Another Look at Average: What Can You Do with Honorable Men at 85?

This may read like a discussion about age. But it is not. Rather, it is one about intelligence. The validity of psychometrics is strongly established. However, IQ score with its confounders could show an interesting meaning with subtle deviation from what we have come to know. Although IQ scores should be largely statistical, we could, perhaps, learn something by looking at data from an interesting study in India.

Psychologist Arthur Jensen, in his book, Straight Talk About Mental Tests, showed that there are four socially sensitive thresholds on the IQ scale that mark major divisions in the probabilities of educational achievement, which may have important consequences in a person's life. He added that these thresholds are a result of the educational and occupational structure of modern industrial societies and the demands they make on the kind of mental ability measured by IQ tests. Professor Jensen explained:

The four socially and personally most important thresholds on the IQ scale are those that differentiate with high probability between persons who, because of their level of general mental ability, (1) can or cannot attend a regular school (threshold at about IQ 50), (2) can or cannot master the traditional subject matter of elementary school (about IQ 75), (3) can or cannot succeed in the academic or college preparatory curriculum through high school with good enough grades for college admission (about IQ 105), and (4) can or cannot graduate from an accredited four-year college with grades that would qualify for admission to a professional or graduate school (about IQ 115).

None of these thresholds is inexorable. They merely indicate the IQ level below which the probability is very slight that the particular achievement will be realized (emphases mine).

A study was done at an Indian medical college to know the duration of preparation, self-study hours, academic performance and its association with the IQ level of medical students, to state how to shorten the duration of completing MBBS degree.

A cross-sectional study was done on 300 medical students using a structured questionnaire derived from IQtest.com. Data collection and appropriate statistical test were applied considering p-value ≤ 0.05 as significant.

Yes, I know that online IQ tests have a bad reputation and tend to score inflation and poor validity. But the test in question did not appear to inflate the scores as we will see. And on the structure of the test, this Intelligence Test contained 38 questions and utilized 13 intelligence scales: arithmetic, algebraic, rote utilization, logical, visual apprehension, spatial skill, intuition, general knowledge, vocabulary, short term memory, spelling, geometric, and computational speed. So it may be reasonable to expect this test to give at least a crude measure of intelligence in the cohort, and to roughly rank its members.

Bring in the Results

On application of IQtest.com 5 (1.7%) subjects had below average IQ, 150 (50%) subjects had average IQ and only 30 (10%) had gifted/genius/extraordinary IQ. The academic performance of students with average IQ was highest and that of below average IQ was poorest among all. The academic performance had no positive or negative correlation with the IQ level of students (Table 3).

Most of the students had IQ in between 85 to 129 i.e. average and above average IQ.

All the students with higher IQ (gifted/genius/extraordinary) spent less than six hours for study and rest of the time in sports and extra-curricular activities.

But what is more interesting is how the performance of the average (85-114) and above average (115-129) IQ students compare.

Among 115 students with above average IQ, 37 (32.2%) spent less than six hours and 78(67.8%) more than six hours for their studies per day. Among students with average IQ 54 (36%) spent less than 6 hrs and 96 (64%) more than six hrs for their study (Table 5). The percentages are similar for both groups.

Among students with above average IQ, 73.9% needed 1 year for medical entrance exam preparation while 52% of average IQ students did. 20.9% needed 2 years among students with above average IQ while it was 28% for average IQ students (Table 4). There are overlaps of about 70% each in both durations for both groups!

94.8% of above average IQ students needed at most 2 years for preparation while it was 80% for average IQ students.

The academic performance of students with average IQ was highest (Table 3) in this study (of course, this could change in another study), showing the presence of both motivation and capacity.

Apparently, we have much to do with honorable men and women at 85, perhaps contrary to what the literature would suggest. They are medical doctors in our midst, proudly!

I would want to see more similar studies. But hardly was this performance pattern a fluke considering the sample size.

An Attempt to Reconcile the Group Differences in IQ - Part 2

Earlier in October 2017, I had made an attempt to reconcile the observed group differences in IQ scores. This article is a sequel, albeit a short one, that aims to propose a working mechanism for the biological marker k, that was proposed to be responsible for the differences. This article follows the critical reasoning and inductions of its prequel.

Everything is different, but the same

Another new paper finds that the GWAS hits for IQ – largely determined in Europeans – don’t work in people of African descent. That was always a possibility: I’ve talked about it. If you look at the frequencies of height alleles (determined from GWAS in Europeans) you would predict that Pygmies are pretty short – but they’re considerably shorter than that. They have their own private alleles influencing height, which make them even shorter than you would think. Or, if you tried to estimate skin color in Koreans by the frequencies of variants that cause light skin in Europeans, you would conclude that they were black as night – but they’re not. They’re pretty light-skinned, but that’s caused by light-skin alleles common in East Asia, almost completely disjoint from the common light-skin alleles in Europeans.

