#302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences

Richard Haier is a psychologist specializing in the science of human intelligence. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Calm: https://calm.com/lex to get 40% off – Linode: https://linode.com/lex to get $100 free credit – BiOptimizers: http://www.magbreakthrough.com/lex to get 10% off – SimpliSafe: https://simplisafe.com/lex and use code LEX – MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off EPISODE LINKS: Richard’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/rjhaier Richard’s Website: https://richardhaier.com/ Documents & Articles: 1. Child IQ and survival to 79: https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5491698/ 2. Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth: https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/DoingPsychScience2006.pdf Books: 1. The Neuroscience of Intelligence: https://amzn.to/3n50DcC 2. The Book of Five Rings: https://amzn.to/3y4Xcc6 3. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: https://amzn.to/3zPAW7q 4. Flowers for Algernon: https://amzn.to/3OfRKZS 5. The Bell Curve: https://amzn.to/3Ng4RJe 6. The Mismeasure of Man: https://amzn.to/3N9IkxB 7. Human Diversity: https://amzn.to/3O7Trsc 8. Facing Reality: https://amzn.to/3bfzqkX PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (08:06) – Measuring human intelligence (22:34) – IQ tests (45:23) – College entrance exams (53:59) – Genetics (59:58) – Enhancing intelligence (1:07:27) – The Bell Curve (1:19:58) – Race differences (1:39:11) – Bell curve criticisms (1:48:21) – Intelligence and life success (1:57:57) – Flynn effect (2:02:49) – Nature vs nuture (2:29:42) – Testing artificial intelligence (2:41:46) – Advice (2:45:53) – Mortality

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Richard Haier on the science of human intelligence. This is a highly controversial topic, but a critically important one for understanding the human mind. I hope you will join me in not shying away from difficult topics like this, and instead, let us try to navigate it with empathy, rigor, and grace. If you're watching this on video now, I should mention that I'm recording this introduction in an undisclosed location somewhere in the world. I'm safe and happy, and life is beautiful.

• 0:34Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Calm for meditation, Linode for cloud computing, BiOptimizers for health, SimpliSafe for security, and MasterClass for inspiration. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Calm, a meditation and mental wellness app. Over 100 million people around the world use Calm to take care of their minds. I'm a big believer, I'm a big fan of meditation in general, and there's all kinds of ways

• 1:19Lex Fridman?

  to achieve that state of mind, where it's complete focus, whether it's focus on the breath, focus on a singular idea, or focus on just the emptiness of space. I do that through running, through walking, through deep work sessions where I have to focus on a particular idea. Herman Hesse talked about that, which is meditation is just not simply meditation, it's the ability to just focus on one thing. And all the great writers and the scholars are able to do that, even if they don't call it meditation. But if you want to get into it and do it systematically and rigorously, guided meditation is a great way to do it, and Calm is my favorite app to get that done. As a listener, you'll get 40% off a Calm premium subscription, which includes hundreds

• 2:04Lex Fridman?

  of hours of programming. Check them out at calm.com/lex.

• 2:10Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Linode, Linux virtual machines. It's an awesome compute infrastructure that lets you develop, deploy and scale whatever applications you build faster and easier. This is both for small personal projects and huge systems. It's lower cost than AWS. They've got great customer service 24/7, 365, however many days there are a year. Like I said, I don't shut up about it. I love Linux. I love Linux in the cloud. I love when the interface and the infrastructure of distributed computing is done really well, whether it's for hosted websites or doing any kinds of compute, whether it's CPU, GPU, all that kind of stuff. I love it when people do this well.

• 2:54Lex Fridman?

  And the interface on Linode is just done incredibly well. It's user friendly, very accessible, very clear to monitor what the heck is going on. I love it. Did I mention how much I love Linux? I think of Linode as love in the cloud because Linux is love. Visit linode.com/lex for free credit.

• 3:15Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by BiOptimizers. They have a new magnesium supplement. When I fast, I'm doing keto or carnivore sodium, potassium and magnesium are essential. That's what they call the electrolytes. Of those, magnesium is the trickiest to get right. That's why I use magnesium breakthrough for BiOptimizers. Most of the other supplements contain only one or two forms of magnesium, like glycinate or citrate. I've actually had a long discussion slash debate slash learning session with Andrew Huberman, who may be the world's greatest expert in magnesium. It was very eye opening. Anyway, there's not just glycinate and citrate.

• 3:56Lex Fridman?

  There's seven other kinds that the body can benefit from. So this particular BiOptimizer supplement gets all of them. So you're covered and it makes it super easy. So you don't have to think about it. Like I said, the difference between An awesomely clear and focused mind on keto or when you're fasting for 16 or 24 hours or multiple days, 48, 72 hours. The difference between feeling crappy and feeling amazing is electrolytes and magnesium. For me, like when I fasted for 72 hours, that was the key. I wasn't feeling that great when that was lower than it needed to be. And when it got higher, I felt great.

• 4:39Lex Fridman?

  Anyway, get a special discount at magbreakthrough.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by SimpliSafe, a home security company designed to be simple and effective. It takes 30 minutes to set up. You can customize the system to your needs. I have it set up in my place and I love it. It is, I guess, the first layer of security at my place. I take my physical and cybersecurity extremely, extremely seriously. And part of doing a good job of securing your physical location is having systems that are actually really easy to set up, really easy to monitor, really easy to debug if anything's going wrong.

• 5:23Lex Fridman?

  And that's exactly what SimpliSafe does for any consumer. You don't even need professional installation. I think they offer professional installation, but you can set it up yourself. It's super easy. From a robotics perspective, it's cool to turn your home into a smart robot type of device that's sensing the world around it through cameras, through motion sensors, all that kind of stuff. Go to simplisafe.com/lex to customize your system and claim your free indoor security camera plus 20% off with interactive monitoring, which you should definitely sign up for. This show is also brought to you by MasterClass. $180 a year gets you an all access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines.

• 6:08Lex Fridman?

  The list is freaking ridiculous. Chris Hadfield, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Will Wright, Carlos Santana, Garrett Casparov, Daniel Negrono, Neil Gaiman, Martin Scorsese, Tony Hawk, Jane Goodall. I really gotta talk to Jane Goodall at some point here soon. She's an incredible, incredible woman. And the list keeps going. Andrew Huberman just texted me and he should definitely have a masterclass because that guy, actually every single episode of his podcast is Is a masterclass of its own. This whole series of ad reads is all about how awesome Andrew Huberman is, which he is. Anyway, I do believe that the way to learn about a topic, there's two ways.

• 6:50Lex Fridman?

  One is you do hands-on training. So you follow tutorials that are hands-on and you build something, something you care about, or you listen or get as close as possible to get the wisdom from the best people in the world that are doing that kind of thing. There's no replacement for that. Just in life in general, whatever you want to do in life, make sure you figure out who's the best person in the world at that and find a way to work with them, even if it's like intern or make coffee for them, all of that kind of stuff. Masterclass makes it super easy for you that you don't have to make coffee for anybody. You just pay 180 bucks a year and you get to listen to these experts. I highly recommend you check it out, get unlimited access to every masterclass

• 7:35Lex Fridman?

  and get 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Richard Hyer.

• 8:06Lex Fridman?

  What are the measures of human intelligence and how do we measure it?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Everybody has an idea of what they mean by intelligence. In the vernacular, what I mean by intelligence is just being smart, how well you reason, how well you figure things out, what you do when you don't know what to do. Those are just kind of everyday, common sense definitions of how people use the word intelligence. If you want to do research on intelligence, measuring something that you can study scientifically is a little trickier.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  And what almost all researchers who study intelligence use is the concept called the G factor, general intelligence. And that is what is common. That is a mental ability that is common to virtually all tests of mental abilities.

• 9:05Lex Fridman?

  What's the origin of the term G factor, by the way? It's such a funny word for such a fundamental human thing.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  The general factor, I really started with Charles Spearman. And he noticed, this is like, boy, more than 100 years ago. He'd noticed that when you tested people with different tests, all the tests were correlated positively. And so he was looking at student exams and things. And he invented the correlation coefficient, essentially. And he, when he used it to look at student performance on various topics, he found that all the scores were correlated with each other, and they were all positive correlations.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  So he inferred from this that there must be some common factor that was irrespective of the content of the test.

• 10:02Lex Fridman?

  And positive correlation means if you do well on the first test, you're likely to do well on the second test. And presumably that holds for tests across even disciplines, so not within subject, but across subjects. So that's where the general comes in, something about general intelligence. So when you were talking about measuring intelligence and trying to figure out something difficult about this world and how to solve the puzzles of this world, that means generally speaking, not some specific test, but across all tests.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely right. And people get hung up on this because they say, well, what about the ability to do X? Isn't that independent? And they said, I know somebody who's very good at this, but not so good at this. This other thing.

• 10:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  And so there are a lot of examples like that, but it's a general tendency. So, exceptions really don't disprove. You know, your, your everyday experience is not the same as what the data actually show. And your everyday experience, when you say, oh, I know someone who's good at X, but not so good at Y, that doesn't contradict the statement of about a, he's not so good, but he's not the opposite. He's not, it's not a negative correlation.

• 11:25Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so we're not, our anecdotal data, I know a guy is really good at solving some kind of visual thing. That's not sufficient for us to understand actually the depths of that person's intelligence. So, how, this idea of G factor.

• 11:46Lex Fridman?

  How much evidence is there? How strong, you know, given across the decades that this idea has been around? How much has it been held up? That there is a universal, uh, sort of horsepower of intelligence that's underneath all of it? All the different tests we do to try to get to this thing, uh, in, in the depths of the human mind, that's a, that's a universal stable measure of a person's intelligence?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  You used a couple of words in there.

• 12:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Stable and.

• 12:17Lex Fridman?

  Are, are we have to be precise with words?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Well.

• 12:19Lex Fridman?

  I was hoping we can get away with being poetic.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  We can. There's a lot about research in general, not just intelligence research, that is poetic. Science has a panetic aspect to it. And good scientists are, are very intuitive. They're not just, hey, hey, th- these are the, the numbers. You have to kind of step back and see the big picture. When it comes to, uh, intelligence research, you asked, how well has this general concept held up? And I think I can say. Without fear of being empirically contradicted, that it is the most replicated finding in all of psychology. Now, some cynics may say, "Well, big deal, psychology. We all know there's a replication crisis in psychology,

• 13:05Speaker 01

  and a lot of this stuff doesn't replicate." That's all true. There is no replication crisis when it comes to studying the existence of this general factor. Let me tell you some things about it. It is, it, it looks like it's universal in, that you find it in all cultures. The way you find it, let's step back one, one step. The way you find it is to give a battery of mental tests. What battery? You choose. Take a battery of any mental tests you want, give it to a large number of diverse people, and you will be able to extract statistically the common, the commonality among all those tests. It's done by a technique called factor analysis.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  You, people think that's, that this may be a statistical artifact of some kind. It is not a statistical artifact.

• 14:00Lex Fridman?

  What is factor analysis?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Factor analysis is a way of looking at a big set of data and look at the correlation among the, the different test scores, and then find empirically the clusters of scores that go together. And there are different factors. So if you have a bunch of mental tests, there may be a verbal factor. There may be a numerical factor. There may be a visual spatial factor. But those factors have variance in common with each other. And that is the common, uh, that's what's common among all the tests, and that's what gets labeled the G factor. So if you give a diverse battery of mental tests and you extract a G factor from it,

• 14:43Speaker 01

  that factor usually accounts for around half of the variance. It's the single biggest factor, but it's not the only factor. But it is the most reliable. It is the most stable. And it seems, uh, to be very much influenced by genetics. It's very hard to change the G factor with training, or, uh, uh, drugs, or anything else. You don't know how to increase the G factor.

• 15:14Lex Fridman?

  Okay, you said a lot of really interesting things there, so. First, I mean, just to get people used to it in case they're not familiar with this idea. G factor is what we mean. So often, there's this term used IQ, which is the way IQ is used, they really mean G factor in regular conversation. The way, because what we mean by IQ, we mean intelligence. And what we mean by intelligence, we mean general intelligence. And general intelligence in the human mind, from a psychology, from a serious, rigorous scientific perspective, actually means G factor. So G factor equals intelligence, just in this conversation to define terms.

• 15:57Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so there's this stable thing called G factor. You said, now, factor, you said factor many times, means a measure that potentially could be reduced to a single number across the different factors you mentioned. And what, you said it accounts for half, half-ish.

• 16:24Lex Fridman?

  It counts for half-ish of what? Of variance across the different set of tests. So if you do for some reason well on some set of tests,

• 16:39Lex Fridman?

  what does that mean? So that means there's some unique capabilities outside of the G factor that might account for that. And what are those? What else is there besides the raw horsepower, the engine inside your mind that generates intelligence?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  There are test-taking skills. There are specific abilities. Someone might be particularly good at mathematical things, mathematical concepts. Even simple arithmetic, people, some people are much better than others. You might know people who can memorize, and short-term memory is another component of this. Short-term memory is one of the cognitive processes that's most highly correlated with the G factor.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  So.

• 17:33Lex Fridman?

  So all those things like memory taste tests taking skills account for variability across the test performances, but you so you can you can run, but you can't hide from the thing that God gave you, the genetics. So that G factor, science says that G factor is there. Each one of us have.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Each one of us has a G factor.

• 17:58Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Some have more than others.

• 18:00Lex Fridman?

  I'm getting uncomfortable already.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Well, IQ is a score and IQs, an IQ score is a very good estimate of the G factor. You can't measure G directly. There's no direct measure. You estimate it from these statistical techniques, but an IQ score is a good estimate. Why? Because a standard IQ test is a battery of different mental abilities. You combined it into one score and that score is highly correlated with the G factor, even if you get better scores on some subtests than others, because again, it's what's common to all these mental abilities.

• 18:43Lex Fridman?

