any ideas that don't conform to your beliefs about the nature of character.

When you put people in situations where they are competing for scarce, precious resources, the respond predictably. Whenever you put people in situations where they desire things that can only be achieved through cooperative behavior, they respond predictably. And Zimbardo's prison guard? What do you expect him to say? What's the alternative explanation, for him? He's arrived at an explanation that minimizes his culpability - how human.

If IQ is associated with deference to authority, I would argue that it's purely a function of self-efficacy or confidence, based on a lifetime of social comparisons in situations in which intelligence yielded some kind of authority. Really, Epi, I don't understand your stubborn desire to accord intelligence some kind of unique status as a prime mover for people. It's an attribute. And no, I think there's no reason to believe that intelligent people are particularly immune to authority. Dominance and submission are universals among social animals. Besides (to raise this specter yet again), you think the Nazis were stupid?

I didn't mean to suggest that it was only the hand of government that prevents us from reverting to savagery. I was really referring to what happens when a significant portion of the participants in a business do not consider themselves bound by what we think of as normal standards of behavior (this could include use of violence, or simply being basic business practices).

Assuming that all those participating in that business agree to a standard of ethical behavior, there may well not need any government regulation at all. But where some of the businessmen won't play by those rules, and chose to use fraud or violence as key parts of their business model, the rest may have to respond with force (their own, hired guns, or some form of government intervention), or they just get out of that business. That is the basic model of the 19th Century mining camps.

Where the business itself is illegal, you stack the deck as regards the character of those who participate. Prohibition bootleggers, drug pushers, pimps, gun runners etc are good examples. The business is illegal, there is no option of calling in the police if your competitors threaten violence so you either respond in kind or go into another line of business.

...he was only acting out what he thought was expected of him by Zimbardo in his role as a prison guard. In other words, his concept of a prison guard was someone who was sadistic.

But Epi... aren't we all playing roles with assumptions of what those roles entail? Doesn't a "real" prison guard have fixed conceptions of how he is expected to treat prisoners in a real prison? Don't policemen have these conceptions as well? Even the criminals have them.

I don't know if you've followed the debate on racial profiling, but many of our law enforcement agencies still train their policemen to make assumptions about the criminality of people based on their apparent race. As in the Zimbardo experiment, those who are assumed to be criminals begin to internalize the role projected on them. If people constantly expect you to be doing something wrong, it only serves to increase the chance that you might want to do that wrong thing. The (admittedly false) logic being, if everyone thinks I'm a thug anyway, I might as well get some benefit out of that belief.

The Wave experiment showed that people can wholeheartedly embrace fascism or any inhuman behaivior if they think it is what is expected of them, or it comes from the mouth of authority.

Most people have the capacity to learn.

Everyone has the capacity. Even people who have 95% of their brain missing. Like the guy in this study who was a mathematician with an 126 IQ despite having only 50-150g of cerebral material in his head! <link>

The question is, do people want to change? Are people willing to lose their preconceived notions and deal with each other from the heart? "Judge not, lest ye yourself be judged." and all that.

I find that if you look at someone and see a criminal, that person is likely to think about behaving criminally towards you. If you look at that same person as a human being doing their best under difficult circumstance, they are likely feel that empathy and return your respect. Life often works in self-fulfilling prophecies.

Entire populations of low IQ, criminal-minded, evil poor people are not born into the world pre-disposed to do grievous bodily harm to you and yours. This is a simplistic and unsympathetic notion.

If simply being taught about Milgram's experiment makes one less likely to be blindly obedient to authority, then what about direct exposure to altruism or community service? What about reading the Constitution, or the works of Thomas Paine?

so we're looking at 40 murders of actual strangers. Of those, about 27 were committed under the influence of alcohol.

I recall you making this point before. The demon rum made them do it, huh? It's the fault of the booze. That was the rationale for liquor prohibition, which you are opposed to.

So even if the rest were all random (highly unlikely) that is 13 murders... hardly what I would call an epidemic. Truth be told, the bulk of those probably come down to gang rivalry.

Maybe the numbers don't sound bad to you (I would guess they are a lot worse in Dallas or LA), but when I read about the immigrant owner of a convenience store, beloved by all in the community, being gunned down for a negligible amount of money, or a black female honor student being shot for nothing, it makes me sick.

I'm not dismissive of random violence or any violence for that matter.

I think you are. These are just people who got "offed", to use your term.