So you can’t use those GWAS hits to tell how smart sub-Saharan Africans are, at least not today. All you can use are IQ measurements and achievements. It is as if the only way we could determine your height was by using a ruler, instead of GWAS predictions.

- Gregory Cochran, on his blog post.

A light that is getting brighter?

The paper that was mentioned is titled, Heterogeneity in polygenic scores for common human traits. Appropriately titled, the paper suggests differences in trait architecture between groups. And we can reasonably expect architectures to have projections.

The paper had stated that "PGSs created using weights derived from GWAS performed in individuals with European Ancestry generally do not perform as well in individuals with African Ancestry". So different groups have different trait architectures.

We may safely assume that an IQ score is a projection of the intelligence trait. If we are correct, scores within a group may be projections of their trait architecture for intelligence. 

Why so? What really is intelligence? Commenting on this, Patrick Meredith, professor of psychophysics at Leeds University, England, said: "It might be held that Frenchmen are brighter than pygmies, but if you see pygmies in their natural environment making bridges out of fibre and living life successfully you might ask what you mean by intelligence. . .". It may be that a pygmy has a different intelligence trait architecture from a Frenchman's, hence his lower IQ score (suggesting a difference in projection, but not necessarily in intelligence).

This may equally explain the anomaly of the low-IQ-score Africans not showing intellectual disability.

But as I had stated earlier, in the first article, persons of different groups at equal percentiles of IQ within their respective groups may possess similar "intelligence" represented by capacity, c for academic achievement (as an alternative -- although a weak one today -- to g which is strongly tied to absolute IQ scores).

Egypt once used to run circles around the world. The Egyptian civilization was advanced and clearly beyond others. The other groups were there, and what had happened to their intelligence? Today, Egypt has an average IQ score of 81! Of course, the Europeans (and Americans of European descent) are the kings of today. But history tells us that some other civilizations had shown a form of world supremacy -- military or economic -- in the past. Babylon, Assyria, Medo-Persia.

It may appear as if we are beginning to descend into pseudoscience. But everything adds up. 

We cannot deny the fact that becoming and sustaining a world power correlates with some form of intelligence. So what is the point? Perhaps, intelligence is a complex trait that manifests itself in alternate ways beyond just absolute IQ scores (remember Flynn effect?). Or between-group differences in IQ scores are differences in trait architecture projections.

This takes us to the topic of projection transformation or what I would like to call projection normalization. To equate the intelligence of persons of different groups at equal percentiles of IQ within their respective groups, we would have to transform their architecture projections or normalize them. Within this, lies the constant k. k is dependent on the intelligence trait architecture for a group.

The Beauty of the Growth Mindset

“If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential.” — Ray Dalio

“When you become comfortable with uncertainty, Infinite Possibilities open up in your life.” — Eckhart Tolle

How beautiful the Growth Mindset is! You can become anything you want to become. You learn new things and become transformed. And you are ever grateful you did take the step to come out of your comfort zone and change! We must learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable. And look a new person is birthed!

An Attempt to Reconcile the Group Differences in IQ

A thorny and often avoided topic is the reported difference in average IQ scores between groups. This article aims to postulate a unifying hypothesis, based on careful observation, data from various researches, and views and reasonable persuasions from notable academic researchers and psychology bloggers. Some elements of the hypothesis about to be put forward draw from critical reasoning common to quantitative fields, and mathematical induction.

For a summary of the current state of affairs, see the wikipedia article Race and intelligence.

Various factors have been hypothesized as the reasons for the differences, but this article takes a different approach by watching for 'capacity' from an academic achievement standpoint, using this achievement as proxy for intelligence.

On the assertion that environmental factors are the sole or most important contributor to group differences in IQ, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending present a powerful counter argument on their blog post The Great IQ Depression:

We hear that poverty can sap brainpower,  reduce frontal lobe function,  induce the  fantods, etc.  But exactly what do we mean by ‘poverty’?  If we’re talking about an absolute, rather than relative, standard of living,  most of the world today must be in poverty, as well as almost everyone who lived much before the present.  Most Chinese are poorer than the official US poverty level, right?  The US had fairly rapid economic growth until the last generation or so, so if you go very far back in time, almost everyone was poor, by modern standards. Even those who were considered rich at the time suffered from zero prenatal care, largely useless medicine, tabletless high schools,  and slow Internet connections.  They had to ride horses that had lousy acceleration and pooped all over the place.

In particular, if all this poverty-gives-you-emerods stuff is true, scholastic achievement should have collapsed in the Great Depression – and with the miracle of epigenetics, most of us should still be suffering those bad effects.