  So that a good IQ test, and I'll ask you about that, but a good IQ test tries to compress down that battery of tests, like tries to get a nice battery, the nice selection of variable tests into one test. And so in that way, it sneaks up to this G factor. And that's another interesting thing about G factor. Now you give, first of all, you have a great book on the neuroscience of intelligence. You have a great course, which is when I first learned, you're a great teacher. Let me just say.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 19:19Lex Fridman?

  You, your course, the teaching company, I hope I'm saying that correctly.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  The intelligent brain.

• 19:26Lex Fridman?

  The intelligent brain is when I first heard about this G factor, this mysterious thing that lurks in the darkness that we cannot quite shine a light on, we're trying to sneak up on. So the fact that there's this measure, stable measure of intelligence, we can't measure directly.

• 19:44Lex Fridman?

  But we can come up with a battery test or one test that includes a battery of variable type of questions that can reliably or attempt to estimate in a stable way that G factor. That's a fascinating idea. So for me, as an AI person, it's fascinating. It's fascinating. There's something stable like that about the human mind, especially if it's grounded in genetics. It's both fascinating that as a researcher of the human mind and all the human psychological, sociological, ethical questions that start arising, it makes me uncomfortable, but truth can be uncomfortable.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  You know, I get that a lot about being uncomfortable talking about this. Let me go back and just say one more empirical thing. It doesn't matter which battery of tests you use. So there are countless tests. You can take any 12 of them at random, extract a G factor and another 12 at random and extract a G factor. And those G factors will be highly correlated like over point nine with each other. That's very, so it is a ubiquitous, it doesn't depend on the content of the test is what I'm trying to say. It is general

• 21:10Speaker 01

  among all those tests of mental ability and tests of mental, you know, mental abilities include things like, geez, playing poker. Your skill at poker is not unrelated to G. Your skill at anything that requires reasoning and thinking, anything from spelling, arithmetic, more complex things. This concept is ubiquitous. And when you do batteries of test in different cultures, you get the same thing.

• 21:44Lex Fridman?

  So this says something interesting about the human mind that is a computer is designed to be general. So that means you can, so it's not, it's not easily made specialized.

• 21:59Lex Fridman?

  Meaning if you're going to be good at one thing, Miyamoto Masashi has this quote, he's an ancient warrior, famous for the Book of Five Rings in the martial arts world. And the quote goes, if you know the way broadly, you will see it in everything. Meaning if you do one thing is going to generalize to everything. And that's an interesting thing about the human mind. So that's what the G factor reveals. Okay. So what's the difference, if you can elaborate a little bit further between IQ and G factor? Just because it's a source of confusion for people.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  And IQ is a score. People use the word IQ to mean intelligence, but IQ has a more technical meaning for people who work in the field. And it's an IQ score, a score on a test that estimates the G factor. And the G factor is what's common among all these tests of mental ability. So if you think about, it's not a Venn diagram, but I guess you could make a Venn diagram out of it, but the G factor would be really at the core. What's common to everything. And what IQ scores do is they allow a rank order of people on the score. And this is what makes people uncomfortable.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  This is where there's a lot of controversy about whether IQ tests are biased toward any one group or another. And a lot of the answers to these questions are very clear, but they also have a technical aspect of it. It's not so easy to explain.

• 23:43Lex Fridman?

  Well, we'll talk about the fascinating and the difficult things about all of this. But so by the way, when you say rank order, that means you get a number and that means one person, you can now compare. Like you could say that this other person is more intelligent than me.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Well, what you can say is IQ scores are interpreted really as percentiles. So that if you have an IQ of 140 and somebody else has 70, the metric is such that you cannot say the person with an IQ of 140 is twice as smart. As a person with an IQ of 70, that would require a ratio scale with an absolute zero. Now, you may think you know people with zero intelligence, but in fact, there is no absolute zero on an IQ scale. It's relative to other people. So relative to other people, somebody with an IQ score of 140 is in the upper, less than

• 24:46Speaker 01

  1%, whereas somebody with an IQ of 70 is two standard deviations below the mean. That's a different percentile.

• 24:57Lex Fridman?

  So it's similar to like in chess, you have an Elo rating that's designed to rank order people. So you can't say it's twice one person, if your Elo rating is twice another person, I don't think you're twice as good at chess.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 25:15Lex Fridman?

  It's not stable in that way, but because it's very difficult to do these kinds of comparisons. But so what can we say about the number itself? Is that stable across tests and so on or no?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  There are a number of statistical properties of any test. They're called psychometric properties. You have validity, you have reliability, reliability, there are many different kinds of reliability. They all essentially measure stability. And IQ tests are stable within an individual. There are some longitudinal studies where children were measured at age 11. And again, when they were 70 years old and the two IQ scores are highly correlated with each other. This comes from a fascinating study from Scotland. In the 1930s, some researchers decided to get an IQ test on every single child age 11 in the whole country.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  And they did. And those records were discovered in an old storeroom at the University of Edinburgh by a friend of mine, Ian Deary, who found the records, digitized them, and has done a lot of research on the people who are still alive today from that original study, including brain imaging research, by the way. Really, it's a fascinating group of people who are studied. Not to get ahead of the story, but one of the most interesting things they found is a very strong relationship between IQ measured at age 11 and mortality.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  So that, you know, 70 years later, they looked at the survival rates and they could get death records from everybody. And Scotland has universal healthcare for everybody. And it turned out if you divide the people by their age 11 IQ score into quartiles, and then look at how many people are alive 70 years later, the, I know this is in the book, I have the graph in the book, but there are essentially twice as many people alive in the highest IQ quartile than in the lowest IQ quartile, true in men and women.

• 27:43Lex Fridman?

  Interesting.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  So it makes a big difference. Now, why this is the case is not so clear, since everyone had access to healthcare.

• 27:54Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's a lot, and we'll talk about it, you know, just the sentences you used now could be explained by nature or nurture. We don't know. Now, there's a lot of science that starts to then dig in and investigate that question. But let me linger on the IQ test. How are the test design, IQ test design? How do they work? Maybe some examples for people who are not aware. What, what makes a good IQ test question that sneaks up on this, on this G factor measure?

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Well, your question is interesting because you want me to give examples of items that make good items. And what makes a good item is not so much its content, but its empirical relationship to the total score that

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Turns out to be valid by other means.

• 28:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  So, for example, let me give you an odd example from personality testing.

• 28:53Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  So, there's a personality test called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, MMPI, been around for decades.

• 29:03Lex Fridman?

  I've heard about this test recently because of the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial. I don't know if you've been paying attention to that, but they had psychologists.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  I have not been paying attention to it.

• 29:12Lex Fridman?

  They had psychologists on the stand and they were talking, apparently those psychologists did, again, I'm learning so much from this trial, they have, they did different battery of tests to diagnose personality disorders. Apparently, there's that systematic way of doing so and the Minnesota one is one of the ones that there's the most science on. There's a lot of great papers, which were all continuously cited on the stand, which is fascinating to watch. Sorry, a little bit of attention.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  It's okay. I mean, this is interesting because you're right, it's been around for decades. There are a lot of scientific research on the psychometric properties of the test, including what it predicts with respect to different categories of personality disorder. But what I want to mention is the content of the items on that test. All of the items are essentially true, false items. True or false, I prefer a shower to a bath. True or false, I think Lincoln was a better president than Washington. What have all these, what does that have to do?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  And the point is, the content of these items, nobody knows why these items in aggregate predict anything, but empirically, they do. It's a technique of choosing items for a test that is called dust bowl empiricism, that the content doesn't matter, but there, for some reason, when you get a criterion group of people with this disorder and you compare them to people without that disorder, these are the items that distinguish, irrespective of content. It's a hard concept to grasp.

• 31:01Lex Fridman?

  Well, for sure, it's fascinating, but from a, because I.

• 31:08Lex Fridman?

  I consider myself part psychologist because I love human robot interaction and that's a problem. Half of that problem is a psychology problem because there's a human. So designing these tests to get at the questions is the fascinating part. Like, how do you get to, like, what does Dust Bowl empiricism refer to? Does it refer to the final result? Yeah, so it's the test is Dust Bowl empiricism, but how do you arrive at the battery of questions? I presume one of the things now, again, I'm going to the excellent testimony in that

• 31:49Lex Fridman?

  trial, they explained, because they also, they explained the tests, that a bunch of the questions are kind of, make you forget that you're taking a test, like, it makes it very difficult for you to somehow figure out what you're supposed to answer.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yes, it's called social desirability, but we're getting a little far afield because I only wanted to give that example of Dust Bowl empiricism. When we talk about the items on an IQ test, many of those items in the Dust Bowl empiricism method have no face validity. In other words, they don't look like they measure anything.

• 32:35Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Whereas most intelligence tests, the items actually look like they're measuring some mental ability. So here's, here's one of the-

• 32:44Lex Fridman?

  So you were bringing that up as an example, as what it is not?

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:47Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Okay, so I don't want to go too far afield on it.

• 32:51Lex Fridman?

  Too far afield is actually one of the names of this podcast, so I should, I should mention that.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Far afield.

• 32:58Lex Fridman?

  Far afield. Yeah, so anyway, sorry. So they feel the questions look like they, they pass the face validity test.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  And some more than others. So, for example, let me give you a couple of things here. If I, one of the subtests on a standard IQ test is general information. Let me just think a little bit because I don't want to give you the actual item. But if I said, how far is it between Washington DC and Miami, Florida?

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Within 500 miles plus or minus. Well, you know, it's not a fact most people memorize. But you know, something about geography, you say, well, I flew there once. I know planes fly 500 miles. You know, you can get, you can kind of make an estimate. But it's also seems like it would be very cultural. Um, you know, uh, so there's that kind of general information. Then there's vocabulary test. What does, uh, regatta mean? And I choose that word because that word was removed from the IQ test because people

• 34:12Speaker 01

  complained that disadvantaged people would not know that word just from their everyday life. Okay. Here's another example from a different kind of sub test on.

• 34:26Lex Fridman?

  What's regatta, by the way?

• 34:27Speaker 01

  A regatta is a, um.

• 34:30Lex Fridman?

  I think I'm disadvantaged.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  A sailing competition, a competition with boats. Not necessarily sailing, but a competition with boats.

• 34:37Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yep, yep. I'm probably disadvantaged in that way. Okay. Excellent. So that was removed. You were saying.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Okay. So here's a, here's another sub test. I'm going to repeat a string of numbers and when I'm done, I want you to repeat them back to me. Ready? Okay. Seven, four, two, eight, one, six.

• 35:00Lex Fridman?

  That's way too many. Seven, four, two, eight, one, six.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Okay. You get the idea. Now, the actual test starts with a smaller number, you know, like two numbers. And then it is people get it right. You keep going, adding to the string of numbers until they can't do it anymore. Okay. But now try this. I'm going to re, I'm going to say some numbers and when I'm done, I want you to repeat them to me backwards.

• 35:25Lex Fridman?

  I quit.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Okay. Now, so I gave you some examples of the kind of items on an IQ test. General information.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  I can't even remember all general information vocabulary, digit span forward and digit span backward.

• 35:45Lex Fridman?

  Well, you said, I can't even remember that. That's a good question for me. What does memory have to do with G factor?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Let's, let's, let's hold on.

• 35:54Lex Fridman?

  Okay, all right.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Let's, let's, let's just talk about these examples now. Some of those items seem very cultural. And others seem less cultural.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Which ones do you think scores on which sub test are most highly correlated with the G factor?

• 36:18Lex Fridman?

  Well, the, the two advancers less cultural.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Well. It turns out vocabulary is highly correlated. And it turns out that digit span backwards is highly correlated.

• 36:35Lex Fridman?

  How do you, how do you figure?

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Now you have decades of research to answer the question, how do you figure?

• 36:43Lex Fridman?

  Right. So now, now there's like good research that gives you intuition about what kind of questions get at it, just like a

• 36:54Lex Fridman?

  there's something I've done, I've actually used for research, just semi autonomous vehicle, like whether humans are paying attention, there's a body of literature that does like end back test, for example, we have to

• 37:12Lex Fridman?

  put workload on the brain to do recall, memory recall. And that helps you kind of put some work onto the brain while the person is doing some other task. And this does some interesting research with that. But that's loading the memory. So there's like research around stably what that means about the human mind. And here you're saying recall backwards is a good predictor.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Transformation.

• 37:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So you have to, so you have to do some. Some like you have to load that into your brain and not just remember it, but do something with it.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Right. Here's another example of a different kind of test called the HIC paradigm, and it's not verbal at all. It's a little box and there are a series of lights arranged in a semi circle at the top of the box. And then there's a home button that you press. And when one of the lights goes on, there's a button next to each of those lights. You take your finger off the home button and you just press the button next to the light that goes on. And so it's a very simple reaction time. Light goes on, as quick as you can, you press the button and you get a reaction time from the moment you lift your finger off the button to when you press

• 38:34Speaker 01

  the button with where the light is. That reaction time doesn't really correlate with IQ very much. But if you change the instructions and you say, three lights are going to come on simultaneously. I want you to press the button next to the light that's furthest from the other two.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  So maybe lights one and two go on and and light six goes on simultaneously. You take your finger off and you would press the button by light six. That's that reaction time to a more complex task. It's not really hard. Almost everybody gets it all right. But your reaction time to that is highly correlated with the G factor.

• 39:22Lex Fridman?

  This is fascinating. So reaction times, there's a temporal aspect to this. So what role does time?

• 39:29Speaker 01

  It's the speed of processing.

• 39:32Lex Fridman?

  Is this also true for ones that take longer, like five, 10, 30 seconds? Is time part of the measure with some of these?

• 39:41Speaker 01

  And that is why some of the best IQ tests have a time limit. Because if you have no time limit, people can do better.

• 39:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  But it doesn't, it doesn't distinguish among people that well. So that adding the time element is important. So speed of information processing and reaction time is a measure of speed of information processing turns out to be related to the G factor.

• 40:10Lex Fridman?