You are far more likely to get killed by your spouse...

Yes, and that's the kind of violence that we cannot do much about.

Some of those mentally challenged men in your prison show probably lost a huge chunk of IQ huffing gasoline, and sniffing paint thinner because they couldn't afford safer drugs.

And they will be better people when they can legally buy crank?

And while I don't think that legalizing drugs would eliminate all drug induced crime, it certainly would take the profit motive out of the equation

And when the price of illicit drugs falls to two dollars a pound, the Bloods and the Crips will turn to what in order to keep buying their tricked out Escalades? Investment banking--or extortion?

For some, it may be the only path open to them

It is the only path open to anyone that allows anyone to make a huge sum of money in a short amount of time.

You may never understand the dynamics at work here.

Yes, J, I understand greed. And I understand that some people would rather be poor than to kill or brutalize another for money.

Just know that the criminality and violence associated with drugs is a product of the drugs being illegal.

So when drugs are legalized, the mafiosi and the gang members will all become what--humanitarians? Is anyone really buying this?

At least Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel and some of the other candidates for president this time around do get it.

I don't think Paul, Kucinich and Gravel foresee the Valhalla you do. They just think that the Drug War prescription is worse than the disease, as you point out. That I agree with.

Not to beat a dead horse, but:

There is no business open to ANYONE that has anywhere near the same potential return on investment than the drug trade.

Umm, not true exactly. Depending on one's position in the trade. There are lots of middle men, and each time the markup is usually only 100% or so... often less. Producers of drugs have huge profits, but they also have the highest risk, and the largest up front costs.

Compare that with say Bottled Water, Arms Dealing, Banking, Insurance, Pharmaceuticals, iTunes... these businesses have unbelievable profit margins, and are all legal. Water is worth more than gasoline... even at todays prices! Check cashing centers get 1/3rd of your check, and most of them are actually owned by Wells Fargo. iTunes is selling you a song that costs them nothing to package or deliver to you for 99c. There are a lot of rackets. For poor people, though, with little or no education... you're looking at drugs, prostitution, or robbery pretty much. Ghetto kids can't even sell lemonade or mow lawns...

any ideas that don't conform to your beliefs about the nature of character.

If I don't argue my case, I cannot get you to try to convince me otherwise.

When you put people in situations where they are competing for scarce, precious resources, the respond predictably. Whenever you put people in situations where they desire things that can only be achieved through cooperative behavior, they respond predictably.

General, now I understand why it would take a book for you to explain what your path to Utopia is. You want to turn the world into a giant social psychology experiment. BTW, how many people in America are really competing for "scarce, precious resources" like food and shelter? Not many. We are competing for what kind of food we eat and what kind of shelter we have. This isn't the Kalahari desert.

And Zimbardo's prison guard? What do you expect him to say?

I think Zimbardo admitted he affected the outcome. (I never would have believed a former rat runner would give such credence to social psychological experiments.)

If IQ is associated with deference to authority, I would argue that it's purely a function of self-efficacy or confidence, based on a lifetime of social comparisons in situations in which intelligence yielded some kind of authority.

Now this is a very good insight, General. I think you are correct.


Really, Epi, I don't understand your stubborn desire to accord intelligence some kind of unique status as a prime mover for people.

No, I don't think IQ is the be-all and end-all of human psychology. Far from it. But, as I said in my original post, I think it has some significance. The thing it has going for it is numbers. The numbers are so enticing. I would rather traverse an ocean with a GPS, but if a sextant is all I can have, I'll take it.

Besides (to raise this specter yet again), you think the Nazis were stupid?

I have noticed that one of the first things totalitarians do when they take power is put dull men in key positions, particularly in the judiciary. This was common in Nazi government. Until seven years ago, even if one did fairly well at a fancy law school, it was difficult to get a job at the Justice Department. Now the Justice Department is filled with 400 graduates from Regent University Law School, Pat Robertson's creation, only very recently even accredited. Coincidence?

You are really unbelievable you know that?

Putting words in my mouth, drawing off base inferences, sarcasm. I shouldn't bother correcting you, but here goes:

1 I never said anything about it being the booze's fault. The statistic merely shows that the majority of the murders under the influence of alcohol are not random strangers... but crimes of passion.

2 All violence makes me sick. Not just inner city violence, but ALL VIOLENCE. Dropping bombs on day care centers isn't morally superior to robbing convenience stores.

