities of 20.0 and 15.5 persons/sq.km., respectively.
Um, as pointed out previously, Korea and Japan are N Asia and not part of SE Asia.
If you look at Southeast Asia, it generally speaking comprises the following countries, which broadly have the following economies:
Singapore - Capitalist
Malaysia - Capitalist
Thailand - Capitalist
Myanmar - Communist
Brunei - Communist
Viet Nam - Communist
Indonesia - Capitalist
Laos - Communist
Kampuchea - Communist (I think)
Philipplines - Capitalist
By population, it’s definately in the capitalist camp. Even the commie die hards like Viet Nam have a pretty extensive % of their population driven by a capitalistic style economy.
The discussion around how much of intelligence is “innate,” and whether national intelligence correlates with wealth moves off the question of the OP. The short answer is that it is necessary but not sufficient; as I mentioned in an earlier post, those who hold that all populations are more or less equal in intelligence can take solace in the fact that this means the world will be flat for everyone; not just Western and Asian countries.
Leaving that alone for now, let me return to the OP’s question of technological innovation and implementation.
I hold that technological innovation does require intelligence and that a profusion of innovation which requires a depth of highly trained personnel to execute it is a marker–a reasonable proxy–suggesting that a population possesses a certain level of intelligence. You may need only a single genius to invent the airplance but you need a host of highly intelligent people to develop (and build) all of its subcomponents into the modern airframe.
If the application of these developed technologies requires intelligent users, a further marker is found if the technologies are widely implemented. Absent a broad market, a cool but complicated consumer good will not achieve wide adoption–i.e. it must either be simple enough to achieve wide adoption or the market must contain enough folks who possess enough intelligence to use whatever gadget is being marketed. I can use a calculator and a cell phone, for instance, but my use of many of the intricacies of my smartphone is limited because the learning curve is too steep for me to make it worthwhile at my capacity for absorbing new information. For a smarter person, a few minutes with the smartphone and they are good to go; they’ll be facile quickly enough to make it worth their while, and so that particular gadget is going find a market in such a population even though its use is complicated enough to require a population of more intelligent users.
This is a very crude marker. I am not suggesting we should rank national intelligence by invention and penetration of complicated gadgets into their marketplace. What I am suggesting is that intelligence is a necessary–not sufficient–condition to create the tehnological environment referenced in the OP. Summarizing it simply: East Asia is so advanced because the are smart(er). It’s the (er) that is such a hotbutton, I realize.
This suggestion is consistent with what national IQ data is available. Were the situation reversed, and nations which score in the lower IQ percentiles leaders in innovation and highly advanced in technology, I am confident that data would be used to refute my position.