  But the G factor only accounts for maybe half or some amount on the test performance. For example, I get a pretty bad test anxiety. Like I was never, I mean, I just don't enjoy tests. I enjoy going back into my cave and working like I've always enjoyed homework way more than tests. No matter how hard the homework is, because I can go back to the cave and hide away and think deeply. There's something about being watched and having a time limit that really makes me anxious. And I could just see the mind not operating optimally at all. But you're saying underneath there, there's still a G factor, there's still.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  No question. No, no question.

• 40:54Lex Fridman?

  Ah, boy.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  And if you get anxious taking a test, many people say, oh, I didn't do well because I'm anxious.

• 41:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  You know, I hear that a lot.

• 41:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  They say, well, fine, if you're really anxious during the test, the score will be a bad estimate of your G factor.

• 41:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  It doesn't mean the G factor isn't there.

• 41:13Lex Fridman?

  That's right.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  And by the way, standardized tests like the SAT, they're essentially intelligence tests. They are highly G loaded. Now, the, the people who make the SAT don't want to mention that for obvious. They have enough trouble justifying standardized testing, but to call it an intelligence test is really beyond the pale. But in fact, it's so highly correlated because it's a reasoning test. SAT is a reasoning test, a verbal reasoning, mathematical reasoning.

• 41:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  And if it's a reasoning test, it has to be related to, to G. But if people go in and take a standardized test, whether it's an IQ test or the SAT, and they happen to be sick that day with a hundred and two fever.

• 42:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  The score is not going to be a good estimate of their G. If they retake the test when they're not anxious or less anxious or don't have a fever. The score will go up and that will be a better estimate. But you can't say their G factor increased between the two tests.

• 42:24Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's interesting. So the question is, how wide of a battery of tests is required to estimate the G factor? Well, because I'll give you as my personal example, I took the SAT and I think it was called the ACT where I was too. Also, I took SAT many times. Every single time I got it perfect on math and verbal, the time limit on the verbal made me very anxious. I did not, I mean, part of it, I didn't speak English very well, but honestly, it was like, you're supposed to remember stuff. And like, I was so anxious and like, as I'm reading, I'm sweating. I can't, you know, that like, um, that feeling you have when you're reading a book and you, you just read a page

• 43:08Lex Fridman?

  and you know nothing about what you've read because you zoned out. That's the same feeling of like, I can't, I have to, you're like, nope, read and understand. And that anxiety is like, and you start seeing like the typography versus the content of the words. Like that was, I don't, it's interesting because, um, I know that what they're measuring, I could see being correlated with, with something. But that anxiety or some aspect of the performance, um, sure plays a, plays a factor. And I wonder how you sneak up in a stable way.

• 43:49Lex Fridman?

  I mean, this is a broader discussion about that's like standardized testing, how you sneak up, how you get at the fact that I'm super anxious and still nevertheless measure some aspect of my intelligence. I wonder, I don't, I don't know. I don't know if you can say to that, that time limit sure is a pain.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  Well, let me say this, there are two ways to approach the very real problem that you say that some people just get anxious or not good test takers. By the way, part of

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Part of testing is you know the answer, you can figure out the answer, or you can't.

• 44:27Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  If you don't know the answer, there are many reasons you don't know the answer at that particular moment. You may have learned it once and forgotten it. You may, it may be on the tip of your tongue and you just can't get it because you're anxious about the time limit. You may never have learned it. You may never, you, you may have been exposed to it, but it was too complicated and you couldn't learn it. I mean, there are all kinds of, of reasons here. But for an individual to interpret your scores as an individual, whoever is interpreting the score has to take into account various things that would affect your individual's score. And that's why decisions about college admission or

• 45:11Speaker 01

  anything else where tests are used are hardly ever the only criterion to make a decision.

• 45:21Lex Fridman?

  And I think people are, college admissions, letting go of that very much.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, they're, yeah.

• 45:27Lex Fridman?

  But what does that even mean? Because is it possible to design standardized tests that do get, that are useful to college admissions?

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Well, they, they already exist. The SAT is highly correlated with many aspects of success at college.

• 45:44Lex Fridman?

  Here's the problem. So maybe you could speak to this. The correlation across the population versus individuals. So, you know, our criminal justice system is designed to make sure, well, it's, it's, it's still, there's tragic cases where innocent people go, go to jail, but you try to avoid that. In the same way with testing, it just, it would suck for an SAT to miss genius.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Yes, and it, it's possible, but it's statistically unlikely. So the, so it really comes down to.

• 46:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Do which piece of information?

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Maximizes your decision making ability. So if you just use high school grades, it's okay. But you will miss some people who just don't do well in high school, but who are actually pretty smart, smart enough to be bored silly in high school and they don't care and they their high school GPA isn't that good. So you will miss them. In the same sense, that somebody who could be very able and ready for a college just doesn't do well on their SAT. This is why you make decisions with taking in a variety of information.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  The other thing I wanted to say, I talked about when you make a decision for an individual. Statistically, for groups, there are many people who have a disparity between their math score and their verbal score. That disparity, or the other way around, that disparity is called tilt. The score is tilted one way or the other. And that tilt has been studied empirically to see what that predicts. And in fact, you can't make predictions about about college success based on tilt. And mathematics is a good example.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  There are many people, especially non-native speakers of English, who come to this country, take the SATs, do very well on the math and not so well on the verbal. Well, if they're applying to a math program, the professors there who are making the decision or the admissions officers don't wait so much the score on verbal, especially if it's a non-native speaker.

• 48:21Lex Fridman?

  Well, so yeah, you have to try to, in the admission process, bring in the context. But non-native isn't really the problem. I mean, that was part of the problem for me. But it's the anxiety was, which it's interesting. It's interesting.

• 48:41Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy, reducing yourself down to numbers, but it's still true. It's still the truth. It's a painful, that same anxiety that led me to be.

• 48:55Lex Fridman?

  To struggle with the SAT verbal tests is still within me in all ways of life. So maybe that's not anxiety. Maybe that's something, you know, like personality is also pretty stable.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Personality is stable. Personality does impact the way you navigate life.

• 49:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  There's no question.

• 49:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And we should say that the G factor in intelligence is not just about some kind of number on a paper. It's also has to do with how you navigate life. How easy life is for you in this very complicated world. So personality is all tied into that in some, in some, in some deep fundamental way.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  But now you've hit the key point about why we even want to study intelligence and personality, I think to a lesser extent, but that's my interest is more on intelligence. I went to graduate school and wanted to study personality, but that's kind of another story how I got kind of shifted from personality research over to intelligence research. Because it's not just a number. Intelligence is not just an IQ score. It's not just an SAT score. It's what those numbers reflect about your ability to navigate everyday life. It has been said that life is one long intelligence test.

• 50:27Lex Fridman?

  Ah.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  And who can't relate to that? And if you doubt, see, another problem here is a lot of critics of intelligence research, intelligence testing tend to be academics who by and large are pretty smart people. And pretty smart people by and large have enormous difficulty understanding what the world is like for people with IQs of 80. Or 75. It is a completely different everyday experience. Even IQ scores of 85, 90. You know, there's a popular television program Judge Judy.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Judge Judy deals with everyday people with everyday problems. And you can see the full range of problem solving ability demonstrated there. And sometimes she does it for laughs, but it really isn't funny because people who are there are people who are very limited in their life navigation, let alone success, by having by not having good reasoning skills, which cannot be taught. We know this, by the way, because there are many efforts. You know, the United States military, which excels at training people.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know that there's a better organization in the world for training diverse people. And they won't take people with IQs under, I think 83 is the cutoff. Because they have found you, they are unable to train people with lower IQs to do jobs in the military.

• 52:13Lex Fridman?

  So one of the things that G factor has to do with is learning.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Some people learn faster than others. Some people learn more than others. Now faster, by the way, is not necessarily better. As long as you get to the same place eventually. But you know, there are professional schools that want students who can learn the fastest because they can learn more or learn deeper or all kinds of of ideas about why you select people with the highest scores. And there's nothing funnier, by the way, to listen to a bunch of academics complain about the concept of intelligence and intelligence testing.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  And then you go to a faculty meeting where they're discussing who to hire among the applicants. And all they talk about is how smart the person is.

• 53:07Lex Fridman?

  We'll get to that. We'll sneak up to that in different ways. But there's something about reducing a person to a number that in part is grounded to the person's genetics that makes people very uncomfortable.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  But nobody does that. Nobody in the field actually does that. That is a, that is a worry that is a worry like,

• 53:33Speaker 01

  well, I don't want to call it a conspiracy theory. I mean, it's a legitimate worry, but it just doesn't, it just doesn't happen. Now, I had a professor in graduate school who was the only person I ever knew who considered students only by their, their test scores.

• 53:51Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  And later in his life, he kind of backed off that. But.

• 53:57Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me ask you this. So we'll jump around. I'll, I'll come back to it.

• 54:04Lex Fridman?

  I tend to, I've had like political discussions with people. And actually, my friend Michael Malice, he's, he's an anarchist. I disagree with him on basically everything except

• 54:20Lex Fridman?

  the fact that love is a beautiful thing in this world.

• 54:26Lex Fridman?

  And he says this test about left versus right, whatever. It doesn't matter what the test is. But he believes, the question is, do you believe that some people are better than others?

• 54:39Lex Fridman?

  Question is ambiguous. Do you believe some people are better than others? And to me, sort of the immediate answer is no. It's a poetic question. It's ambiguous question, right? Like, you know, people want to maybe the temptation to ask better what? Better like sports, so on? No. To me, I stand with the sort of the Fonda document of this country, which is all men are created equal. There's a basic humanity. And there's something about tests of intelligence.

• 55:18Lex Fridman?

  Just knowing that some people are different, like the science of intelligence that shows that some people are genetically.

• 55:28Lex Fridman?

  In some stable way across a lifetime, have a greater intelligence than others. Makes people feel like some people are better than others. And that makes them very uncomfortable. And I, maybe you can speak to that. The fact that some people are more intelligent than others in a way that's cannot be compensated through education, through anything you do in life. What do we do with that?

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Okay, there's a lot there. We haven't really talked about the genetics of it yet. But you are correct in that it is my interpretation of the data that genetics has a very important influence on the G factor. And this is controversial, we can talk about it. But if you think that genetics, that genes are deterministic, are always deterministic, that leads to kind of the worry that you expressed. But we know now in the 21st century that many genes are not deterministic, they're probabilistic.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Meaning they, their, their gene expression can be influenced. Now whether they're influenced only by other biological variables or other genetic variables, or environmental or cultural variables, that's where the controversy comes in. And we can come, we can discuss that in more detail if you like. But to go to the question about better, people better, there's zero evidence that smart people are better with respect to important aspects of life, like honesty, even likability.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  I'm sure you know many very intelligent people who are not terribly likeable, or terribly kind, or terribly honest.

• 57:34Lex Fridman?

  Is there something to be said, so, one of the things I've recently reread for the second time, I guess that's what the word reread means, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which is, I think, the best telling of the rise and fall of Hitler. And one of the interesting things about the people that, how should I say it? Justified, or maybe propped up, the ideas that Hitler put forward, is the fact that

• 58:15Lex Fridman?

  they were extremely intelligent, they were in the intellectual class. They were, like, it was obvious that they, they thought very deeply and rationally about the world. So what I would like to say is, one of the things that shows to me is, some of the worst atrocities in the history of humanity have been committed by very intelligent people. So that, that means that intelligence doesn't make you a good person. I wonder if, you know, there's a G factor for intelligence. I wonder if there's a G factor for goodness. You know, the Nietzschean good and evil, of course, that's probably harder to measure,

• 59:00Lex Fridman?

  because it's such a subjective thing, what it means to be good. And even the idea of evil is a deeply uncomfortable thing, because how do we know?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  But it's independent, whatever it is, it's independent of intelligence. So I, I agree with you about that. But let me say this, I have also asserted my belief that more intelligence is better than less.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  It doesn't mean more intelligent people are better people. But all things being equal, would you like to be smarter or less smart? So if I had a pill, I have two pills. I said, this one will make you smarter, this one will make you dumber. Which one would you like? Are there any circumstances under which you would choose to be dumber?

• 59:48Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me ask you this. That's a very nuanced and interesting question. You know, there's been books written about this, right? Now we'll return to the hard questions, the interesting questions. But let me ask about human happiness. Does intelligence lead to happiness?

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:00:10Lex Fridman?

  So, so, okay, so back to the pill then. So why, uh, when would you take the pill? So you said IQ 80, 90, 100, 110. You start going to the quartiles and, um, is it obvious? Isn't there, uh, diminishing returns? And then it starts becoming negative.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  This is an empirical question.

• 1:00:38Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  And so that I have advocated in many forums, more research on enhancing the G factor. Right now, there's, there have been many claims about enhancing intelligence. With, you mentioned the N back training. It was a big deal a few years ago. It doesn't work. Data is very clear. It does not work, you know?

• 1:01:04Lex Fridman?

  Or doing like memory tests, like training and so on.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it make, it may give you a better memory in the short run, but it doesn't impact your G factor.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  It was very popular a couple of decades ago that the idea that listening to Mozart could make you more intelligent. There was a paper published on this with somebody I knew published this paper. Uh, intelligence researchers never believed it for a second. Been hundreds of studies, all the meta-analyses, all the summaries and so on. So there's nothing to it, nothing to it at all.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  But, but, but, wouldn't it be something? Wouldn't it be world shaking? If you could take the normal distribution of intelligence, which we haven't really talked about yet, but IQ scores and the G factors thought to be a normal distribution? And shift it to the right so that everybody is smarter? Even a half a standard deviation would be world shaking? Because there are many social problems, many, many social problems that are exacerbated by people with lower ability to reason stuff out and navigate everyday life.

• 1:02:29Lex Fridman?

  I wonder if there's a threshold? So maybe I would push back and say, universal shifting of the normal distribution may not be the optimal way of shifting. Maybe it's better to, whatever the asymmetric kind of distributions is like really pushing the lower up versus trying to make the people at the average more intelligent.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  So you're saying that if in fact there was some way to increase G, let's just call it metaphorically a pill, an IQ pill, we should only give it to people at the lower end?