* side note: In LA convenience store owners get killed because they keep guns behind the counter, and shoot lots of people every year... many of whom were unarmed themselves. They also tend to harass and look down on their customers. That is not an excuse... just an explanation of why they sometimes end up murdered.

3 Why is it harder to do something about loved ones killing each other than to fix inner city crime? What are you saying?

4 Yes. If people have safe, clean, cheap access to whatever drugs they want, they won't end up smoking rat poison or huffing gas. They won't need to steal to support their habit, and they'll have access to rehabilitation if they want it. Currently, rich drug addicts can go to private clinics, but a poor person who shows up at a state run hospital strung out winds up going cold-turkey in a jail cell.

5 When there is no more profit left in a given business, people move on to other things. There are plenty of examples throughout history. Will they all become saints? No. But if the Mafia is any example, they will move into legitimate businesses... like waste disposal management.

6 You wanna know what happens when drugs are decriminalized? Go look at the Netherlands. Or any number of progressive nations that have more sensible drug policies than we do. They all have higher standards of living. They all have lower rates of teenage drug use. They all have fewer drug overdoses, and they all scored higher than the US on the UN Human Development Index. Paradise? No. Not by a long shot... but far more civilized than anything we got going here. And none of them have even been able to fully legalize drugs due to the pressures of the US and our EU allies.

7 The police kill 7 times as many people in drug raids as die from drug overdoses. While there are 125,000+ deaths attributed to alcohol every year, and another 100,000 alcohol related deaths (vehicular manslaughter etc)... all illegal drugs combined kill between 3,800 - 5,200 people. Legal drugs kill as many as 27,000 a year and rising. Cigarettes kill 340,000 to 395,000. Can you really make a claim that the Drug War is to save people?

Protecting people from themselves is a ludicrous notion. Do you realize that there are over 300,000 unscheduled plants and chemicals that are psychoactive in the US? Should we criminalize all of them too?

Why isn't anyone illegalizing Datura? It was only the drug of choice for the Manson Family. It is only known as Devil's Weed, Jimson Weed, Belladonna, and Yerba del Diablo. It only puts hundreds of people in the mental hospital every year and dozens more in the morgue. 1 seed is considered an overdose... and yet that plant is growing all over America. Kids can actually accidentally kill themselves with a plant that is used as an ornamental by many landscapers. It was even growing in the White House garden!

Look, the point is, if someone wants to change their consciousness, they will always be able to find a way. They have over 1,000 options at every supermarket. Even nutmeg contains a potent MDMA (ecstasy) analog. The very premise that if something might be harmful, we have to punish the people who use it is fundamentally flawed. Before crank became the big evil that it is today (and it is pretty evil), it was given to housewives on a regular basis and was the nation's main diet pill... not that that was good, but it didn't destroy the country. Ritalin is a fricking methamphetamine for G*D's sake... and teachers give them to kids simply for not sitting still.

This whole thing is schizophrenic. The Drug War is a world-wide civil war, and the enemies are your sons & daughters. I'm glad you agree that the medicine is worse than the disease. It really is. I personally don't see any Valhallas. I can't see where you would even get that idea. And while I can't speak for those honorable men running for president, there are videos of them explaining their positions on YouTube and whatnot. They are intelligent enough to see that the TRILLIONS of dollars we waste trying to enforce protectionism for Drug Companies and the Prison Complex is insane. This boogey man issue has done unthinkable damage already. How many more people have to die? How many more millions of otherwise productive members of society have to rot in jail with violent felons? Enough is enough...

You attribute the behavior of those Stanford-admitted prison guards to vague "demand characteristics", yet you suggest that intelligent people (which those guards presumably were) are less susceptible to being influenced by authority ala Milgram. Do you see the peculiar selectivity you're employing?

You accept that intelligent people may be more confident/have greater self-efficacy due to the cumulative impact of their lifelong history of social comparisons, but you don't grasp the idea that, so far as self-comparisons are concerned, this is also a lifetime of competition?

What do you think prompted such a protracted and, often, caustic debate on this board? Why do you suppose the two sides tended to become alienated from each other? It's the same type of exchange that promotes any group conflict - just because we are competing for something intangible, doesn't make it any less of a competition. If you review the threads on this board, debate became more caustic (or began caustic) when the person responding did not feel their perspective had been given any credence (and gives indication of Saletan's initial failure on this front). Frankly, this isn't even an issue of competition between ideas, it's an issue of acknowledged validity of their experience.

