The Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles about IQ and How to Beat It with Hard Work.

Abstract: David Brooks has shown us the way to success by ignoring IQ scores and concentrating on hard work.  He follows the standard egalitarian argument that equality must be attained at any cost and this is going to be successful using contemporary paralogisms. He follows some novel theorists who seem to show that there are alternate paths to greatness achievable by only hard work and occasional mystical intervention of tutors or mentors.  We are given ‘research’ that shows that they can sort out the successful beings in history by merely assigning IQ levels or other cognitive skills in the absence of any data. Brooks treats us to a dainty little scenario whereby hard work and perseverance wins out for an average girl! This scheme strictly parallels the faulty logic of EcoNazism, Fabianism and other leftist follies. The political thrust here is an unswerving neuronal cramdown upon the above-average folk by the elitists who would structure our society according to egalitarianist ideals. Let the disnimble lead the race.  Hopefully California will institute these mandates and give us a peek into the future. They already appear to have their least adept political types in office and power now and working the tax levers with zeal. We can learn a lot from their failure if it is accurately reported as their society is melting down in puddles of ignorance, debt and drug addiction. Maybe this will be reversed by ‘hard work’ and the advice of a few mentors. Brook’s essay today is a “pastiche of other people’s work.”

As we stroll through the wasteland of political propaganda pieces from the NYT—aka the Walter Duranty Papers[1]--a turn-of-the-crank Marxian fog horn that gets noisier when we are cruising at full power against the rocks, we frequently are alerted to new ways to achieve success.  Our Chief Babbler David Brooks,[2][3][4][5] [6] now refutes the conventional wisdom about IQ and unveils the way to ‘success’ for the cognitively disnimble. Hard work or The Turtle and the Hare Revisited are offered as substitute titles for this hokum.  As the main focus of the soon-to-be-bankrupt NYT is misinformation[7] we expect this current contribution by David Brooks to be foaming over with such. It is. The point of the essay here is social leveling—the conviction that we all can achieve if we just work hard—thus demonstrating for all time that equality is at hand.  

 “Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness — Dante, Mozart, Einstein — whose talents far exceeded normal comprehension, who had an other-worldly access to transcendent truth, and who are best approached with reverential awe.”[8]-- Genius: The Modern View by David Brooks Op-Ed Columnist Published: April 30, 200 [Emphasis is mine in all quotes.][All quotes are from this link in this essay today unless otherwise indicated.]

 “We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocus-pocus.[9] In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.”-- David Brooks

We now must submit our first piece of counter information at the offset with the IQ of the famous composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Composer estimated at 165 IQ.[10] This is much higher than John Kerry’s meager score of 122. Again, these leftists do not know what WAM.’s IQ was. This idea is interesting, but how do you isolate those with high IQs from the lesser beings when both may have been stubborn and studious in their endeavors and also had excellent teachers? This is an important piece of the puzzle here and presents hazards and potholes for the traveler in this vein.

“It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. “

How does Brooks know this? He seems to prove the zero. Who took Mozart’s IQ or determined what level his ‘spiritual gifts’ were set upon?  He warps the definition of spiritual here for what reason? This is like judging a race car’s performance in a major race by looking at a worn tire used in practice runs. Actually we do know some things about Mozart when he wrote Minuet in F (K.2—actually K.1) and Minuet and Trio in G (K.1—actually K.2) at the age of between 5 and 6. We also know his father Leopold[11] was a fine teacher and that Mozart practiced long and hard.[12] We find references in the literature that suggest his IQ was 165.[13] If Mozart had a high IQ then our Babbler’s conclusion fails [cadit quastio] because he did not select a person with an average IQ or ‘spiritual’ gifts to wax philosophically upon. He ‘predicted’ a winner who must have gotten his gains by hard efforts because Mozart was a winner in the beginning! How do we know that Mozart’s cognitive skills were very high or not? It is easy to select a historical celebrity and then blandly assert that his success or failure was predicated and ultimately based upon a single metric and then to assure us that his score for this metric was low. This gives new meaning to the notion of circular logic.  We can give David Brooks credit for this advance in our intellectual inventory if nothing else. He seems to suggest that those who had high SAT scores and high IQ levels—those who run our engines of commerce and such—derived no benefit from their innate intellect. The Bell Curve debunks this phony theory with numerous—nay millions—of examples.[14]

Brooks cites Geoff Colvin’s book “Talent Is Overrated[15]” as a form of proof or at least some justifiable reference to support his very weak assertion.[16] But, Brooks now chucks in some comments about chess players as not having high IQs. It turns out that the famous Russian Chess grandmaster and World Champion Garry Kasparov has an IQ of 190. Again, we must search the world for world class chess players who had known and provable first normal or low IQs but who became rated as grand masters [2400 score or above] and perhaps attained the world title of World Chess Champion by hard work. Maybe Bobby Fischer was stupid. Notice that IQ measurements and SAT scores were scant before 1905[17] so this is conveniently left for us by ponder by Brooks who invokes the Law of Negative Evidence. Smorgasbord style, they pick the winners and losers by some hidden knowledge of their subject’s immeasurable abilities and then draw vast and all encompassing information from their own isolated conclusions in this little parlor game.