• 1:03:09Lex Fridman?

  No, it's just intuitively, I can see that life becomes easier at the lower end. If it's increased, it becomes less and less, it is an empirical scientific question, but it becomes less and less obvious to me that more intelligence is better.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  At the high end, it, not because it would make life easier, but it would make whatever problems you're working on more solvable. And if you are working on artificial intelligence, there's a tremendous potential.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  To good for for that to improve society.

• 1:03:52Lex Fridman?

  I understand, but so at the whatever problems you're working on, yes. But there's also the problem of the human condition. There's love, there's fear and all of those beautiful things. That sometimes if you're good at solving problems, you're going to create more problems for yourself. It's a I'm not exactly sure. So ignorance is bliss is a thing. So there might be a place, there might be a sweet spot of intelligence. Given your environment, given your personality, all of those kinds of things. And that becomes less beautifully complicated, the more and more intelligent you become. But that's a that's a that's a question for literature, not for science, perhaps.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Well, imagine this, imagine there was an IQ pill.

• 1:04:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  And it was developed by a private company. And they are willing to sell it to you. And whatever price they put on it, you are willing to pay it because you would like to be smarter.

• 1:04:50Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  But just before they give you a pill, they give you a disclaimer form to sign.

• 1:04:57Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  Don't hold us that we you understand that this pill has no guarantee that your life is going to be better. And in fact, it could be worse.

• 1:05:09Lex Fridman?

  Well, yes, that's how lawyers work, but I would love for science to answer the question. To try to predict if your life is going to be better or worse. When you become more more or less intelligent, it's a it's a fascinating question. About what is the sweet spot for the human condition?

• 1:05:26Lex Fridman?

  Some of the things we see as bugs might be actually features may be crucial to our overall happiness is our limitations might lead to more happiness than less. But again, more intelligence is better at the lower end. That's more that's that's something that's less arguable and and fascinating, if possible, to increase.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  But you know, there's virtually no research. That's based on a neuroscience approach to solving that problem. All the solutions that have been proposed to solve that problem, or to ameliorate that problem, are essentially based on the blank slate assumption that enriching the environment, removing barriers, all good things, by the way. I'm not against any of those things. But there's no empirical evidence that they're going to improve the general reasoning ability, or make people more employable.

• 1:06:26Lex Fridman?

  Have you read Flowers of Algonon?

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:30Lex Fridman?

  That's to the question of intelligence and happiness.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  There are many profound aspects of that story. It was a film that was very good. The film was called Charlie. For the younger people who are listening to this, you might be able to stream it on Netflix or something. But it was a story about a person with very low IQ who underwent a surgical procedure in the brain, and he slowly became a genius. And the tragedy of the story is the effect was temporary.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  It's a fascinating story, really.

• 1:07:12Lex Fridman?

  That goes in contrast to the basic human experience that each of us individually have. But it raises the question of the full the full range of people who might be able to be given different levels of intelligence. You've mentioned the normal distribution. So let's talk about it. There's a book called The Bell Curve, written in 1994, written by psychologist Richard Hoenstein and political scientist Charles Murray. Why was this book so controversial?

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  This is a fascinating book. I know Charles Murray. I've had many conversations with him.

• 1:07:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, what is the book about?

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  The book is about the importance of intelligence in everyday life. That's what the book is about. It's an empirical book. It has statistical analyses of very large databases that show that essentially IQ scores or their equivalent are correlated to all kinds of social problems and social benefits. And that in itself is not where the controversy about that book came. The controversy was

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  about one chapter in that book, and that is a chapter about the average difference in mean scores between black Americans and white Americans. And these are the terms that were used in the book at the time and are still used to some extent.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  And historically, or really for decades, it has been observed that disadvantaged groups

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  score, on average, lower than Caucasians on academic tests, tests of mental ability, and especially on IQ tests. And the difference is about a standard deviation, which is about 15 points, which is a substantial difference.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  In the book, Hearnstein and Murray, in this one chapter, assert clearly and unambiguously that whether this average difference is due to genetics or not, they are agnostic. They don't know. Moreover, they assert they don't care because you wouldn't treat anybody differently knowing if there was a genetic component or not, because that's a group average finding. Every individual has to be treated as an individual. You can't make any assumption about what that person's intellectual ability might be from the fact of an average group

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  difference. They're very clear about this.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, people took away, I'm going to choose my words carefully because I have a feeling that many critics didn't actually read these, read the book. They took away that Herstein and Murray were saying that blacks are genetically inferior. That was the take-home message. And if they weren't saying it, they were implying it because they had a chapter that discussed this empirical observation of a difference. And isn't this horrible? And so the reaction to that book was incendiary.

• 1:10:55Lex Fridman?

  What do we know about, from that book and the research beyond, about race differences and intelligence?

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  It's still the most incendiary topic in psychology. Nothing has changed that. Anybody who even discusses it is easily called a racist just for discussing it. It's become fashionable to find racism in any discussion like this. It's unfortunate. The short answer to your question is, there's been very little actual research on this topic since 19-

• 1:11:42Lex Fridman?

  Since the bell curve.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Since the bell curve, even before. This really became incendiary in 1969 with an article published by an educational psychologist named Arthur Jensen. Let's just take a minute and go back to that to see the bell curve in a little bit more historical perspective. Arthur Jensen was a educational psychologist at UC Berkeley. I knew him as well. And in 1969 or 68, the Harvard Educational Review asked him to take an, to do a review article

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  on the early childhood education programs that were designed to raise the IQs of minority students. This was before the federally funded Head Start program. Head Start had not really gotten underway at the time Jensen undertook his review of what were a number of demonstration programs. And these demonstration programs were for young children around kindergarten age. And they were specially designed to be cognitively stimulating, to provide lunches, do all the

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  things that people thought would minimize this average gap of intelligence tests. There was a strong belief among virtually all psychologists that the cause of the gap was unequal opportunity due to racism, due to all, you know, all negative things in the society. And if you could compensate for this, the gap would go away. So, early childhood education back then was called, literally, compensatory education. Jensen looked at these programs. He was an empirical guy. He understood psychometrics.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  And he wrote a, it was over a hundred-page article detailing these programs and the flaws in their research design. Some of the programs reported IQ gains of, on average, five points, but a few reported 10, 20, and even 30-point gains. One was called "The Miracle in Milwaukee." That investigator went to jail ultimately for fabricating data. But the point is that Jensen wrote an article that said, "Look," the opening sentence of this article is classic. The opening sentence is, I may not quote it exactly right, but it's, "We have tried compensatory education, and it has failed."

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  And he showed that these gains... Were essentially nothing. You couldn't really document empirically any gains at all from these really earnest efforts to increase IQ. But he went a step further, a fateful step further. He said, "Not only have these efforts failed, but because they have had essentially no impact, we have to reexamine our assumption that these differences are caused by environmental things that we can address with education. We need to consider a genetic influence, whether there's a genetic influence on this group difference."

• 1:15:11Lex Fridman?

  So you said that this is one of the more controversial works?

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  I think it's the most infamous paper in all of psychology, I would go on to say. Because in 1969, the genetic data was very skimpy on this question. Skimpy and controversial. It's always been controversial, but it was even skimpy and controversial. It's kind of a long story that I go into a little bit in more detail in the book Neuroscience of Intelligence. But to say he was vilified is an understatement. I mean, he couldn't talk at the American Psychological Association without bomb threats clearing the lecture hall. Campus security watched him all the time. They opened his mail. He had to retreat

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  to a different address. This was one of the earliest kinds, this is before the internet and kind of internet, social media mobs. But it was that intense. And I have written that overnight, after the publication of this article,

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  All intelligence research became radioactive. Nobody wanted to talk about it. And then it didn't, it, nobody was doing more research. And then the bell curve came along. And the Jensen controversy was dying down. I have stories that Jensen told me about his interaction with the Nixon White House on this issue. I mean, it was, this was like a really big deal. It was some unbelievable stories, but you know, he told me this, so I kind of believe these stories. Nonetheless.

• 1:17:00Lex Fridman?

  Twenty-five years later.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  Twenty-five years later.

• 1:17:03Lex Fridman?

  All the silence, basically, saying, you know, this, uh, nobody wants to do this kind of research. There's so much pressure, so much attack against this kind of research. And here's, uh, sort of a bold, stupid, crazy people that decide to dive right back in. I wonder how much discussion there was. Do we include this chapter or not?

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  Murray has said they discussed it and they felt they should include it. And they were very careful in the way they, they wrote it, which did them no good.

• 1:17:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  Uh, so, um, as a matter of fact, when the bell curve came out, it was so controversial. I got a call from a television show called Nightline. It was with a broadcaster called Ted Koppel. He had this evening show, I think it was on late at night, talked about news. It was a straight up news thing.

• 1:18:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  And producer called and asked if I would be on it to talk about the, uh, the bell curve. And I said, you know, it, it, she asked me what I thought about the bell curve as a book. And I said, look, it's a very good book. It talks about the role of intelligence in society. And she said, no, no, what do you think about the chapter on race? That's what we want you to talk about. I remember this conversation. I said, well.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  She said, what would you say if you were on TV? And I said, well, what I would say is that it's not at all clear if there's any genetic component to intelligence, any differences. But if there were a strong genetic component, that would be a good thing. And, you know, complete silence on the other end of the phone.

• 1:19:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  And she said, well, what do you mean? And I said, well, if it's the more genetic any difference is, the more it's biological. And if it's biological, we can figure out how to fix it.

• 1:19:18Lex Fridman?

  I see. That's interesting.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  She said, would you say that on television?

• 1:19:22Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  I said, no. And so that was the end of that.

• 1:19:26Lex Fridman?

  So that's for more like biology is within the reach of science. And the environment is a public policy, is social and all those kinds of things. From your perspective, whichever one you think is more amenable to solutions in the in the short term is the one that excites you. But you saying that is good. The truth of genetic differences, no matter what, between groups is a painful, harmful,

• 1:20:11Lex Fridman?

  potentially, potentially dangerous thing. Let me ask you to this question, whether it's bell curve or any research on race differences. Can that be used to increase the amount of racism in the world? Can that be used to increase the amount of hate in the world? Do you think about this kind of stuff?

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  I have thought about this a lot, not as a scientist, but as a person. And my sense is there is such enormous reservoirs of hate and racism that have nothing to do with scientific knowledge of the data, that speak against that, that, no, I don't, I don't want to give racist groups a veto power over what scientists study. If you think that the differences, and by the way, virtually no one disagrees that there are differences in scores. It's all about what causes them and how to fix

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  it. So if you think this is a cultural problem, then you must ask the problem, what do you want to, do you want to change anything about the culture? Or are you okay with the culture? Because you don't feel it's appropriate to change a person's culture. So are you okay with that? And the fact that that may lead to disadvantages in, in school achievement? It's a question. Are, if you think it's environmental, what are the environmental parameters that can be fixed? I'll tell you one, lead in, you know, lead from gasoline in the atmosphere, lead in paint, lead in, in water. That's an environmental toxin

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  that society has the means to eliminate, and they should.

• 1:22:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, just to sort of trying to find some insights and conclusion to this very difficult topic. Is there been research on environment versus genetics, nature versus nurture on this question of race differences?

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  There is not, no one wants to do this research. First of all, it's hard research to do. Second of all, it's, it's a minefield. No one wants to spend their career on it. Tenured people don't want to do it, let alone students. The way I talk about it, I, well, before I tell you the way I, I talk about it, I want to say one more thing about Jensen. He was once asked by a journalist, straight out, are you a racist? His answer was very interesting. His answer was, I've thought about that a lot. And I've concluded it doesn't matter.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  Now, I know what he meant by this.

• 1:23:02Lex Fridman?

  The guts to say that, wow.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  He was a very unusual person. I think he had a touch of Asperger's syndrome, to tell you the truth, because I saw him in many circumstances.

• 1:23:13Lex Fridman?

  He would be canceled on Twitter immediately with that sentence.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but what he meant was, he had a hypothesis.

• 1:23:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  And with respect to group differences, he called it the default hypothesis. He said, whatever factors affect individual intelligence are likely the same factors that affect group differences. It was the default, but it was a hypothesis. It should be tested, and if it turned out empirical test didn't support the hypothesis, he was happy to move on to something else. He was absolutely committed to that scientific ideal. That it's an empirical question, we should look at it, and let's see what happens.

• 1:23:57Lex Fridman?

  The scientific method cannot be racist from his perspective. It doesn't matter what the scientists, if they follow the scientific method, it doesn't matter what they believe.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  And if they are biased, and they consciously or unconsciously bias the data, other people will come along to replicate it, they will fail, and the process over time will work.

• 1:24:27Lex Fridman?

  So let me push back on this idea. Because psychology, to me, is full of gray areas. And what I've observed about psychology, even replication crisis aside, is that something about the media, something about journalism, something about the virality of ideas in the public sphere, they misinterpret, they take up things from studies willfully or from ignorance, misinterpret findings, and tell narratives around that.

• 1:25:06Lex Fridman?

  I personally believe, for me, I'm not saying that broadly about scientists, but for me, it's my responsibility to anticipate the ways in which findings will be misinterpreted. So I've had, I thought about this a lot because I publish papers on semi-autonomous vehicles and those, you know, cars, people die in cars. There's people that have written me letters, saying emails, nobody writes letters, I wish they did, that have blood on my hands because of things that I would say, positive or negative, there's consequences. In the same way, when you're a researcher of intelligence, I'm sure you might get emails

• 1:25:51Lex Fridman?

  or at least people might believe that a finding of your study is going to be used by a large number of people to increase the amount of hate in the world.

• 1:26:01Lex Fridman?