I don't know how to explain it any better than that. If one wanted to unite the players on this board, one would have to provide a set of ideas that would be validating to all the players - a framework in which everyone's experience gets validated. It has to be conceptually valid, internally cohesive, and provide more explanatory power than the ideas it supplants. I wish I was more eloquent, because I think I understand the nature of the divide. A few thousand words later, however, I've apparently been unsuccessful at concisely making my case in a persuasive way.

As far as you're concerned, Epi, I don't really know the nature of your bias; perhaps because you haven't been completely honest about the perspective you're occupying? Not that it really matters. If after this bloated exchange you think I want to reduce the world to an elaborate social psych. experiment, you're clearly not getting what I'm saying. Whether that's because I don't express myself well, or because you're deliberately electing not to, is a question I couldn't answer.

Enticing numbers: numbers are reductionistic. In this particular case, researchers are attempting to distill the multidimensional nature of cognition down to a single number, and then pretending that this reflects a unidimensional standard by which groups of people can be fairly judged. As someone who makes such judgments nearly every day, on the level of individual people, I am telling you that this exercise is ludicrous, and that the exercise itself is inherently misleading. Is there such a thing as intelligence? Do individuals vary in this quality? Everyone on this board would concede this is true - we all have the experience of comparing the problem-solving prowess of individuals (and for a number of people here, a lifetime of such comparisons has probably left them feeling somewhat smug). Does this mean that every one of them would make a competent engineer, technical writer, attorney, physician, or mathematician? The idea is ludicrous. But how does "g" explain these differences? It doesn't. It glosses over their critical importance. [And you call me a radical environmentalist?]

You started this thread asking a question about that boils down to the relationship between IQ and character. I told you that there is no direct relationship, and that the indirect relationships are mediated by social affiliation. I argued that intelligent people are also prone to aggression, when social affiliation is lacking, and are in fact much more sophisticated and effective in it's delivery. To this I would add that intelligent people are also more adept at justifying it afterwards. [On an individual level, Oppenheimer makes a good case study for both capacity, ethical conflict, and the intellectual manner in which an individual can justify their own dishonesty.]

I stand by my answer, Epi. But I suggest you let go of your dreams of utopia - every Eden has it's poisonous apple. But the attainment of happiness has always been over-rated anyway, hasn't it? Lets decide what we want our utopia to look like, and pursue it with as much integrity as we can muster. Pretending that intelligence is a causal factor in criminal or aggressive behavior violates that integrity. Pretending that we have adequate understanding of either cognition or genetics (and all those pesky interactions) to warrant policy changes violates that integrity. There is nothing I've seen written here that would begin to persuade me otherwise - not because I don't see it, but because I see it in a context broad enough to illuminate the distortion of such a narrow, reductionistic viewpoint.

The outrage expressed on this board represents the panicked (and often inelegant) attempts of people who are trying to draw your attention to critical aspects of context - from both sides of the debate. Until Morgan (or an associate of greater breadth of sophistication, desire, and intellectual integrity) can provide me with answers that place these findings in a context broad enough to subsume my contrasting viewpoint, my answer will be the same - you don't get it. I don't expect that answer to come from Morgan and associates, however. Eventually, I have faith science will produce it from elsewhere.

I wish I could express it better than I have here. I guess you'll have to forgive me my intellectual shortcomings.

Hey GD

I also would like to see some commonality among the entrenched sides on, not only this issue, but pretty much any of the seemingly polemicized issues of our time. Quite often our overlapping positions are greater than our points of contention... as was the case with the simmering argument with Epi over drug policy despite his conceding the fact that the "prescription is worse than the disease." We tend to redraw the lines of the debate so that we minimize or ignore the agreement, and focus on the divergence. I think we can maintain some perspective and decorum, but we will probably never completely stop highlighting the differences... even as they get finer and more abstract.

I'd been trying to wade through crshalizi's extensive blogs on the statistical myth of "g" and Heritability ... admittedly a bit denser on the advanced statistics than I could quickly grasp. He makes a very strong case that since intelligence tests are made to correlate with each other, it follows trivially that there must appear to be a general factor of intelligence, simply by virtue of the kind of math used to analyze such tests. He even shows that Zip Codes are heritable at 81%. This stuff is thick, and way outside my field, but I could grasp it well enough to see that this is really a moot point. I had come to that conclusion through other things like the damning evidence that Rushton & Lynn have seriously fudged and misrepresented their data. Seriously fudged...