His research:

“Coyle and Colvin describe dozens of experiments fleshing out this process. This research takes some of the magic out of great achievement. But it underlines a fact that is often neglected. Public discussion is smitten by genetics and what we’re “hard-wired” to do. And it’s true that genes place a leash on our capacities. But the brain is also phenomenally plastic. We construct ourselves through behavior. As Coyle observes, it’s not who you are, it’s what you do.”—summation by Brooks.

In other words, we can make a silk sow out of a purse’s ear.

We can all ‘flesh out’ success stories.[18] Let us peruse some anecdotes and submit them as proof:  In my high school many of the IQ scores of many leaked out from some teachers and during administrative meetings where student placements in certain classes were important. My high school had a population of about 400 in the fall from the freshman people, but the graduating class was only about 80. Most of the students and teachers knew who had the high IQ skills. My click in HS consisted of 10 persons of which 5 were Japanese who were born in relocation camps. The other five consisted of one Chicano, the class and student body president and four whites who were long-term natives of the San Joaquin Valley. The high school was divided into narrowly defined cardinal social ordinates consisting of ‘wetb**ks[19],’ Okies[20], hoodlums and creeps.[21] So, you must be a member of two groups at once.  The wetb**ks were mostly Hispanics or, in their preferred ethnic terms Chicano. This meant that the Japanese, Chinese and Armenians were Okies by default, but some chose to be wetb**ks.  Driven by IQ scores and innate intelligence the creeps took home the top grades, scholarships and went on to college while most of the Chicanos dropped out of school to work. Most of the hoodlums tried to become California state cops [and several succeeded] or other government employees or went to jail for certain crimes such as marijuana peddling.  I was an Okie creep, of course.

So, we knew who had the cognitive skills and were witnesses to the long-term development of our peer’s academic achievements often stretching over a decade or more for many of us. From our click of 10 we arrived at an impressive list of accomplishments: one medical doctor, one electrical engineer, one entrepreneur, one chemist-inventor [me], one dentist, one PhD in mathematics, one jail bird, one missionary, one friend of the 10, a Hispanic who became a university professor at [I think] University of California at San Diego, one big business administrator in the hospital trade and others.  One Japanese friend died early of heart disease after setting up his own business in dental appliances. But, of course, these were the intellectual elites of our high school. I don’t know what happened to the 1200 who never graduated.  Perhaps a hundred or so teach at Harvard.

Predicting events in the movie American Graffiti, most of us went to the local JC[22] where the academic progression continued. The valedictorian at our high school, an Okie girl with a soaring intellect, went on to take top honors at the College of the Sequoias. I took the Student Body Award for grade points by taking 26. 5 credit hours in one semester. Two of us went to UCLA and continued on in engineering. I wound up at S.U.N.Y. after being drafted[23] and did research at Yale for a few years and then was invited to join E. I.  DuPont so my career culminated with 25 research papers[24][25] and 6 patents,[26] a dozen successful products and several bonuses for corporate achievements.  I was later a member of an engineering fraternity at UCLA but the entrance exams were so difficult that only the very brightest were present. Thus, my group was elitist in academic skills. However, I did see a mixture of levels of hard work in my peers as estimated by the number of hours spent in study. My roommate studied more than 13 hours per day and was the president of the fraternity. Some brothers across the hall were into pranks and such and I have seen them ‘prepare’ for a nasty exam on dynamics for a full 20 minutes by musing over the little bumps and grinds in the homework, which they both ignored. They were both 4.0 students and went on to grad schools and never spent more than 20 min in any study period in my presence. They were always working on such follies as metal kite design theory, politics, the construction of bizarre missiles to be launched in the Mojave Desert, electronically defeating the ATT billing machines at General Telephone or the painting of blue and gold stripes on laboratory rats for the Stanford Library excitement just before the Stanford v. UCLA game at the Coliseum. Many of us put out little effort in lessons and preparation for exams—some buried themselves in their studies and went with little sleep and all were brilliant. They all were phenomenal successes in life.