  I think there's some responsibility on scientists, but for me, I think there's a great responsibility to anticipate the ways things will be misinterpreted. And there you have to, first of all, decide whether you want to say a thing at all, do the study at all, publish the study at all, and to the words with which you explain it. It's, I find this on Twitter a lot, actually, which is when I, when I write a tweet, and I'm usually just doing so innocently, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll write it. You know, it takes me like five seconds to write it or whatever, 30 seconds to write it.

• 1:26:43Lex Fridman?

  And then I'll think, all right, I like close my eyes open and try to see how will the world interpret this? Like, what are the ways in which this will be misinterpreted? And I'll sometimes adjust that tweet to see, like, yeah, so in my mind, it's clear, but that's because it's my mind from which this tweet came. But you have to think in a fresh mind that sees this

• 1:27:07Lex Fridman?

  and it's spread across a large number of other minds, how will the interpretation morph? I mean, for a tweet, that's a silly thing, it doesn't matter, but for a scientific paper and study and finding, I think it matters. So I don't know. Well, I don't know what your thoughts about that because maybe for Justin, the data is there. What do you want me to do? This is a scientific process has been carried out. If you think the data was polluted by bias, do other studies that reveal the bias. But the data is there. And like, I have, I'm not a poet.

• 1:27:51Lex Fridman?

  I'm not a literary writer. Like, what do you want me to do? I'm just presenting you the data. What do you think on that spectrum? What's the role of a scientist?

• 1:28:00Speaker 01

  The reason I do podcasts.

• 1:28:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  The reason I write books for the public is to explain what I think the data mean and what I think the data don't mean. I don't do very much on Twitter, other than to retweet references to papers.

• 1:28:18Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  I don't think it's my role to explain these because they're complicated. They're nuanced. But when you decide not to do a scientific study because you're, or not to publish a result because you're afraid the result could be, could be harmful or insensitive, that's not an unreasonable thought. And people will make different conclusions and decisions about that. I wrote about this. I wrote, I'm the editor of a journal called Intelligence, which publishes, which publishes scientific papers. Sometimes we publish papers on group differences.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  Those papers sometimes are controversial. These papers are written for a scientific audience. They're not written for the Twitter audience. I don't promote them very much on Twitter. But in a scientific paper, you have now choose your words carefully also, because those papers are picked up by non-scientists, by writers of various kinds. And you have to be available to discuss what you're saying and what you're not saying. Sometimes you are successful at having a good conversation, like we are today. It doesn't start out pejorative.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  Other times, I have been asked to participate in debates where my role would be to justify race science. Well, you can see, you start out.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  You know, that was a BBC request that I had, that I received.

• 1:30:04Lex Fridman?

  I have so much, it's a love hate relationship, mostly hate with these shallow journalism organizations. So they would want to use you as a kind of in a debate setting to communicate as to like, there is raised differences between groups and make that into debate.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:30:23Lex Fridman?

  And put you in a role of.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  Justifying racism.

• 1:30:28Lex Fridman?

  Justifying racism.

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  That's what they're asking me to do.

• 1:30:30Lex Fridman?

  Of course, it's like educating about this, this field of the science of intelligence. Yeah.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  I want to say one more thing before we get off the, the normal distribution. You also asked me, what is the science after the bell curve? And the short answer is there's not much new work, but whatever work there is, supports the idea that there still are group differences. It's arguable whether those differences have diminished at all or not. And there is still a major problem in underperformance for school achievement. For many disadvantaged and minority students, and there so far is no way to fix it.

• 1:31:16Lex Fridman?

  What do we do with this information? What is this, is this now a task now? We'll talk about the future on the neuroscience and the biology side. But in terms of disinformation as a society, in the public policy, in the political space, in the social space, what do we do with this information?

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  I've thought a lot about this. The first step is to have people interested in policy, understand what the data actually show to pay attention to intelligence data. You can read policy papers about education and using your word processor, you can search for the word intelligence. You can search a 20,000 word document in a second and find out the word intelligence does not appear anywhere. And most discussions about what to do about achievement gaps, I'm not talking about test gaps, I'm talking about actual achievement gaps in schools, which everyone agrees is a problem.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  The word intelligence doesn't appear among educators.

• 1:32:23Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  As a matter of fact, in California. There has been tremendous controversy about recent attempts to revise the curriculum for math in high schools. And we had a Stanford professor of education who was running this review assert there's no such thing as talent, mathematical talent. And she wanted to get rid of the advanced classes in math because, you know, not everyone could do that. Now, of course, this has been very controversial. They've retreated somewhat. But the idea that a university professor was in charge of this who believes that there's

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  no talent, that it doesn't exist, this is rather shocking, let alone the complete absence of intelligence data. By the way, let me tell you something about what the intelligence data show. Let's take race out of it. Even though the origins of these studies were a long time ago, I'm blocking on the name of the report. The Coleman Report was a famous report about education. And they measured all kinds of variables about schools, about teachers, and they looked at academic achievement as an outcome.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  And they found the most predictive variables of education outcome were the variables the student brought with him or her into the school, essentially their ability. And that when you combine the school and the teacher variables together, the quality of the school, the funding of the school, the quality of the teachers, their education, you put all the teacher and school variables together, it barely accounted for 10% of the variance. And this has been replicated now. You know, so the best research we have shows that school variables and teacher variables

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  together account for about 10% of student academic achievement. Now, you want to have some policy on improving academic achievement? How much money do you want to put into teacher education? How much money do you want to put into the quality of the school administration? You know who you can ask? You can ask the Gates Foundation. Because they spent a tremendous amount of money doing that. And they, at the end of it, because they're measurement people, they want to, you know, they want to know the data, they found it had no impact at all. And they've kind of pulled out of that kind of program.

• 1:35:12Lex Fridman?

  So, oh, boy. Let me ask, let me ask you, this is me talking, but there's...

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  Just the two of us.

• 1:35:21Lex Fridman?

  Well, just the two of us, but I'm gonna say some funny and ridiculous things, so you're sure you're not approving of it. But there's a movie called Clerks. You probably...

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  I've seen it. I've seen it, yeah.

• 1:35:35Lex Fridman?

  There's a funny scene in there where a lovely couple are talking about the number of previous sexual partners they had. And the woman says that, I believe she just had a handful, like two or three or something like that, sexual partners, but then she also mentioned that she, what's that called? Fellatio? What's the scientific, but she went, you know, gave a blowjob to 37 guys, I believe it is. And so that has to do with the truth. So sometimes, knowing the truth...

• 1:36:15Lex Fridman?

  Can get in the way of a successful relationship of love of some of the human flourishing. And that's seems to me that's at the core here, that facing some kind of truth that's not able to be changed is makes it difficult to sort of is limiting as opposed to empowering. That's the concern. If you sort of test for intelligence and lay the data out, it feels like you will give up on certain people. You will you'll sort of start bidding people as like, well, this is this person is like, let's focus on the average people. Well,

• 1:36:58Lex Fridman?

  let's focus on the very intelligent people. That's the concern. And and there's a kind of intuition that if we just don't measure, and we don't use that data, that we would treat everybody equal and give everybody equal opportunity. If we have the data in front of us, we're likely to mis distribute the amount of sort of attention we allocate, resources we allocate allocate to people. That's that's probably the concern.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  It's a realistic concern. And but I think it's a misplaced concern if you want to fix the problem. If you want to fix the problem, you have to know what the problem is.

• 1:37:43Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  Now, let me let me tell you this. Let's go back to the bell curve for not the bell curve, but the normal distribution.

• 1:37:50Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:37:51Speaker 01

  16% of the population on average has an IQ under 85, which means they're very hard. If you have an IQ under 85, it's very hard to find gainful employment at a salary that sustains you at least minimally in modern life. Okay, not impossible, but it's very difficult. 16% of the population of the United States is about 51 or 52 million people with IQs under 85. This is not a small issue. 14 million children have IQs under 85.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  Is this something we want to ignore? Does this have any, what is the Venn diagram between, you know, when you have people with IQs under 85 and you have achievement in school or achievement in life? There's a lot of overlap there. This is why, to go back to the IQ pill, if there were a way to shift that curve toward the higher end, that would have a big impact.

• 1:39:10Lex Fridman?

  If I could, maybe before we talk about the impact on life and so on, some of the criticisms of the bell curve, so Stephen Jay Gould wrote that the bell curve rests on four incorrect assumptions. It'd be just interesting to get your thoughts on the four assumptions, which are, intelligence must be reducible to a single number, intelligence must be capable of rank ordering people in the linear order, intelligence must be primarily genetically based, and intelligence must be essentially immutable. Maybe not as criticisms, but as thoughts about intelligence.

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, we could, we could spend a lot of time on him.

• 1:39:52Lex Fridman?

  On Stephen Jay Gould, yeah.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  He wrote that in what, about 1985, 1984? He, his views were overtly political, not scientific. He was a scientist, but his views on this were overtly political, and I would encourage people listening to this, if they really want to understand his criticisms, they should just Google what he had to say and Google the scientific reviews of his book, The Mismeasure of Man, and they will take these statements apart.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  They were wrong, not only were they wrong, but when he asserted in his first book that, you know, that there was no biological basis essentially to IQ, by the time the second edition came around, there were studies of MRI, MRIs of showing that brain size, brain volume were correlated to IQ scores, which he declined to put in his book.

• 1:40:58Lex Fridman?

  So I'm learning a lot today. I didn't know, I didn't know the, actually the extent of his work. I was just using a few little snippets of criticism. That's interesting. So there's a battle here. He wrote a book, Mismeasure of Man. That's not, that's missing a lot of the scientific.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  His book is highly popular in colleges today. You can find it in any college bookstore under assigned reading. It's highly popular.

• 1:41:23Lex Fridman?

  The Mismeasure of Man?

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  Yes, highly influential.

• 1:41:25Lex Fridman?

  Can you speak to the Mismeasure of Man? I'm, I'm undereducated about this. So what, is this the book basically criticizing?

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:32Lex Fridman?

  The ideas in the bulk of?

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Where those four things came from. And it is really a book that was really taken apart, point by point, by a number of people who actually understood the data. And he didn't care.

• 1:41:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  He didn't care. He didn't modify anything.

• 1:41:50Lex Fridman?

  It's a politically, listen, because this is such a sensitive topic, like I said, I believe

• 1:42:00Lex Fridman?

  the, the impact of the work as it is misinterpreted has to be considered because it's not just going to be scientific discourse, it's going to be political discourse, there's going to be debates, there's going to be

• 1:42:17Lex Fridman?

  politically motivated people that will use messages in each direction, make it the, make something like the bulk of the enemy or the support for your, for, for one's racist beliefs. And so I think you have to consider that, but it's difficult because, you know, Nietzsche was used by Hitler to justify a lot of his beliefs. And it's not, it's not exactly on Nietzsche to, to anticipate Hitler. So, or how his ideas will be misinterpreted and used for evil. But there's a balance there. So I understand. This is really interesting. I didn't, I didn't know. Is there any criticism of the book you find compelling or interesting or challenging to you from a scientific perspective?

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  There were factual criticisms about the nature of the statistics that were used, the statistical analyses. These were more technical criticisms. And they were addressed by Murray in a couple of articles where he took all the criticisms and, and spoke to them. And people listening to this podcast. Can certainly find all those online. It's very interesting. But Murray went on to write some additional books, two in the last couple of years. One about human diversity, where he goes through the data, refuting the idea that race is only a social construct with no biological meaning.

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  He discusses the data. It's a very good discussion. You don't have to agree with it, but he presents data in a cogent way. And he talks about the critics of that, and he talks about their data in a cogent, non personal way. It's a very informative discussion. The book is called Human Diversity. He talks about race and he talks about gender, same thing, about sex differences. And more recently, he's written what might be his final say on this, a book called Facing Reality, where he talks about this again. So, you know, he can certainly defend himself. He doesn't need me to do that.

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  But I would urge people who have heard about him and the bell curve and who think they know what's in it, you are likely incorrect and you need to read it for yourself.

• 1:44:44Lex Fridman?

  But it is scientifically, it's a, it's a serious subject. It's a difficult subject. Ethically, it's a difficult subject. Everything you said here calmly and thoughtfully is difficult. It's difficult for me to even consider that G factor exists. I don't mean from like that somehow G factor is inherently racist or sexist or whatever. It's just, it's difficult in the way that concerning the fact that we die one day is difficult, that we are limited by our biology is difficult. And it's.

• 1:45:25Lex Fridman?

  At least from an American perspective, you like to believe that everything is possible in this world.

• 1:45:29Speaker 01

  Well, that leads us to what I think we should do with this information. And what I think we should do with this information is unusual.

• 1:45:44Lex Fridman?

  Uh oh.

• 1:45:45Speaker 01

  Because I think what we need to do is fund more neuroscience research on the molecular biology of learning and memory. Because one definition of intelligence is based on how much you can learn and how much you can remember.

• 1:46:05Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  And if you accept that definition of intelligence, then there are molecular studies going on now, and Nobel Prizes being one, on molecular biology or molecular neurobiology of learning and memory. Now, the step those researchers, those scientists, need to take when it comes to intelligence is to focus on the concept of individual differences. Intelligence research has individual differences as its heart because it assumes that people

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  differ on this variable, and those differences are meaningful and need understanding. Cognitive psychologists, who have morphed into molecular biologists studying learning and memory, hate the concept of individual differences historically. Some now are coming around to it. I once sat next to a Nobel Prize winner for his work on memory, and I asked him about individual differences, and he said, "Don't go there, it'll set us back 50 years."

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  But I said, I said, don't you think they're the key, though, to understand why can some people remember more than others? He said, you don't want to go there.

• 1:47:35Lex Fridman?

  I think the 21st century will be remembered by the technology and the science that goes to individual differences because we have now data, we have now the tools to much, much better to start to measure, start to estimate, not just on the sort of through tests and IQ test type of things, sort of outside the body kind of things, but measuring all kinds of stuff about the body. So you had truly go into the molecular biology, to the neurobiology, to the neuroscience. Let me ask you about the life. How does intelligence correlate with or lead to or has anything to do with career success? You've mentioned these kinds

• 1:48:19Lex Fridman?

  of things. And is there any data? You had an excellent conversation with Jordan Peterson, for example. Is there any data on what intelligent means for success in life?

