The Bigger Picture

Myksyk

:eek: Pardon my indignation Sextusempiricus but I DID NOT mention my IQ score (I don't know what it is and am spectacularly uninterested in knowing) ... If you re-read my post you'll see I was quoting Calibos.

I will accept a pint of Carlsberg at the next public lecture as an apology.

Merci.

sextusempiricus

Originally posted by Myksyk
:eek: Pardon my indignation Sextusempiricus but I DID NOT mention my IQ score (I don't know what it is and am spectacularly uninterested in knowing) ... If you re-read my post you'll see I was quoting Calibos.

I will accept a pint of Carlsberg at the next public lecture as an apology.

Merci.

Apologies. I'll try and stay a bit longer after the next meeting to make amends.

Myksyk

I am just about over my indignation now and construct a rational post!!

I agree with sextusempiricus about the promotion of science point. In fact, the ISS is primarily holds an educational brief. It seems to me that WG and Calibos see this as an unimportant aspect of the society and that it is all about slamming the stupid unscientific people out there (Calibos, your idea that people believing weird things equates with lower intelligence reflects poor intellectual analysis of the causes of uncritical thinking ... IMHO).

Unless we want to spend our time in preaching to the converted ... a distinctly uninteresting prospect ... then we must set about changing minds or, more realistically, playing a small role in that process.

Let's be clear here ... this is an extraordinarily difficult business at the best of times and requires tact, patience, hard work and a committment to the idea that people are capable of understanding and accepting rational analyses of the natural world. But people must be led to such positions, not bullied, demeaned and laughed at for not immediately and impulsively changing long held beliefs. I find some of the attitudes expressed on this forum incompatible with this aspect of the society's raison d'etre. The ISS is interested in the promotion of science and critical thinking but not through the use of patently useless and self-defeating tactics. Can you imagine the scene ...

Skeptic: "I think the natural world is awe-inspiring and its truths and beauty can be best uncovered and understood through the scientific method"

Curious Joe: Ok ... sounds interesting ... tell me more"

Skeptic: Well before we start CJ, can we just agree that your current views and beliefs constitute the most horrendously steaming heap of B***sh1t imaginable and that you are clearly a unredeemable and despicable dipstick to believe what you currently do?

Curious Joe: (exit stage left)

Skeptic: Sigh ... I wonder why these plebs never listen ... If only they were more intelligent!

Yes indeed. :rolleyes:

williamgrogan

By 'genetic determinism' I meant that a person's behaviour and fate was, accidents apart, determined solely by his genetic make-up. I was being provocative believing no-one was likely to wholeheartedly accept it. WG seems to come close if not entirely to this viewpoint

I don’t know what you mean by “come close”. I most definitely do not believe that a person’s behaviour and fate is determined solely by his genes.

I suspect that a lot of people have a problem admitting to themselves what they really know to be true in this matter. No one likes to think that they are primarily a product of (actually someone else’s) genes but they are. Very few people would have a problem admitting that their height or the colour of their eyes or hair was related to genes but tell them they are “genetically mean” and they go apesh1t.

For example I think that you are born mean or generous. I think that your upbringing and other “accidents” can make you less mean or more mean but not generous if you are genetically born mean and visa versa. When we eventually understand all the genetic code for any creature there will be all sorts of classes of genes and how they produce the characteristics of the creature they do will be complex and different.

I was involved with a project to train programmers from disadvantaged backgrounds which was generously supported by Microsoft and they told us that in a very large study they conducted in the USA that innate abilities win out in the end. In other words to a large extent your economic “fate” is determined by your genes.

The mind is the software running in the brain.

I do not believe that there are genes that one can point to and say those genes make you generous and those make you mean. The genes were not designed. The survival of animals with certain traits meant that genes that gave rise to those traits for whatever reason survive and become more common and mutate further and confer further advantages.

I don’t think the genes are a blueprint either. In fact to think this is as ridiculous as thinking that there are genes that have the dimensions of your nose in inches. To grasp evolution you have to go right back to very primitive creatures and imagine how they functioned and how a small mutation give a small advantage to those with the mutation and how statistically that mutation meant that the genes were now different in successive generations but only in so far as the effect of that mutation resulted in a minor change in the animal and not that the gene necessarily encoded the change as a description of the change. (I actually find this much easier to imagine than explain.)

