Jordan Peterson ~ The Uncomfortable Fact About IQ

now a lot of people have complained about the idea of intelligence because they don't like the idea they don't really mind the idea so much that there are smart people but people really don't like the idea that or there are dumb people and you know it's it's it's it's really not reasonable from a logical perspective to have one without the other and it's easy to see why people object to that because whatever term you use to refer to the low end of the intelligence distribution rapidly takes on a pejorative nature so and so what happens is the culture cycles through various words decade by decade trying to describe the lower end of the intelligence distribution but all the words end up being pejorative and so they're they're changed decade after decade but you and you can understand that because first of all there's great danger in labeling someone unintelligent perhaps period but certainly if there's measurement error you know so if you're labeled unintelligent let's say and you're not that's gonna be real catastrophe so there's measurement error problems but then you know you have to think about the problems of not doing the measurement so this is something I've thought about for a long time so let's say that I assess your verbal IQ before you came to the University of Toronto forget linguistic differences assume we could control for that which is very difficult at the University of Toronto because there's so many people who have English as a second language but forget about that for a minute let's say I got a entire population distribution not only of the applicants from the University of Toronto but over the entire population and I said categorically that the bottom 30% of the people in that distribution would not be able to graduate from the University of Toronto am i doing them a favor by not letting them apply or am i harming them well we know perfectly well I mean there the probability that there's anybody in this room that has an IQ of less 115 is pretty damn low and if if there is someone in the room whose general intelligence level is at that level you can bloody well be sure they're working like Mad Dogs in order to keep up and I'm not saying that all of you who have to work like Mad Dogs to keep up you know are they are necessarily lower than you might be an IQ I'm just saying that because IQ in part seems to be a measure of something like processing speed or rate of understanding or something like that if you're not in the upper echelon of the distribution and you're tasked with extraordinarily difficult tasks that require abstraction and quick learning the only way that you can compensate for it is by working to an incredible degree and you can do that and that's also why at the University of Toronto we know this perfectly well and it's true in other educational institutions conscientiousness is almost as good a predictor of grades as intelligence and that only makes sense to me it's like who the hell is going to get the good grades the smart people who work hard and I mean would it wouldn't be good if that wasn't the case as far as I can tell because hopefully what you get when you get a grade is an indicator of how fast you are how well you know the material and how much effort you've put into learning it something like that the relationship between creativity and grades at the University of Toronto is zero by the way once you control for IQ which is you know perhaps rather appalling but the problem is is it's very difficult to assess creative people right because they're annoying creative people do things in a new way and the problem with trying to assess whether or not someone has done saying something in a new way is that you have to come up with a new scheme of grading for that and you can believe that's not going to happen you know and then it's worse because if you're a creative person and you're graded by someone who isn't creative they're not gonna think you're creative they're just gonna think that you're wrong and so and you might be because lots of times if you're creative you're also wrong because it's not that easy to come up with a novel way of doing something or a novel hypothesis that actually is going to be an improvement over the previous hypothesis right most of the time you're off on a tangent and it's an incorrect tangent it is uncomfortable for people to admit that there might be something like actual differences in ability that are important and unravel now I can understand why people would have trouble with that but consider the alternatives we know part of the reason that you're here and will perhaps stay here and will perhaps be successful insofar as you can define success along the dimension of career attainment say in your life as it unfolds from this time onward is because you work hard okay but we also know that part of the reason that you're here is because you're smart now the question is what should you do with that from an ethical perspective exactly should you say no I'm no smarter than anyone else which means that maybe you're much more hard-working than everyone else so you're still you know denigrating the non achieving end of the distribution or do you say I've been blessed by something that's actually beyond my control and privileged as a consequence of that and then decide what exactly that means in terms of your responsibilities those are your choices but but to not take into account the fact that you've been blessed at at least one level of analysis with a favorable role of the of the randomness dice seems to me to completely miss state the nature of the causal sequences that propel you into what's essentially a position of privilege so but that by denying that the differences the innate differences in people with regards to important abilities all you do is it tribute all your success to your own particular individual controllable actions and I mean I'm not saying that you don't deserve credit for your work it's like more power to you and all of that but the idea that some people are smarter than others that's not an idea that's a fact and it's an uncomfortable fact and the fact that we won't deal with it means that people suffer unnecessarily

Channel: THE BESTS

Views: 1,927,522

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, Jordan Peterson new, Psychology, Philosophy, Personality, personality disorders, self-improvement, Jordan Peterson 2020, Self Improvement, Jordan Peterson Personality, Jordan Peterson Personality Disorder, How to cure Personality Disorders, Motivation, Inspiration, How to improve myself, Self Help, Clinical Psychology, Depression, Jordan Peterson Depression, Jordan Peterson anxiety, Counseling, Jordan Peterson Psychology, ADHD Jordan Peterson, truth

Id: Cycon01RT18

Length: 6min 42sec (402 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020