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  Success in life, there is a tremendous amount of validity data that looked at intelligence test scores and various measures of life success. Now, of course, life success is a pretty broad topic, and not everybody agrees on, you know, what success means. But there's general agreement on certain aspects of success that can be measured. And

• 1:49:12Lex Fridman?

  Including life expectancy, like you said.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  Life expectancy. Now, there's life success. You know, life expectancy. I mean, that is such an interesting finding, but it, you know, IQ scores are also correlated to things like income. Now, okay, so who thinks income means you're successful? That's not the point. The point is that income is one empirical measure.

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  In this culture, that says something about your level of success. You can define success in ways that have nothing to do with income. You can define success based on your evolutionary, natural selection success. You know, but for variables, and even that, by the way, is correlated to IQ in some studies. So however you want to define success, IQ is important. It's not the only determinant. People get hung up on, well, what about personality? What about so-called emotional intelligence? Yes, all those things matter.

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  The thing that matters empirically, the single thing that matters the most is your general ability, your general mental, intellectual ability, your reasoning ability. And the more complex your vocation, the more complex your job, the more G matters. G doesn't matter in a lot of occupations don't require complex thinking. And there are occupations like that, and G doesn't matter. Within an occupation, the G might not matter so much. So that if you look at all the professors at MIT

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  and had a way to rank order them, you know, there's a ceiling effect is what I'm saying. That, you know.

• 1:51:24Lex Fridman?

  Also, when you get past a certain threshold, then there's impact on wealth, for example, or career success, however that's defined in each individual discipline. But after a certain point, it doesn't matter.

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  Actually, it does matter in certain things. So for example, there is a very classic study that was started at Johns Hopkins. When I was a graduate student there, I actually worked on this study at the very beginning. It's the study of mathematically and scientifically precocious youth. And they gave junior high school students, age 11 and 12, the standard SAT math exam.

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

  And they found a very large number of students scored very high on this exam. Not a large number. I mean, they found many students when they cast the net. They're all of Baltimore. They found a number of students who scored as high on the SAT math when they were 12 years old as incoming Hopkins freshmen. And they said, gee, now this is interesting. What shall we do now? And on a case by case basis, they got some of those kids into their local community college math programs. Many of those kids went on to be very successful.

• 1:52:49Speaker 01

  And now there's a 50 year follow up of those kids. And it turns out, if you, these kids were in the top 1%. Okay, so everybody in this study is in the top 1%. If you take that group, that rarefied group and divide them into quartiles. So you have the top 25% of the top 1% and the bottom 25% of the top 1%. You can find unmeasurable variables of success. The top quartile does better than the bottom quartile in the top 1%.

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  They have more patents, they have more publications, they have more tenure at universities. And this is based on their, you're dividing them based on their score at age 12.

• 1:53:45Lex Fridman?

  I wonder how much interesting data is in the variability, in the differences. So, but that's really, that's, oh, boy. That's very interesting, but it's also, I don't know, somehow painful. I don't know why it's so painful. That that's so, that G factor is so determinant. Of even in the nuanced.

• 1:54:09Speaker 01

  Well, this is interesting that you find that painful. Do you find it painful that people with charisma are very success, can be very successful in life, even though having no other attributes other than they're they're famous and people like them? Do you find that painful?

• 1:54:26Lex Fridman?

  Yes, if that charisma is untrainable. So one of the things, again, this is like I learned psychology from the Johnny Depp trial, but one of the things, the psychologist, the personality psychologist, he can maybe speak to this because he had interest in this for a time, is she was saying that personality, technically speaking, is the thing that doesn't change over a lifetime. It's the it's the thing you're, I don't know if she was actually implying that you're born with it.

• 1:55:00Speaker 01

  Well, it's a trait.

• 1:55:01Lex Fridman?

  It's a trait.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  It's a trait that's relatively stable over time. I think that's generally correct.

• 1:55:08Lex Fridman?

  So to the degree your personality is stable over time, yes, that too is painful. Because what's not painful is the thing, you know, if I'm fat and out of shape, I can exercise and, you know, become healthier in that way. If my diet is a giant mess and that's resulting in some kind of conditions that my body is experiencing, I can fix that by having a better diet. That's sort of my actions, my willed actions can make a change. If charisma is part of the personality, that's the part of the charisma that is part of the personality that is stable.

• 1:55:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, that's painful too, because it's like, oh shit, I'm stuck with this. I'm stuck with this.

• 1:55:58Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, and this pretty much generalizes to every aspect of your being. This is who you are. You've got to deal with it. And what it undermines, of course, is a realistic appreciation for this, undermines the fairly recent idea prevalent in this country, that if you work hard, you can be anything you want to be, which has morphed from the original idea that if you work hard, you can be successful. Those are two different things.

• 1:56:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  And now we have. If you work hard, you can be anything you want to be. This is completely unrealistic. I'm sorry. It just is. Now, you can work hard and be successful. There's no question. But you know what? The hard, I could work very hard and I am not going to be a successful theoretical physicist. I'm just not.

• 1:56:57Lex Fridman?

  That said, I mean, we should, because we had this conversation already, but it's good to repeat. The fact that you're not going to be a theoretical physicist is not judgment on your basic humanity. Returning again to the all men, which means men and women are created equal. So again, some of the differences we're talking about in quote unquote success, wealth, uh, number of, uh, whether you win a Nobel Prize or not, that doesn't, um, put a measure on your basic humanity and, um, basic value and even goodness of you as a human being.

• 1:57:41Lex Fridman?

  Cause that, that your basic role and value in society is largely within your control. Uh, it's, it's some of these measures that we're talking about. Uh, it's good. It's good to remember this. Um, one question about the Flynn effect. What is it? Are humans getting smarter over the years, over the decades, over the centuries?

• 1:58:07Speaker 01

  The Flynn effect is James Flynn, who passed away about a year ago, uh, published a, uh, a set of analyses, uh, going back a couple of decades, uh, when he first noticed this, that IQ scores, when you looked, uh, over the years, seemed to be drifting up.

• 1:58:33Speaker 01

  Now, this was not unknown to the people who make the test because they re-norm the test periodically and they have to re-norm the test periodically because what 10 items correct meant relative to other people 50 years ago is not the same as what 10 items mean relative today. People are getting more things correct. Now, the scores have been drifting up about three points, IQ scores have been drifting up about three points per decade. This is not a personal effect, this is a cohort effect. Well, it's not for an individual, but...

• 1:59:16Lex Fridman?

  The world. What, how do you explain, so what's that?

• 1:59:18Speaker 01

  And, and this has presented intelligence researchers with a great mystery. Two questions. First, is it affect on the 50% of the variance that's the G factor or on the other 50%? And there's evidence that it is a G factor effect. And second, what on earth causes this? And doesn't this mean intelligence and G factor cannot be genetic because the scale of natural selection is much, much longer than a couple of decades ago? And so it's been used to try to undermine the idea that there can be a genetic influence on intelligence.

• 2:00:03Speaker 01

  But certainly, it can be, the Flynn effect can affect the non-genetic aspects of intelligence because genes account for maybe 50% of the variance, maybe higher, it could be as high as 80% for adults, but let's just say 50% for discussion. So, the Flynn effect, it's still a mystery.

• 2:00:29Lex Fridman?

  It's still a mystery, that's interesting.

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  It's still a mystery, although the evidence is coming out. I told you before, I edited a journal on intelligence and we're doing a special issue in honor of James Flynn. So, I'm starting to see papers now on really the latest research on this. I think most people who specialize in this area of trying to understand the Flynn effect are coming to the view based on data that it has to do with advances in nutrition and healthcare.

• 2:01:01Speaker 01

  And there's also evidence that the effect is slowing down and possibly reversing.

• 2:01:09Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy. So how would nutrition, so nutrition would still be connected to the G factor? So nutrition as it relates to the G factor, so the biology that leads to the intelligence?

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:01:24Lex Fridman?

  That would be the claim, like the hypothesis being tested by the research.

• 2:01:31Speaker 01

  Yes, and there's some evidence from infants that nutrition has made a difference. And so it's not an unreasonable connection.

• 2:01:43Speaker 01

  But does it negate the idea that there's a genetic influence? Not logically at all. So, but it is very interesting, so that if you take an IQ test today, but you normal, but you take the score and use the tables that were available in 1940, you're going to wind up with a much higher IQ number.

• 2:02:08Speaker 01

  So are we really smarter than a couple of generations ago? No, but we might be able to solve problems a little better

• 2:02:20Speaker 01

  and make use of our G because of things like Sesame Street and other curricula in school. More people are going to school. So there are a lot of factors here to disentangle.

• 2:02:35Lex Fridman?

  It's fascinating, though. It's fascinating that there's not clear answers yet that as a population, we're getting smarter. We just zoom out, that's what it looks like. As a population, we're getting smarter. It's interesting to see what the effects of that are. I mean, this raises the question, we've mentioned it many times, but haven't clearly addressed it, which is nature versus nurture question. So how much of intelligence is nature? How much of it is nurture? How much of it is determined by genetics versus environment?

• 2:03:06Speaker 01

  All of it.

• 2:03:07Lex Fridman?

  All of it is genetics?

• 2:03:09Speaker 01

  No, all of it. Is nature a nurture?

• 2:03:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so yes, yes, okay.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  But how much of variance can you apportion to either?

• 2:03:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:23Speaker 01

  Most of the people who work in this field say that that is a, the framing of that, if, if the question is framed that way, it can't, can't be answered because nature and nurture are not two independent influences. They interact with each other and understanding those interactions is so complex that many behavioral geneticists say it, it is today impossible and always will be impossible to disentangle that, no matter what kind of advances there are in DNA, technology and genomic informatic, informatics.

• 2:04:03Lex Fridman?

  But there's still to push back on that. That same intuition from behavioral geneticists would lead me to believe that there cannot possibly be a stable G factor because it's super complex.

• 2:04:17Speaker 01

  Many of them would assert that as a logical outcome.

• 2:04:24Speaker 01

  But because I believe there is a stable G factor from lots of sources of data, not just one study, but lots of sources of data over decades.

• 2:04:35Speaker 01

  I am more amenable to the idea that whatever interactions between genes and environment exist, they can be explicated, they can be studied, and they, that information can be used as a basis for molecular biology of intelligence.

• 2:04:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so, and we'll do this exact question because isn't, doesn't the stability of the G factor give you at least a hint that there is a biological basis for intelligence?

• 2:05:13Speaker 01

  Yes, I, I think it's clear that the fact that an IQ score is correlated to things like thickness of your cortex, that it's correlated to glucose metabolic rate in, in your brain. That identical twins reared apart are highly similar in their IQ scores. These are all important observations that certainly more that indicate, not just suggest, but indicate that there's a biological basis. And does anyone believe intelligence has nothing to do with the brain?

• 2:05:55Speaker 01

  I mean, it's so obvious.

• 2:05:59Lex Fridman?

  Well, indirectly definitely has to do with it. But the question is, environment interacting with the brain? Or is it the actual raw hardware of the brain?

• 2:06:12Speaker 01

  Well, some would say that the raw hardware of the brain, as it develops from conception through adulthood, or at least through the childhood, that that so-called hardware that you are assuming is mostly genetic, in fact, is not as deterministic as you might think, that it is probabilistic. And what affects the probabilities are things like in uterine environment and other factors like that, including chance.

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  That chance affects the way the neurons are connecting during gestation. It's not, hey, it's pre-programmed. So there is pushback on the concept that genes provide a blueprint. That it's a lot more fluid.

• 2:07:15Lex Fridman?

  Well, but also, yeah, so there's a lot, a lot, a lot happens in the first few months of development. In nine months inside the mother's body and in the, you know, the months, the few months afterwards, there's a lot of fascinating stuff, like including chance and luck, like you said, how things connect up.

• 2:07:43Lex Fridman?

  The question is afterwards, the neuroplasticity of the brain, how much adjustment there is relative to the environment, how much that affects the G factor. But that's where the, the whole conclusions of the studies that we've been talking about is, that seems to have less and less and less of an effect as, pretty quickly.

• 2:08:02Speaker 01

  Yes, and I do think there is more of a genetic, by my view, and I'm not an expert on this, I mean, genetics is a highly technical and complex subject. I am not a geneticist, not a behavioral geneticist. But, but my reading of this, my interpretation of this, is that there is a genetic blueprint, more or less, and that has a profound influence on your subsequent intellectual development, including the G factor. And that's not to say things can't happen to, I mean, if you think of that genes provide a potential, fine,

• 2:08:45Speaker 01

  and then various variables impact that potential. And every parent of a newborn, implicitly or explicitly, wants to maximize that potential. This is why you buy educational toys. This is why you pay attention to organic baby food. This is why you do all these things, because you want your baby to be as healthy and as smart as possible. And every parent will say that.

• 2:09:14Lex Fridman?

  Is there a case to be made, can you still man the case, that genetics as, is a very tiny component of all of this, and the environment is essential?

• 2:09:28Speaker 01

  I don't think the data supports that genetics is a tiny component. I think the data support the idea that the genetics is a very important, and I don't say component, I say influence, very important influence. And the environment is a lot less than people believe. Most people believe environment plays a big role. I'm not so sure.

• 2:09:50Lex Fridman?

  I guess what I'm asking you is, can you see where, what you just said, it might be wrong? Can you, can you imagine a world, and what kind of evidence would you need to see? To say, you know what, the intuition, the studies so far, like reversing the directions. So one of the cool things we have now more and more is we're getting more and more data. And the rate of the data is escalating because of the digital world. So when you start to look at a very large scale of data, both on the biology side and the social side, we might be discovering some very counterintuitive things about society.

• 2:10:32Lex Fridman?