The genes contain information that causes effects that result in an animal with particular characteristics. The genes and the steps between “reading” the genes during whatever is the first step and building the adult animal need not follow in any sort of design/development sequence as understood by say an engineer. In fact the steps might be ludicrous if examined in this light.

The best way I can describe this is that a particular characteristic, such as say a sense of humour or a quick wit, might be increased in strength as a probability because a gene or genes led to a slight increase in the quantity of a protein in conjunction with other genes that at a particular time during the development of the fetus meant that another protein might be changed into something that meant that the way nerve cells joined together in the developing brain under the influence of another protein resulted in a section of the brain that was slightly different than it might otherwise have been and that as a result of this that the infant developed slightly differently under certain external stimulus and that as a result that another part of the brain was programmed differently and that as the child grew up a feedback mechanism caused him to behave slightly differently and consequently his brain development in one area drifted in a particularly direction that meant he spent more time thinking in a particular way about certain things that meant that he developed his mind in this area of his personality differently and that eventually when he was 2 years old, say, he was potentially going to be witty. Even the wittiness might be a manifestation/side effect of another trait that millions of years ago had completely different purposes.

What is important is that there are external, environmental factors but that ultimately the genes did start the ball rolling and that those genes being the way they were conferred a higher probability that they would survive because there was a higher probability that the adult with them would survive longer and procreate and pass on those genes.

When the genes mutate they don’t know what they are doing. The mutation can have no “meaning” in a design sense. It’s random but IF the ‘new” changed gene survives over many generations it must confer an advantage. That advantage and the mutation are so separated in most cases that we would find it hard to believe there was a connection.

PS

Another big problem is that it was fashionable to believe in nurture in the 50’s & 60’s when the likes of Dr Spock convinced parents that they could determine how their children turned out. It was all baloney. All those mechanisms for making your kids “smarter”, making them learn to count at 2 etc. are now discredited. Kids will turn out however they are “fated” to turn out with little or no connection between what their parents did. In fact the smarter innately the kids are the more this applies.

davros

Hmmm, I think we've had this discussion.

By the way, the more IQ tests one does, the better one's score gets. Interesting that.

Calibos

I am deeply embarressed for mentioning IQ results as I must conceed that it does make one sound conceited, which I can assure you I am not. Quoting results in the form of, 'slightly above average' or 'above average' would however be valid to the subject of the thread I believe, in that a significant part of the tests are deductive reasoning, logic etc. Qualities that help one to smell the bull**** so to speak. The fact that I score above average confirms that I am better at smelling the bull than the average Joe. I guarantee that all sceptics score higher than average as well but aren't silly enough to post the fact for the valid reasons your example illustrates.

Let's be clear here ... this is an extraordinarily difficult business at the best of times and requires tact, patience, hard work and a committment to the idea that people are capable of understanding and accepting rational analyses of the natural world. But people must be led to such positions, not bullied......

You are kind of agreeing with the fact that the average Joe's deductive reasoning is slightly inferior though ie. But people must be lead to such positions.... I wasn't led, you weren't led, Davros wasn't led, sextus wasn't lead etc etc etc

davros

Originally posted by Calibos
Davros wasn't led...

[cough] um, well... when I was young and naïve, I borrowed all the books on UFOs and psi from the local library. I assumed they were true since there were no books offering the sceptical viewpoint.

It was a fair bit later (though I was still young :-), after working my way through all of Martin Gardner's mathematical books, that I found one of his sceptical books in Hodges. Aha!

So, I'd have to say I was led to scepticism, even though I'm naturally scientifically inclined. All it took was the proper presentation of evidence (or the countering of supposed evidence) and the truth was clear.

williamgrogan

If Calibos said his height was measured and it was 6ft 11 3/4" would you be criticising him for saying so? There is a PC attitude to intelligence. You are nearly supposed to pretend you are stupid. It certainly applies to politicians. They would hardly ever get elected if they were seen as very intelligent. I thought he pointed out what he thought his IQ was in a matter of fact way. It does sound a bit naff discussing your IQ but it does have relevance to our discussion.

I do suspect that those with higher IQ’s are less likely to be conned and more likely to be doing the conning, less likely to believe in god and more likely to be Skeptics. People with very high IQ’s do most of the discovering and inventing. I believe that if we had had IQ tests way back through history and pre-history they would shown a very gradual increase over the millennia. I can’t be a co-incidence that we landed on the moon and not our African ancestors 100,000 years ago (and of course I realise that the gradual build up of knowledge is important too.). I can’t be a co-incidence that we are the most non religious and non superstitious people in history.