But somehow none of this seems to have gone through the formality of actually happening.

The Bell Curve has been observed even within groups. Genetics appears to be the most important contributor to the differences.

Do the scores between groups point to difference in intelligence? I would not want to use the g factor, as its definition in the context of cognitive tests may expose it to relative interpretation. I will propose a new term called 'capacity' or c for short. Capacity is the 'absolute' ability of an individual to acquire an academic achievement, assuming the absence of abnormalities such as a learning disability. Therefore, c is a proxy for intelligence. Why use academic achievement instead of current cognitive tests? We need an alternate measure to study our current realities.

Charles Murray, via Gene Expression,offers this insight on what fraction of the (US) population is capable of absorbing a university education or mastering college-level material:

To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.

These are not devastating shortcomings. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.

In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses. In the humanities and social sciences, the demarcation is fuzzier. It is possible for someone with an IQ of 100 to sit in the lectures of Economics 1, read the textbook, and write answers in an examination book. But students who cannot follow complex arguments accurately are not really learning economics. They are taking away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion that they know something they do not. (A depressing research literature documents one's inability to recognize one's own incompetence.) Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.

There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college--enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.

It is then expected that there is a minimum c, statistically, for which an engineering or math degree can be achieved -- and it is not usually possessed by US White population with IQ of 100. What happens in other parts of the world? Considering the research by Rushton, et al. Construct validity of Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices for African and non-African engineering students in South Africa, how can we reconcile the outcomes?

One reviewer suggested that it seemed unlikely that Africans with so low an IQ could complete engineering school and then practice the profession, and so these lower scores cannot mean the same as they would for students in the US.

Two possibilities were proposed. The first is that the low African mean IQ score does accurately represent the probable level of cognitive performance for the population and that, indeed, commensurate work performance is predicted (see Lynn & Vanhanen, 2002). The second is that although individual differences in IQ score within populations are predictive of individual differences in various criteria within that population (as in Figures 3 and 4), differences between populations are attributable to such factors as poverty and cognitive deprivation so that high motivation is able to outweigh their predicted role in determining performance. According to this view, Euro-American test norms are not valid for Africans. And it adds that, future research, especially longitudinal studies using some of the real-life criteria identified by Gottfredson (2003) could be undertaken to better resolve this enigma.

Now, considering the view that a person of average of intelligence would struggle at a tough high school course, not to mention a college engineering or math degree, how can we reconcile the fact that the math and science students at the University of the North had an average IQ of 100, and African cognitive elite engineering students at the University of the Witwatersrand had an IQ of 103 (Rushton et al., 2003)?

If we use academic achievement as proxy for intelligence, many modern sub-Saharan Africans (arguably from pools similar to those in the research) have come to US universities and have studied engineering courses and have come out with good grades, and have been gainfully employed in the US. It appears to follow that these students possess the minimum c for these achievements, yet clocking in at such comparatively low scores. It is important to mention that these population subsets are also those at a higher IQ percentile for their populations.

What about the academically high-achieving Pakistanis in the US? Can the average Chinese achieve the engineering degrees despite having a higher average IQ score? Perhaps it is that persons of similar or equal IQ scores from different groups do not possess equal c. But I theorize that persons of different groups at equal percentiles of IQ within their respective groups may possess similar c. Hence, between-group differences in test scores could be merely a constant in a biological equation, where the constant does not add to intelligence, but is merely a biological marker k for the different groups.

IQ = k + c

Could this really be a possibility? Let us see how it attempts to solve another anomaly. Some countries in Africa have an average IQ of 70. This would be mental retardation by US norms with all its blindingly visible symptoms. But alas! This does not happen. These countries have their own scores for their own lows!

Some have argued that these groups have a high motivation that help them achieve more than their white counterparts of similarly average scores. The counter argument is that they do not have a monopoly on motivation, and this kind of ability statistically comes at a threshold as observed even within groups. As stated earlier, these population subsets are also those at a higher IQ percentile for their own populations.

IQ = g ignores the possibility of k, and assumes that between-group persons of equal IQ scores must have equal g, and appears to suffer the contradictions of the reality observed.

[Pseudo representations have been used to describe complex biological functions]

But could there be any such biological equations affecting cognitive ability? Reaction time (RT). Several studies have found differences between races in average reaction times. These studies have generally found that reaction times among black, Asian and white children follow the same pattern as IQ scores. Rushton & Jensen (2005) have argued that reaction time is independent of culture and that the existence of race differences in average reaction time is evidence that the cause of racial IQ gaps is partially genetic instead of entirely cultural.

Do we have more data to corroborate the possibility of high academic performance at seemingly low IQ scores? See "Wisconsin Men's Henmon-Nelson IQ Distributions for 1992-94 Occupation Groups with 30 Cases or More" for a range.