  We might see the edge cases that reveal that if we actually scale those edge cases and they become like the norm, that we'll have a complete shift in our, like you'll see G factor be able to be modified throughout life in the teens and in later life. So is in any case you can make or for your current intuitions are wrong?

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  Yes, and it's a good question because I think everyone should always be asked, what evidence would change your mind?

• 2:11:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  It's certainly not only a fair question, it is really the key question for anybody working on any aspect of science. I think that if environment was very important, we would have seen it clearly by now. It would have been obvious that school interventions, compensatory education, early childhood education, all these things that have been earnestly tried and well-funded, well-designed studies would show some effect, and they don't.

• 2:11:41Lex Fridman?

  They don't. What if the school, the way we've tried school, compensatory school sucks?

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  And we need to do better. That's what everybody said at the beginning, that's what everybody said to Jensen. He said, well, maybe these, maybe we need to start earlier. Maybe we need not do pre-kindergarten, but pre-pre-kindergarten. It's always an infinite, well, maybe we didn't get it right. But after decades of trying, 50 years, 50 or 60 years of trying, surely something

• 2:12:12Speaker 01

  Would have worked to the point where you could actually see a result and not need a probability level at point oh five on some means. So that's why I, that's the kind of evidence that would change my mind.

• 2:12:26Lex Fridman?

  Population level interventions like schooling that you would, you would see, um, like this actually has an effect.

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  Yes, and when you take adopted kids and they grow up in a, in another family and you find out when those adopted kids are adults, their IQ scores don't correlate with the IQ scores of their adoptive parents, but they do correlate with their IQ scores of their biological parents whom they've never met. I mean, these are important, these are powerful observations.

• 2:13:01Lex Fridman?

  And it would be convincing to you if the reverse was true.

• 2:13:05Speaker 01

  Yes, that would be more, now, and there is some data on adoption that indicates the, the adopted children are moving a little bit more toward their, their adoptive parents. But it's, you know, it's, to me, the overwhelming, the way, I, I have this concept called the weight of evidence, where I don't interpret any one study too much. The weight of evidence tells me genes are important, but what does that mean? What, what does it mean that genes are important, knowing that gene expression, genes don't express themselves in a vacuum, they express themselves in, in an environment. So the environment has to have something to do with it, especially if the best genetic

• 2:13:49Speaker 01

  estimates of the amount of variance are around 50 or even, even if it's as high as 80%, it still leaves 20% of, of non-genetic. Now, maybe that is all luck, maybe that's all chance. I could believe that, I could easily believe that. So.

• 2:14:10Speaker 01

  But I do think after 50 years of trying various interventions and nothing works, including memory training, including listening to Mozart, including playing computer games, none of that has shown any impact on intelligence test scores.

• 2:14:27Lex Fridman?

  Is there data on the intelligence, the IQ of parents as it relates to the children?

• 2:14:36Speaker 01

  Yes, and there is some evidence, genetic evidence of kind of of of an interaction between the parents IQ and the environment. That high IQ parents provide an enriched environment, which then can impact the child in addition to the genes, it's that environment. So there are all these interactions that, you know, but it's not, you know, think about the number of books in a household. This was a variable that's correlated with IQ.

• 2:15:11Lex Fridman?

  It is.

• 2:15:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, what, well, why? Especially if the kid never reads any of the books. It's because more intelligent people have more books in their house. And if you're more intelligent and there's a genetic component to that, the child will get those genes or some of those genes as well as as the environment. But it's not the number of books in the house that actually directly impacts the child. So the two scenarios on this are you find that, and this was used to get rid of the SAT test. Oh, the SAT score is highly correlated

• 2:15:54Speaker 01

  with the social economic status of the parents. So all you're really measuring is how rich the parents are. Okay, well, why are the parents rich?

• 2:16:05Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:16:06Speaker 01

  And so you could, the opposite kind of syllogism is that people who are very bright make more money. They can afford homes in, in better neighborhoods so their kids get better schools. Now, the kids grow up bright. Where in that chain of events does that come from? Well, unless you have a genetically informative research design where you look at siblings that have the same biological parents and, and so on, you, you can't really disentangle all that.

• 2:16:44Speaker 01

  Most studies of social economic status and intelligence do not have a genetically informed design. So any conclusions they make about the causality of the social economic status being the cause of the IQ is, is a stretch. And where you do find genetically informative designs,

• 2:17:10Speaker 01

  you find most of the variance in your outcome measures are due to the genetic component. And sometimes the SES adds a little.

• 2:17:22Speaker 01

  But I, the weight of evidence is it doesn't add very much variance to predict what's going on beyond the genetic variance. So when you actually look at it in, in, in some, and there aren't that many studies that, that have genetically informed designs. Uh, but when you, you do see those, the genes seem to have an advantage.

• 2:17:44Lex Fridman?

  Sorry for the strange questions, but there's, is there a connection between,

• 2:17:51Lex Fridman?

  fertility or the number of kids that you have and G factor? So you know, the kind of conventional wisdom is,

• 2:18:01Lex Fridman?

  people of, maybe is it higher economic status or something like that, or having fewer children? I just loosely hear these kinds of things. Is there, is there data that you're aware of in one direction or another on this?

• 2:18:14Speaker 01

  Well, strange questions always get strange answers.

• 2:18:19Lex Fridman?

  Yes, alright. So do you have a strange answer for that strange question?

• 2:18:23Speaker 01

  The answer is, there were some studies that indicated the more children in a family,

• 2:18:32Speaker 01

  the firstborn children would be more intelligent than the fourth or fifth or sixth. It's not clear that those studies hold up over time. And of course, what you see also is that families where there are multiple children, four, five, six, seven, you know, really big families,

• 2:18:59Speaker 01

  the socioeconomic status of those families usually in the modern age is not that high.

• 2:19:07Speaker 01

  Maybe it used to be the aristocracy used to have a lot of kids, I'm not sure exactly. But there have been reports of correlations between IQ and fertility. But I'm not sure that the data are very strong that the firstborn child is always the smartest. It seems like there's some data to that, but I'm not current on that.

• 2:19:33Lex Fridman?

  How would that be explained? That would be a nurture?

• 2:19:37Speaker 01

  Well, it could be nurture, it could be in uterine environment, I mean.

• 2:19:42Lex Fridman?

  Boy, the biology is complicated.

• 2:19:46Speaker 01

  And this is why, you know, like many areas of science, you said earlier that there are a lot of gray areas and no definitive answers.

• 2:20:00Speaker 01

  This is not uncommon in science, that the closer you look at a problem, the more questions you get, not the fewer questions. Because the universe is complicated. And the idea that we have people on this planet who can study the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang?

• 2:20:24Speaker 01

  That's pretty amazing. And I've always said that if they can study the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang, we can certainly figure out something about intelligence that allows that.

• 2:20:37Lex Fridman?

  I'm not sure what's more complicated, the human mind or the physics of the universe. It's unclear to me. I think we over.

• 2:20:48Speaker 01

  Well, that's a very humbling statement.

• 2:20:51Lex Fridman?

  Maybe it's very human centric, egotistical statement that our mind is somehow super complicated, but biology is a tricky one to unravel. Consciousness. What is that?

• 2:21:05Speaker 01

  Well, I've always believed that consciousness and intelligence are the two real fundamental problems of the human brain. And I, and I, and therefore I think they must be related.

• 2:21:21Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yeah. Hard problems like walk together, holding hands, kinda, kinda, kinda of idea.

• 2:21:28Speaker 01

  You may not know this, but I did some of the early research on anesthetic drugs with brain imaging, trying to answer the question, what part of the brain is the last to turn off when someone loses consciousness? And is that the first part of the brain to turn on when consciousness is regained? And I was working with an anesthesiologist named Mike Alkire, who was really brilliant at this. These were really the first studies of, of brain imaging, uh, using positron emission tomography, long before, uh, FMRI. And, uh, you would inject a radioactive sugar that labeled the brain. And the harder the brain was working, the more sugar it would take up.

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  And then you could make a picture of glucose use in the brain. And we, he, he was amazing. He managed to do this in normal volunteers he brought in and anesthetized as if they were going into surgery. Uh, and he managed all the human subjects requirements on this research. And, uh, it was, he was brilliant at this. And, uh, and what we did is we had, uh, these normal volunteers come in on three occasions. On one occasion, he gave them enough anesthetic drug. So they were a little drowsy.

• 2:22:53Speaker 01

  And on another occasion, they came in and he fully anesthetized them.

• 2:22:59Speaker 01

  And, you know, he would say, you know, Mike, can you, can you hear me? And the person would say, ah, yeah. You know, that's, and then we would scan people under the, and under a no anesthetic condition. So same person. And we were looking to see if we could see the part of the brain turn off. He subsequently tried to do this with MFMRI, which has a faster time resolution. And you could do it in real time as the person went under and then regain consciousness where you couldn't do that with PET. You had to have three different occasions. And the results were absolutely fascinating.

• 2:23:42Speaker 01

  We did this with different anesthetic drugs and different drugs impacted different parts of the brain. So we were naturally looking for the common one. And it seemed to have something to do with the thalamus and consciousness. This was actual data on consciousness, real conscious, actual consciousness.

• 2:24:04Lex Fridman?

  What part of the brain turns on? Uh, what part of the brain turns off?

• 2:24:09Speaker 01

  It's not so clear.

• 2:24:11Lex Fridman?

  It's not, but maybe has something to do with the thalamus.

• 2:24:14Speaker 01

  The, the, the sequence of events seemed to have the thalamus in it.

• 2:24:18Lex Fridman?

  Boy.

• 2:24:19Speaker 01

  Um, now here's the question. Are some people more conscious than others? Are there individual differences in consciousness? And I don't mean it in the psychedelic sense. I don't mean it in the political consciousness sense. I just mean it in everyday life. Do some people go through everyday life more conscious than others? And are those the people we might actually label more intelligent? So now the other thing I was looking for is whether the parts of the brain we were seeing in the anesthesia studies were the same parts of the brain we were seeing in the intelligence studies. Now this is, you know, this was very complicated, expensive research. We didn't really have funding to do this.

• 2:25:03Speaker 01

  We were trying to do it on the fly. I'm not sure anybody has pursued this, you know, I, I, I'm retired now. He's gone on to other things. But it's, I think it's an area of research that, that would be fascinating to see. The parts, there are a lot more imaging studies now of consciousness. I'm just not up on them.

• 2:25:23Lex Fridman?

  So, but basically, the question is which imaging, so newer imaging studies to see in high resolution, spatial and temporal way, which part of the brain lights up when you're doing intelligence tasks? And which parts of the brain lights up when you're doing consciousness tasks and see the interplay between them? And try to infer, I mean, that's the challenge of neuroscience, without understanding deeply, looking from the outside, try to infer something about how the whole thing works.

• 2:25:58Speaker 01

  Well, imagine this, here's a simple question. Does it take more anesthetic drug to put, to have a person lose consciousness if their IQ is 140 than a person with an IQ of 70?

• 2:26:17Lex Fridman?

  That's an interesting way to study it. Yeah. I mean, if there is, if there is a, if the answer to that is a stable yes, that's very interesting.

• 2:26:26Speaker 01

  So I tried to find out, and I went to some anesthesiology textbooks about how you dose, and they dose by weight.

• 2:26:38Speaker 01

  And what I also learned, this is a little bit off subject, anesthesiologists are never sure if you, how deep you are.

• 2:26:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:49Speaker 01

  And they usually tell by poking you with a needle, and if you don't jump, they tell the surgeon to go ahead.

• 2:26:56Speaker 01

  I'm not sure that's literally true, but it's.

• 2:26:59Lex Fridman?

  Well, it might be very difficult to know precisely how deep you are. It has to do with the same kind of measurements that you were doing with the consciousness with the, it's, it's, it's difficult, it's difficult to know.

• 2:27:13Speaker 01

  So I don't lose my train of thought. I couldn't find in the textbooks anything about dosing by intelligence. I asked my friend, the anesthesiologist, he said, no, he doesn't know. I said, can we do a chart review? And look at people using their years of education as a proxy for IQ. Because if someone's gone to graduate school, that tells you something. You can make some inference as opposed to someone who didn't graduate high school. You know, can we do a chart review? And he says, no, they never really put down the the exact dose and no, he said, no. So to this day, that the the the the simple question.

• 2:27:54Speaker 01

  Does it take more anesthetic drug to put someone under if they have a high IQ? Or less or less, it could go either way. Because by the way, our early PET scan studies of intelligence. Found the unexpected result of an inverse correlation between glucose metabolic rate and intelligence. It wasn't how much a brain area lit up. How much it lit up was negatively correlated to how well they did on the test. Which led to the brain efficiency hypothesis, which is still being studied today. And there's more and more evidence that the efficiency of brain information processing

• 2:28:39Speaker 01

  is more related to intelligence than than than just more activity.

• 2:28:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it'll be interesting again, this is the total hypothesis, how much in the relationship between intelligence and consciousness. It's not obvious that those two, if there's correlation, there would be. They they could be inversely correlated. Wouldn't that be funny? If you the the consciousness factor, the C factor plus the G factor equals one. It's a nice trade off. You get you get you get a trade off, how deeply you experience the world versus how deeply you're able to reason through the world.

• 2:29:27Speaker 01

  What a great hypothesis. Certainly, somebody listening to this can do this study.

• 2:29:32Lex Fridman?

  Even if it's the aliens analyzing humans a few centuries from now. Let me ask you from an AI perspective.

• 2:29:42Lex Fridman?

  I don't know how much you've thought about machines, but in, you know, there's the famous Turing test, test of intelligence for machines, which is a beautiful, almost like cute formulation of intelligence that Alan Turing proposed. Basically, conversation being if you can fool a human to think that a machine is a human that passes the test. I suppose you could do a similar thing for humans. If I can fool you that I'm intelligent, then that's a good test of intelligence, right?

• 2:30:26Lex Fridman?