If I would have been more informed about any of this stuff from the outset of the argument, I think I would've felt less frustrated and been more civil. As it happened, this whole thing has pushed me to educate myself about a number of the elements involved. If my digging had indicated that my intuitive understanding from a layman's point of view was off base, I would've probably swallowed hard, grumbled about it a bit, and dismissed the whole field regardless (honesty ;-). Since the data, by and large shows my feelings on the subject to be fairly accurate (see above links), I feel that Slate's editors have made a huge and damaging mistake in printing these articles, though. If I could research this issue as far as I have in the past few weeks, I think it reasonable to assume that Saletan could have as well. Even simply googling Rushton would've come up with enough serious aspersions and allegations to give anyone pause... unless of course the goal was simply to create controversy and shock as a publicity stunt.

By this point, one would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to not see that this "science" is nowhere near the scientific certainty of Evolution... as Saletan claimed in his comparison of us skeptics to Creationists. This whole thing has been tiring, sobering, and more than a bit troubling as it is clear that the "race realists" knew the damning evidence beforehand and purposefully continue to pass off South African Apartheid studies from the 20's as definitive of IQ for the whole African continent. The racism we've seen here is a lot more sophisticated than the more pedantic redneck variety I was more familiar with. I'm very sure that Joe Public is not prepared to think through and counter these types of claims... especially not when put forth by solid, mainstream sources like Slate's national correspondent.

I sincerely hope that Slate has the courage to step up and apologize to its readership for putting this stuff out. At the very least, they need to do an expose on the Pioneer Fund, and allow the true experts on this issue to offer their positions in the same forum they gave ol' Will.

Anyway... far as I can tell, you don't have any intellectual shortcomings GD. We could all do better than we have done in the past. I know I will try. If this has taught me anything, it is that we must hold ourselves to higher standards than this medium might, at first, seem to warrant. This is not a vacuum, and our thoughts do, in fact, reverberate. I actually have more compassion now for my brothers and sisters on the other side of the divide than before this started.

Blessings & respect... to all and sundry.

{PS} crshalizi's posts from 11/20 & 11/21 are specific challenges to Slate, and are much easier to follow for those who don't remember anything about stochastics and whatnot, and are worth reading as well. There was even an interesting exchange between him and someone from Gene Expression.

I am quite unimpressed with Saletan's apology today, and am frankly skeptical about his motives for providing it. This has been an exhausting little debacle, and I have learned some things. One of the things I've learned is, there are a few people I will be looking out for - you, Melvyl, Brerlou (who I owe about a dozen replies to) and others I wasn't acquainted with, but who had informative things to say, and often said them eloquently.

I've never seen a thread of this length on the Fray before (certainly not on the "new" fray), but I wasn't here in the "golden age", I guess.

Still, this was a very active discussion.

I should add a caveat about civility - no-one will respond to you if they do not notice you, and one of the ways one goes about being noticed is to be confrontation, inflammatory, or shocking. It's like inducing an itch someone feels compelled to scratch. Some people seem to have a natural knack for it. So as much as I'm a fan of civil dialogue, I am also a fan of being noticed, and finding the most persuasive ways to get a point across.

Be well, Jahsun.

Hi GeneralDisarray

I have looked at this discussion and because you, as i see that this whole race thing is bullshit even thoug i know nothing really

about this i must admitt , it just sounds like a strange thing to be so passionate about what good woud it do to even try to prove such a thing.

Have you thougt of the possibility that morgan and this empi dont recall the name is working together on this?

This empiri something alwayes manages to make morgan look good when he answers his stupid questions, just a thougt.

Dont trash my english its not my first tounge.

epicurus i mean

Morgan has been defeated in every thread thus far. When one is only armed with fatally flawed IQ data, they're destined to lose in any intellectual discourse.

To transboy,

Re: "defeated," "armed," "destined to lose"

You strike me as person who is fighting a war while everyone else is having a discussion. Regardless of how readers view MorganLee's comments, your comments invite pity. You are delusional. (Delusion is a "false belief that persists even when a person has evidence that the belief is not true." from <link> )

Finish school freepeoplearenotequal - you're young and naive. You're obviously not of ready capacity to understand what is being discussed and why, and by whom. I just hope that school may impart some wisdom and common sense in you.