Interviews by Chloe Lambert

The more I talk of intelligence, the stupider I feel

People like me, apparently, “feel that their ability to understand and deal with their own emotions is barely acceptable”. In fact I feel no such thing; actually after five years deep delving with a psychoanalyst I tend to feel the exact opposite, but this slapdown was the diagnosis following a 106-question internet test of my “emotional intelligence”, which included a series of questions hypothesising about the imagined feelings of various people in photographs. In other words, I thought the test was crude bullsh**, but whoever set it thought it was a fabulous diagnostic tool for a certain kind of intelligence.

There is a great deal to be lost or gained in possessing or not possessing “intelligence”, which may be why I was so annoyed. We can easily see that University Challenge, for example, tests a very specific set of skills (dubbed “crystallised” intelligence by one acadamic, as distinct from “fluid” intelligence) and allow that many bright folk might be rubbish at quizzes. But it is much less obvious what we mean when we use the word “intelligent”, other than as a broad idea to connote the kind of mental ability we are now describing. Yet measures of intelligence are constantly being invoked. When I was a teenager battle raged around the question of IQ tests and whether they indicated genetic (or, indeed, racial) predispositions towards cleverness or stupidity. Was it the case that the poor were stupid, or that the stupid were poor? Then this pessimistic determinism was replaced by the suggestion that we were all — except in the Far East — becoming dumber. But since then the work of James R. Flynn in the US has shown that, as measured by IQ tests, we have steadily become cleverer. Allowing for the effect of the constant recalibration of IQ tests (we don’t take the same ones we did 40 years ago) Flynn’s work suggested that, in America, the mean IQ had gone up by 9.7 points over the decades, and that most of the gain had been at the lower end of IQ scores. Such an outcome seriously undermines genetic explanations for IQ, suggesting that social, cultural and technological factors are just as, if not more, important. Are we made “cleverer” because the world we live in demands that we should be? Why be clever in, say, a rural farm setting, when there is no need for it?

Why worry about being clever at all, you may wonder, if, as some claim , computers will, one day, be as or even more “intelligent” than we are? They will surpass us by 2050, someone helpfully predicted a few weeks ago. Or do we intuit that such intelligence can’t possibly compete with the deeply socialised ability of a human being to respond, often unconsciously, to the equally unconscious promptings of other human beings?

I don’t know. But it is a personal paradox that the more I talk about intelligence, the more confused and therefore the stupider I feel. Just as the emotional intelligence test said.
David Aaronovitch

The big issue that needs to be tackled

Every decade or so, the toxic issue of whether or not intelligence is genetically distributed across the races is brought into the spotlight. There is then a huge furore, a lot of emotional accusations and then it is swept under the carpet again .

In the past I have interviewed warlords and militia leaders who have said terrible things. I’m used to and attracted by examining and putting under the spotlight people who espouse ideas and beliefs that the vast majority of us find repugnant and abhorrent. In tonight’s programme for Channel 4, I have looked at the arguments of scientists who have advanced the theories that black people are genetically, immutably, less intelligent than other races and evaluated the actual scientific evidence behind it.

Obviously, it was difficult to sit opposite scientists who were saying things that felt like a direct attack on me and my children. It is hard to stay calm, and impartial, but that is the only way to win the argument.

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