  Like, you're talking to two people. And my, you're, you're, you're, the test is saying, who has a higher IQ? And it's an interesting test because, yeah, maybe charisma can be very useful there. And you're only allowed to use conversation, which is the formulation of the Turing test. Anyway, all that to say is, what are good tests of intelligence for machines? You know, what do you think it takes to achieve human level intelligence for machines?

• 2:31:02Speaker 01

  Well, I have thought a little bit about this, but, you know, I, every time I think about these things, I rapidly reach the limits of my knowledge and imagination. So when Alexa first came out, and I think there was a competing one. Well, there was Siri with Apple and Google had Alexa.

• 2:31:29Lex Fridman?

  No, no, Amazon had Alexa.

• 2:31:31Speaker 01

  Amazon had Alexa.

• 2:31:32Lex Fridman?

  Google has Google.

• 2:31:34Speaker 01

  Something. So I proposed to one of my colleagues that he buy one of these, each, you know, one of each, and then ask it questions from the IQ test.

• 2:31:46Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 2:31:47Speaker 01

  But it became apparent that they all searched the internet. So they all can find answers to questions like, how far is it between Washington and Miami? And repeat after me. Now, I don't know if you said to Alexa, I'm going to repeat these numbers backwards to me. I don't know what would happen. I've never done it. But the, so, so one answer to your question is, try, you're gonna try it right now. Let's try it. Let's try it.

• 2:32:18Lex Fridman?

  No, no.

• 2:32:19Speaker 01

  Ask Siri.

• 2:32:21Lex Fridman?

  So it would actually probably go to Google search and it will be all confusing kind of stuff. It would, it would fail.

• 2:32:29Speaker 01

  Well, then I guess there's a test that it would fail.

• 2:32:33Lex Fridman?

  Well, but that's not, that has to do more with the, you know, the language of communication versus the content. So if you did an IQ test to a person that doesn't speak English and the test was administered in English, that's not really the test of.

• 2:32:50Speaker 01

  Well, let's think about the computers that beat the Jeopardy! Champions.

• 2:32:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so that, so that, because I happen to know how those are programmed, those are very hardcoded and there's definitely a lack of intelligence there. There's something like IQ tests. There's, there's a guy, artificial intelligence researcher, Francois Chollet. He's, he's at Google. He's one of the seminal people in machine learning. He also, as a fun aside thing, developed an IQ test for machines.

• 2:33:25Speaker 01

  Oh, I haven't heard that. I'd like to know about that.

• 2:33:27Lex Fridman?

  I'll, I'll, I'll actually email you this because it'd be very interesting for you. It doesn't get much attention because people don't know what to do with it. But it deserves a lot of attention, which is, it basically does a pattern type of tests. Where you have to do, you know, one standard one is, you're given three things and you have to do a fourth one, that, that kind of thing. You have to understand the pattern here. And for that, it really simplifies to.

• 2:34:03Lex Fridman?

  So the interesting thing is, he's trying not to achieve high IQ. He's trying to achieve like pretty low bar for IQ. Things that are kind of trivial for humans. And they're actually really tough for machines, which is seeing, playing with these concepts of symmetry, of counting, like if I give you one object, two objects, three objects, you'll know the last one is four objects. You can like count them, you can, you can cluster objects together. It's both visually and conceptually, we could do all these things with our mind that we take for granted.

• 2:34:43Lex Fridman?

  The objectness of things, we can like figure out what spatially is an object and isn't. And we can play with those ideas. And machines really struggle with that. So he really cleanly formulated these IQ tests. I wonder what like that would equate to for humans with IQ, but it'd be a very low IQ. But that's exactly the kind of formulation like, okay, we want to be able to solve this. How do we solve this? And he does this as a challenge and nobody's been able to, it's similar to the Alexa Prize, which is Amazon is hosting a conversational challenge. Nobody's been able to do well on, on his.

• 2:35:27Lex Fridman?

  But that's an interesting, those kinds of tests, interesting because we, we take for granted all the, the ability of the human mind to play with concepts and to formulate concepts out of novel things. So like things we've never seen before, we were able to use that. I mean, that's, I've talked to a few people that design IQ tests sort of online. They write IQ tests and I was trying to get some questions from them. And they, they spoke to the fact that we can't really share questions with you because part of the, like first of all, it's really hard work to come up with questions.

• 2:36:12Lex Fridman?

  It's really, really hard work. It takes a lot of, it takes a lot of research, but it also takes a lot of novelty generating. You're constantly coming up with really new things. And part of the point is that you're not, they're not supposed to be public. They're supposed to be new to you when you look at them. It's interesting that the novelty is fundamental to the hardness of the problem. At least a part of what makes the problem hard is you've never seen it before.

• 2:36:42Speaker 01

  Right. That's called fluid intelligence, as opposed to what's called crystallized intelligence, which is your knowledge of, of facts. You know, things, but can you use those things to solve a problem? Those are two different things.

• 2:36:58Lex Fridman?

  Do you think we'll be able to, because we spoke, I don't want to miss opportunity to talk about this, we spoke about the neurobiology, about the molecular biology of intelligence. Do you think one day we'll be able to modify the biology of, or the genetics of a person to modify their intelligence, to increase their intelligence? We started this conversation by talking about a pill you could take. Do you think that such a pill would exist?

• 2:37:28Speaker 01

  Metaphorically, I do. And I am supremely confident that it's possible because I am supremely ignorant of the complexities of neurobiology. And so I have written-

• 2:37:42Lex Fridman?

  Ignorance is bliss.

• 2:37:44Speaker 01

  Well, I have written that the nightmares of neurobiologists, you know, understanding the complexities, this cascade of events that happens at the synaptic level, that these nightmares are what fuels some people to solve. So some people, you have to be undaunted. I mean, yeah, this is, this is not easy. Look, we're still trying to figure out cancer.

• 2:38:14Speaker 01

  It was only recently that they figured out why aspirin works. You know, these are not easy problems, but I also have the perspective of the history of science is the history of solving problems that are extraordinarily complex.

• 2:38:36Lex Fridman?

  And seem impossible.

• 2:38:37Speaker 01

  And seem impossible at the time.

• 2:38:40Lex Fridman?

  And so, one of the things you look at at companies like Neuralink, you have brain computer interfaces, you start to delve into the human mind and start to talk about machines measuring, but also sending signals to the human mind, you start to wonder what that has, what impact that has on the G factor, modifying in small ways or in large ways the functioning, the mechanical, electrical, chemical functioning of the brain.

• 2:39:13Speaker 01

  I look at everything about the brain, there are different levels of explanation. On one hand, you have a behavioral level, but then you have brain circuitry, and then you have neurons, and then you have dendrites, and then you have synapses, and then you have the neurotransmitters, and the presynaptic and the postsynaptic terminals, and then you have all the things that influence neurotransmitters, and then you have the individual differences among people.

• 2:39:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's complicated, but 51 million people in the United States have IQs under 85 and struggle with everyday life. Shouldn't that motivate?

• 2:40:14Speaker 01

  People to take a look at this.

• 2:40:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:16Speaker 01

  To treat seriously.

• 2:40:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but I just want to linger one more time that we have to remember that the science of intelligence,

• 2:40:29Lex Fridman?

  the measure of intelligence is only a part of the human condition. The thing that makes life beautiful and the creation of beautiful things in this world is perhaps loosely correlated, but is not dependent entirely on intelligence.

• 2:40:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I certainly agree with that.

• 2:40:50Lex Fridman?

  That's so for anyone sort of listening, I'm still not convinced that sort of more intelligence is always better if you want to create beauty in this world. I don't know.

• 2:41:06Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't say more intelligence is always better if you want to create beauty. I just said, all things being equal, more is better than less. That's all I mean.

• 2:41:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but that's sort of that I just want to sort of say, because a lot, to me, one of the things that makes life great is the opportunity to create beautiful things. And so I just want to sort of empower people to do that, no matter what some IQ test says. At the population level, we do need to look at IQ tests to help, to help people. And to also inspire us, yeah, to do, to take on some of these extremely difficult scientific, scientific questions. Do you have advice for young people in high school, in college?

• 2:41:55Lex Fridman?

  Whether they're thinking about career or they're thinking about a life they can be proud of? Is there advice you can give? Whether they're in the, they want to pursue psychology or biology or engineering, or they want to be artists and musicians and poets?

• 2:42:12Speaker 01

  I can't advise anybody on that level of what their passion is. You know, but I can't say if you're interested in psychology, if you're interested in science, in the science. Around the big questions of consciousness and intelligence and psychiatric illness. We haven't really talked about brain illnesses and what we might learn from, you know, if you are trying to develop a drug to treat Alzheimer's disease, you are trying to develop

• 2:42:51Speaker 01

  a drug to impact learning and memory, which are core to intelligence. So it could well be that the so-called IQ pill will come from a pharmaceutical company trying to develop a drug for Alzheimer's disease.

• 2:43:08Lex Fridman?

  Because that's exactly what you're trying to do, right? Yeah.

• 2:43:10Speaker 01

  Well, what will that, what will that drug do in a college student that doesn't have Alzheimer's disease? So I would encourage people who are interested in psychology, who are interested in science, to pursue a scientific career and address the big questions. And this, you, and the, the, the, the most important thing I can tell you, if you're going to be in kind of a, a, a research environment, is you gotta follow the data where the data take you. You can't decide in advance where you want the data to go. And if the data take you to places that you don't have the technical expertise to follow,

• 2:43:55Speaker 01

  like, you know, I would like to, to understand more about molecular biology, but I'm not going to become a molecular biologist now, but I know people who are. And my job is to get them interested, to take their expertise into this direction. And that, it's not so easy, but.

• 2:44:14Lex Fridman?

  And if the data takes you to a place that's controversial, that's counterintuitive in this world, um, no, I would say it's probably a good idea to still push forward boldly, but to communicate the interpretation of the results with skill, with compassion.

• 2:44:38Lex Fridman?

  With a with a with a greater breadth of understanding of humanity, not just the science of the impact of the results.

• 2:44:47Speaker 01

  One famous psychologist wrote about this issue that somehow a balance has to be found between pursuing the science and communicating it with respect to people's sensitivities, the legitimate sensitivities. Somehow. He didn't say how.

• 2:45:06Lex Fridman?

  Somehow.

• 2:45:07Speaker 01

  Somehow. And this is-

• 2:45:08Lex Fridman?

  Every part of that sentence, somehow and balance is left up to the interpretation of the reader. Let me ask you, you said big questions, the biggest or one of the biggest. We already talked about consciousness and intelligence, one of the most fascinating, one of the biggest questions. But let's talk about the why. Why are we here? What's the meaning of life?

• 2:45:34Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm not going to tell you.

• 2:45:36Lex Fridman?

  You know, but you're not going to tell me? This is very, I'm going to have to wait for your next book.

• 2:45:42Speaker 01

  The meaning of life, you know, we do the best we can to get through the day.

• 2:45:51Lex Fridman?

  And then there's just a finite number of the days. Are you are you afraid of the finiteness of it? You think about your death-

• 2:45:57Speaker 01

  I think about it more and more as I get older. Yeah, I do. And it's one of these human things that it is finite. We all know it. Most of us deny it and don't want to think about it. Sometimes you you think about it in terms of estate planning. You try to do the rational thing. Sometimes you it makes you work harder because you know your time is more and more limited and you want to get things done. I don't know where I am on that. It is just one of those things that's always in the back of my mind. And I don't think that's uncommon.

• 2:46:42Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's just like G factor intelligence. It's a hard truth that's there. And sometimes you kind of walk past it and you don't want to look at it. But it's still there.

• 2:46:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46:56Speaker 01

  Yes, you can't escape it. And think about the G factor and intelligence is everybody knows this is true on a personal, daily basis. You, if even if you think back to when you were in school,

• 2:47:14Speaker 01

  you know who the smart kids were. You know, when you are on the phone, talking to a customer service representative that in response to your detailed question is reading a script back to you and you get furious at this. And you, and have you ever called this person a moron or wanted to call this person a moron? You're not listening to me. Everybody has had the experience of dealing with people who they think are not at their level. It's, it's just common because that's the way human beings are. That's the way life is.

• 2:47:50Lex Fridman?

  But we also, we also have a poor estimation of our own intelligence. We have a poor, and we're not always a great, this, our judgment of human character of other people is not as good as a battery of tests. We, there's, there's, there's, that's where bias comes in. That's where our history, our emotions, all of that comes in. So, you know, people on the internet, you know, there's such a thing as the internet. And people on the internet will call each other dumb all the time. And, um, you know, I, that's the worry here is that, um, we give up on people.

• 2:48:32Lex Fridman?

  We put them in a bin just because of one interaction or some small number of interactions as if that's it, they're hopeless. That's just in their genetics. But I, I think no matter what the science here says, once again, that does not mean we should not have compassion for our fellow man.

• 2:48:53Speaker 01

  That's exactly what the science does say. It's not, it's not.

• 2:48:59Speaker 01

  Opposite of what the science is. Everything I know about psychology, everything I've learned about intelligence, everything points to the inexorable conclusion that you have to treat people as individuals respectfully and with compassion. Because through no fault of their own, some people are not as capable as others. And you want to turn a blind eye to it, you want to come up with theories about why that might be true, fine, I would like to fix some of it as best I can.

• 2:49:36Lex Fridman?

  And everybody is deserving of love. Richard, this is a good way to end it, I think.

• 2:49:44Speaker 01

  I'm just getting warmed up here.

• 2:49:46Lex Fridman?

  I know. I know you can go for another many hours, but to respect your extremely valuable time, this is an amazing conversation. Thank you for the teaching company, the lectures you've given with the New York Science of Intelligence, just the work you're doing. It's a difficult topic. It's a topic that's controversial and sensitive to people. And to push forward boldly and in that nuanced way, just thank you for everything you do. And thank you for asking the big questions of intelligence, of consciousness.

• 2:50:21Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for asking me. I mean, there's nothing like good conversation on these topics.

• 2:50:25Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Hare. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein. "It is not that I'm so smart, but I stay with the questions much longer." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.