Now, let us contrast this with the new ‘hard work’ theme touted by Brooks above. None of the people with known lower IQs in our HS or College were ‘successful’ in the academic sphere or any where lese from their hard work if they had low cognitive skills. Brooks must define success in other than academic terms.

Here is the Babblers road map to success:

[1]… you’d take a girl who possessed a slightly above average verbal ability. [?? Above what?]

[2]… you would want her to meet, say, a novelist,

[3]… she would read novels and literary biographies without end. 

[4]… This would give her a [sic] core knowledge of her field.

[5]… Then she would practice writing. Her practice would be slow, painstaking and error-focused…

[6]… Coyle describes a tennis academy in Russia where they enact rallies without a ball.

[7]… By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance.

[8]… Then our young writer would find a mentor who would provide a constant stream of feedback, viewing her performance from the outside, correcting the smallest errors, pushing her to take on tougher challenges.

This is so silly that I must probe the galaxy for a place to begin my condemnation of this sophistry. Here, we see some contorted, rose pedal-strewn path that parallels the traditional academic regimens but studiously avoids mention of cognitive skills or any innate ability. Only hard work will generate a Pulitzer Prize winning essayist or whatever. What Coyle describes here is the kind of atmosphere that Alexander must have experienced in the presence of Aristotle. We can also interject Bernard Shaw[27] and H. L. Mencken,[28] Joseph Conrad[29] into this discussion to contrast this puerile scenario with reality. These were all really great writers. We can agree that none of these three soared to the pinnacle of academic greatness, but we cannot assign their IQ levels either. In Mencken’s case, we might assume that he was very intelligent and only needed the rudimentary foundations of journalism to launch his superb literary career as he had little other training. Shaw was highly educated, but could not get his works published for years. He fashioned his own image writing for the London Saturday Review as a drama and literary critic where he frequently sent in letters to himself to complain about matters about his reviews and replied to these comments in his own columns with a caustic vehemence.[30]  He stirred up his own tempest much to his own benefit. Conrad’s most essential asset in his writing was his emotionalism that went frequently out of control as he attempted suicide at least once. I don’t think we could demonstrate that any of these had below average cognitive skills, but they all did work hard. Barbara Tuchman is another example of success without academic credentials.[31] Was she a dolt with a mentor? Did any or all of these four have a divine spark? I think so. Did they all have high IQs? I think so.

Here are some verified SAT scores translated into IQ equivalents:

Ref: http://www.kids-iq-tests.com/famous-people.html

It is amusing that John Kerry[32] scores lower than that blockhead Bush.[33] Clinton scrapes the bottom at 110 just ahead of Al Franken. Rush is right up there with the best just under 150.

Something that corresponds with  or tracks the new  EcoNazi theme[34] seems to be apparent [and predominate] here and is translated as this: We need to ‘change’ the system whereby some other pathway to ‘success’ is  mandated, but we cannot show examples of success from people with proven low cognitive skills so we have to use abstract examples. We must avoid choosing candidates who do have high IQs thus avoiding destruction and violence to our hypothesis. The obvious choice to demonstrate this with IQ levels lower than 90 must be avoided.[35] This pathway of ‘thinking’ penetrates into the nostrum of Global Warming where the best guesses and hottest computer models predicted an increase in the temperature of the earth and, embarrassingly, the opposite is now happening.[36] Hence, we shift the nostrum label to “Climate Change.” There is no outcome necessary—only a pathway that gives the soothsayers of this fantasy some power and lot money from speaking and investments. The whole “Genius” thing proffered here is probably just a cheap ruse. But, it might make political sense as the low class swells the voter rolls. Thus the mediocre might be offered the illusion that they can compete with their superiors. Some people need to get some ‘skin in the game’ and share the wealth.

Perhaps the best outcome here would be to watch some state reverse the IQ scale and only admit people to medical school or the university system or law schools or government with IQs less than 85. This type of social experiment was similarly structured, magnificently, by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia where they tried to liquidate all those citizens who could read or had soft hands.  We don’t need airline pilots that can read if they worked hard to get into flight school. This can be a howling success. California now drifts toward such a system although, for the moment, they are not greasing the guillotines. [37] That might come.  The dumbing down of the educational system by the L. A. Unified School District and others will show us the wisdom of ignoring academics and innate cognitive skills probably to our amusement. If California crashes into financial oblivion we just might get a tax break in the other 49. We can all do better with less competition.

Again, we have put to sleep yet another sick puppy from the New York Times. We will continue to do so until they go bankrupt, which may be soon.

rycK

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