My mother bought a book on UFO’s when I was a teenager and I ate the head of her for insulting me. She thought that because I was “into” Science that I believed in UFO’s (as visitors from outer space.)

I remember arguing with a friend, who is now a Scientist (in fact the quality of your pint of Guinness is very much related to his work!), that keeping them in his cardboard pyramid would not keep his razors sharp as he supposed.

The founder(?) of the USA Skeptics is an ex-Theological student.

Repeatedly doing simple IQ tests will increase your score slightly but it levels out.

PS

I have never done an IQ test. I’d be terrified I’d score only 80, the average intelligence of a Sun reader & Homeopathic remedy user. (Actually now that I think of it when I was 20 I did an aptitude test for programming aptitude and came in the top 10 out of 300 who did it – so stick that up your PC correct bottom!)

Myksyk

You are kind of agreeing with the fact that the average Joe's deductive reasoning is slightly inferior though ie. But people must be lead to such positions.... I wasn't led, you weren't led, Davros wasn't led, sextus wasn't lead etc etc etc

I admit that the phrasing '...must be led ...' might be construed as patronising which was not my intention.

I don't agree I wasn't led, I was. As a teenager my natural curiosity was 'hijacked' by simplistic notions about the world - I was into the Bermuda triangle, UFOs and religion in a big way. My intelligence was not the problem ... I didn't become more intelligent when I adopted a more skeptical frame of mind!!

My contention is that it is not people's intelligence or curiosity that is the problem it is their critical thinking and often that's just a matter of who had the early influence (or the ongoing influence).

I think you are making a fundamental error in equating intelligence and critical thinking - I doubt that they are strongly correlated. Michael Shermer's book 'Why smart people believe weird things' addresses this.

I can't believe you think we weren't led. I think we are all led to a certain degree all the time. I was led by writings by Dawkins, Gould, Skinner, Pigliucci, Pinker, Fodor, Darwin, etc etc etc in various ways at various times. Davros alludes to the same experience. Our ideas come from somewhere and someone else most of the time.

sextusempiricus

Originally posted by Myksyk


My contention is that it is not people's intelligence or curiosity that is the problem it is their critical thinking and often that's just a matter of who had the early influence (or the ongoing influence).

I think you are making a fundamental error in equating intelligence and critical thinking - I doubt that they are strongly correlated. Michael Shermer's book 'Why smart people believe weird things' addresses this.

I can't believe you think we weren't led. I think we are all led to a certain degree all the time. I was led by writings by Dawkins, Gould, Skinner, Pigliucci, Pinker, Fodor, Darwin, etc etc etc in various ways at various times. Davros alludes to the same experience. Our ideas come from somewhere and someone else most of the time.

I agree. I suppose I was led by my professor of physiology to take an interest in the writings of Sir Karl Popper and his philosophy of 'critical rationalism'. So much of this was pure chance. I could easily have not taken 18 months out to do an extra B.Sc. degree and never discovered Popper. I could have had a professor who was more taken by Karl Pearson's inductive outlook. Our minds function, as I've already said before, in an intellectual milieu where they interact with the products of other minds whether in the form of conversations or in books or on the web. Statements are made and we respond according to not only our intelligence which helps us comprehend difficult arguments(and which is largely influenced by our genetic make-up) but our education (and here I include the influence of our favourite authors; let me here include not only Popper but idiosyncratically perhaps Montaigne, William Harvey, David Hume, Jane Austen, Charles Darwin and Peter Medawar). Discovering these authors was also largely by a series of accidents such as getting a set of Austen's novels cheap on joining a book club. We try and build on the ideas of others and this is largely by a 'trial and error' type process. Perhaps sometimes we are lucky and find out something useful. James Watson was lucky in helping to discover the structure of DNA. His IQ of 122 is, as he says himself 'respectable but definitely not stellar'. No doubt his intelligence helped his idea of pairing the nucleotides in DNA but it was still a lucky break that got him working with Crick in the first place. The important thing is to subject ideas to severe tests and most of us can learn to do this to a varying degree. I suppose education in critical thinking has to start in schools. I certainly do not agree that as a species we are intrinsically illogical and that such education is misconceived. I believe we can learn from our mistakes. I would be optimistic that we can solve problems and improve our lot (but perhaps that optimism is just a polygenic trait intrinsic in me).