IQ and pseudoscience

In the debate over Ben Stein's movie Expelled, which purports to argue that creationism/intelligent design has a rightful place in the science curriculum, some have argued that - to be blunt - pseudoscience of this sort is popular because people are dumb. Example - Jerry Pournelle argues that higher education is wasted on the proles:

As we go down the Bell Curve it becomes more difficult and eventually becomes impossible -- and all the educational effort expended in teaching "talent meritocracy" skills has been wasted. Those on the left side of the Bell Curve have talents and potentials, but they require a different kind of education -- and the United States public school system, with rare exceptions, not only doesn't provide it but doesn't want to provide it. We believe or say we believe what Bill Gates believes: that every child deserves a world class university prep education. And as I have said, attempting to provide that to everyone means that few will in fact get such and education, and much of the money and resources devoted to education will be wasted.

In a nitshell, this is why the IQ-is-taboo crowd has such a bad reputation - because they cannot resist the temptation to indulge their latent sense of superiority. In asserting their intellectual prowess, they wholly abandon the moral high ground.

The argument in defense of science is wholly separate from the argument about IQ. The former is easy: ExpelledExposed, RealClimate, TalkOrigins, etc. Yes, those who unequivocally reject the (in retrospect, obvious) idea that IQ has a genetic component are as guilty of pseudoscience as Stein et al.

But the other side of the fence, those who say "IQ has a genetic component" are also at fault when, and if, they propose policy. Such as Pournelle's horrific implication that higher education is wasted upon the plebes.

There is in fact no need to "consider" IQ when combating pseudoscience unless you are prepared to accept the fallacy that only dumb people fall for pseudoscience. Very, very high-IQ people are quite happy embracing pseudoscience for a number of reasons. One of them being simple calculus of self-interest (financial or otherwise). And another being genuine belief.

It is intellectual laziness to assume that disagreement is due to inferiority. You are implicitly assuming that super-rationality exists. It does not. The reason people fall for pseudoscience is not because they are dumb but because pseudoscience is Godelian - it cannot be disproved by reason and logic. Pseudoscience is a belief system.

The problem is not that there are low IQ rubes who slurp up pseudoscience. The problem is that there are high-IQ people who gladly dispense pseudoscience because unlike science, pseudoscence is very useful in promoting an agenda. Science is not quite so easy to push around to fit an a-priori.

Were reason and rationality truly objective, then pseudoscience would not exist. That is the problem, and there is no solution aside from the kind of solution to bad, but free, speech: more speech. More Science. Fight fire with light.

Proposing public policy to restrict higher education to the high-IQ-enabled is not only a moral travesty, but would also do nothing to erase pseudoscience from this world.

ritualizing Science

(Below is a comment I left in response to Elezier Yudkowski's thought experiment that science might be better served by wrapping it in a cloak of ritual.)

Elezier,

The reason I keep coming back to this blog is because you madden me. Long time reader, first time commentor. I appreciate the thought experiment you are conducting in this post but I think some of your own biases are driving the theory.

For example, you equate science with magic. I suspect this is because you have a romanticized bias towards science instead of practical, mundane scientific experience in the trenches. Arthur C. Clarke would be happy, god rest his soul, but the actual practice of science is the opposite of magic. The scientific method simply could not survive in an arcane mysterium context. As a practicing scientist, I not only rely on the knowledge of my fellow initiates to Ars Scientifica to hold my work to its rigour, but also the very public nature of the peer review process itself. There's a reason why PLoS and arXiv are so popular and groundbreaking - these are innovations in the process of peer review that drive us towards greater public transparency, not less. If Ars Scientifica were walled off from the public sphere and wrapped in layers of ritual, it would hamper the very process of inquiry and most importantly self-critique that is essential to the function of Science itself (and magnify the very real flaws and problems in the Method and peer review that persist today).

Secondly, you equate religion with the very small, very specific, and very (disproportionately so) vocal subset that is intelligent design/young earth creationism/etc. This is likely because you are biased in regards to the sample of religious folk you find yourself debating with online and in person. Ordinary deeply religious folk like myself are simply not insecure enough about their faith to care much that you keep referring to religion as a whole as an original sin of rationality (though I do admire your cleverness in inverting the metaphor!). However, that said, you tipped your hand a bit when you wrote above that "if some other cult tried to tell you [The Truth] was actually a bearded man in the sky 6000 years ago, you'd laugh like hell." I think at least part of the underlying drive behind the thought experiment at hand is the wish that science were accorded more respect, so that it least would have parity with pseudoscience. But if science has a PR problem, it is structural. It's simply not worth the effort worrying about it. I think Science succeeds in making an impact on people's lives irrespective of their respect for it.

By focusing only on the bearded sky dude you are avoiding the much deeper intellectual challenge of grappling with the far more mature manifestations of religion, the majority of which transcend minor details like young earths, bearded men, or whatever. The kernel of religion is not the trappings of the stereotype you invoke but rather the simple idea that existence is deeper than what can be accessed by the finite tools we possess.

I am fond of arguing that Godel's Theorem points the way towards the superset of knowledge that contains all that Science can discover and all that Religion seeks to uncover. I don't think ritualizing Science to make it more like religion, or systematizing Religion to make it more like science, is the answer.