Implications of the Growth Mindset

"In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that's that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don't necessarily think everyone's the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it."

Carol Dweck's work on 'Growth Mindset' is well known. It holds that individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset. More can be read on the work here and here. But this article looks at perspectives that may not be readily apparent.

Who is the 'growth mindset' meant for?

If you've always achieved whatever you set out to (since you were a kid), 'without' help from others, is it for you? In other words, is the growth mindset for the "Einsteins" of this world?

Technically, no. The theory is not primarily meant for this group. "The growth mindset was intended to help close achievement gaps, not hide them. It is about telling the truth about a student’s current achievement and then, together, doing something about it, helping him or her become smarter." See here.

But it's not forbidden for an Einstein to ask a question or two to save themselves a few hours.

Obviously, being an "Einstein" implies any talent at all. It's not just for students, but for employees, entrepreneurs, corporations and even governments.

Is the 'growth mindset' just about a belief or attitude?

Attitude is half the work. The meat is in constructive strategies. And of course, working them. Growth mindset is not being flexible or open-minded or having a positive outlook. Not to underestimate attitude, you don't become defensive, angry, or crushed at fixed-mindset triggers, like criticism or setbacks.

How much progress can be made with the 'growth mindset'?

This normally depends on how much 'raw material' you begin with. The Cambridge Dictionary defines talent as "a natural ability to be good at something, especially without being taught". For academic aptitude, it's been observed that we begin to 'zone out' at skill levels above +2 SD on our IQ score.

Perhaps a similar pattern may be found for other skills, following the assumption that they're normally distributed in the population.

Growth mindset hacks that will change your life for the better

You might need humility to increase your growth mindset. Individuals who have a growth mindset worry less about looking smart and they put more energy into learning.

Even for the smart, asking input from others even when we think we know something, might be a sophisticated way of working that delivers deft results and high performance. This will allow a person to live a less stressful and more successful life.

You may collaborate with others to deliver a project even if you don't understand everything.

Set reasonable goals.

The Burden of Being a Senior Developer

Who is a senior software developer? A developer who has over seven years of experience. I think this is not quite encompassing. I think it is a developer who possesses a certain state of mind. So a developer with six months' experience can be senior (theoretically) if they have that state. But this state is usually gained through knowledge and experience, over time. This state comes with some responsibilities (or burden).

Any enterprise that is worth something is then worth doing well. And how do we do things right? By ensuring that what we do does not 'collapse' or is not done messily. In the field of software engineering, the fear of not incurring technical debt, and the ability to prevent such, is the state of being a senior engineer.

With the burden of a technical sort also comes an emotional one. In fact, the latter drives the acquisition of the former. And it is this emotional burden that I want to talk about.

I started out programming as an independent contractor in my home country of Nigeria. I specialized on Java applications. I was self-taught and happened (fortunately) to start out on high level projects. Having been brought in on a referral, I quickly acquired a senior developer image before my clients (they were mostly international non-profits), although I was new. I was stretched by these projects to research software engineering best practices (not because I was required to do so by my clients, but for fear of mediocrity). So I had an accelerated path.

Now, seven years after my first gig I have decided to become a JavaScript developer. There is a dearth of quality software firms in my country (and I hate boring jobs). So I have set my eyes on a new american world-class software engineering organisation with an office in Lagos. This company is of course very teams-oriented in their development approach. But I have been like a solo assassin as a consultant, not like a member of a well-commanded army. So here comes my call for integrity and being true to the craft.

Will I apply for a senior position? By the way, I have seven years under my belt. And yes, I might land the job. But I will have holes in my skills. Now I would be working with people. Perhaps I would need some training.

I will be applying for a technical leadership program offered by the company, as a developer. I have the need (fear) to be competent if I would bear the title senior. When I have completed my training I would apply for a promotion.

Being a true senior developer comes with a huge emotional burden. You have the need for technical competence. You will not rest until you have the right (optimal?) architecture. You must learn and acquire knowledge. It is language-agnostic. You know when a solution or code doesn't look right. You know (or are able to know) how to fix it. And you have the nightmare of living with bad code. If this does not happen to you, perhaps you are not yet senior.

Kindly 'like' this article if you like it.

The Cult of Credentialism

For the uninitiated, credentialism is belief in or reliance on academic or other formal qualifications as the best measure of a person's intelligence or ability to do a particular job.

It's an issue of 'quantity and quality' -- the number of degrees one obtains and where they obtain them!

Most top firms apply this rule to recruit and to promote candidates. This is just how the world works. But a few people have been able to defy this odd, especially in the field of computers.

What, though, is the attraction for these elite jobs? I think a commercial propaganda that happiness would be found.