I, like many, hadn't paid attention to James Watson after learning about the double-helix of DNA back in school. I found this via a Bluesky post where one of the writers of STAT said "I wish I...
I, like many, hadn't paid attention to James Watson after learning about the double-helix of DNA back in school. I found this via a Bluesky post where one of the writers of STAT said "I wish I could have read what Sharon [Begley] would have written. And it turned out she had pre-written an obituary, as many celebrities have done to them. And I learned a lot about how Watson was turned having a large scientific discovery at age 25 into proof that he was inherently smarter than anyone else, especially when it came to being racist.
One formative influence was Watson’s making his one and only important scientific discovery when he was only 25.
Watson nevertheless viewed himself “as the greatest scientist since Newton or Darwin,” a longtime colleague at CSHL told STAT in 2018.
To remain on the stage and keep receiving what he viewed as his due, he therefore needed a new act. In the 1990s, Watson became smitten with “The Bell Curve,” the 1994 book that argued for a genetics-based theory of intelligence (with African Americans having less of it) and spoke often with its co-author, conservative political scholar Charles Murray. The man who co-discovered the double helix, perhaps not surprisingly, regarded DNA as the ultimate puppet master, immeasurably more powerful than the social and other forces that lesser (much lesser) scientists studied. Then his hubris painted him into a corner.
Although the book’s central thesis has been largely discredited, Watson embraced its arguments and repeated them to anyone who would listen. When friends urged him to at least acknowledge that the book’s science was shaky (or worse), Watson wouldn’t hear of it.
“He loved getting a rise out of people,” the lab friend said. “And when you think of yourself as a master of the universe, you think you can, or should, get away with things.”
This is such a familiar pattern, it's hard to even pick who to compare him to.
Jim is intuitive,” MIT biologist H. Robert Horvitz told the oral history. “He had an uncanny sense of science and science problems.”
He came to believe in his intuition about something else: race and IQ and genetics. His gut, he felt, was a stronger guide to truth than empirical research or logic. As a result, “he believed what he believed and wasn’t going to change his view,” the lab friend said. “It’s not as simple as courting controversy for controversy’s sake. But as the scientific environment became even less hospitable to [the “Bell Curve” thesis], he became even more adamant. He loved trashing the establishment, whatever it is.”
It is fascinating how this man, who could have been content with a Nobel Prize and a tenured faculty position decided to burn it all to the ground in the name of being certain his racism/sexism was right because it felt right to him.
I think what this says to me is that racism and sexism can't be pinned on "low education" as if, patronizingly, those of us with degrees look down on people without and declare how we cannot blame them for their bigotry, they lack a college degree and thus cannot understand it! It's much more of an active choice, whether to retain a taught worldview or to accept a new one, to cling on to debunked (whether by simple observation or scientific evidence) bigotry because you think it's right.
But the Great Man model of history never worked for me for reasons like this.
People forget, or perhaps never learned, that eugenics and race science had prestigious journals and many Nobel-winning scientists were involved with the field. The field really only died out...
People forget, or perhaps never learned, that eugenics and race science had prestigious journals and many Nobel-winning scientists were involved with the field. The field really only died out among serious scientists because it was so associated with the Nazis who have applied it, and the world got to witness firsthand what a eugenicist government did.
And yet, people like this guy and Richard Dawkins still consider it sound science (though the latter at least concedes it's immoral which… yeah)
Well the science has also since been debunked, but there has been in a resurgence recently because it's not so bad to be associated with Nazis anymore. The Dangerous Resurgence of “Bad Genes”...
Well the science has also since been debunked, but there has been in a resurgence recently because it's not so bad to be associated with Nazis anymore.
I did a whole post on scientific racism before, that I hope still stands on Tildes because I don't have the enery. But it's fascinating and frustrating that the guy who wasn't an expert in the field (despite his discovery) decided to die on this hill, despite others, including the experts, debunking it. His PhD couldn't protect him from his ego
Rarely does. You'd think proper scientists would be willing to be open to new discoveries and evidence. But Sinclair's principle ("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his...
His PhD couldn't protect him from his ego
Rarely does. You'd think proper scientists would be willing to be open to new discoveries and evidence. But Sinclair's principle ("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.") applies here just as much as any other field. People like fame and money and we for some reason have this very primal urge to associate "wrong" with "not smart".
It's a real shame because there may be some interesting discoveries to find based on how genes evolved in different cultures. But knowing someone is going to inevitably try to use it to tout superiority/inferiority makes a lot of that field a pandora's box to remain sealed. And all of that is before getting into the actual ethical quandaries a la GATTACA. We're not even far enough in the conversation for that discussion yet.
The irony is his salary didn't depend on it. He chose this path, but wasn't forced there by his paycheck. The problem is it can be a great and useful thing to look at genes from different...
The irony is his salary didn't depend on it. He chose this path, but wasn't forced there by his paycheck.
The problem is it can be a great and useful thing to look at genes from different populations, but believing in a genetic concept of "race" that somehow aligns with a sociological one (usually the American sociological one) throws you into that race science bullshit so fast.
But where my head is on this is I literally just had a conversation where someone floats that bigotry is due to lack of education and we should care only about economic solutions and not make uneducated (unspoken: white male cis het) people have to "keep up" with "identity" issues. I think that view is short sighted, a bit classist or at least snobbish, and acts like that group of people being bigoted is the "norm" and represents all non-college educated people. It's clearly not the degree or lack thereof that is the key
Eugenics was hugely popular amongst intellectuals of all stripes during the early 20th century. Even black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois promoted eugenics (Wikipedia). Genetics is full of...
Eugenics was hugely popular amongst intellectuals of all stripes during the early 20th century. Even black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois promoted eugenics (Wikipedia).
Genetics is full of slippery slopes. Identical twin studies clearly show that genetics matter, but they're not easy to trace. Things like epigenetic markers caused by famines contribute to obesity rates, yet those aren't even a part of DNA as it's popularly understood.
[Disclaimer: I should probably just go to bed, but instead I've hit enter...] I'd venture that a lot of science is still slippery slope, or at least heavily biased by the funders of whatever...
[Disclaimer: I should probably just go to bed, but instead I've hit enter...]
I'd venture that a lot of science is still slippery slope, or at least heavily biased by the funders of whatever research is ongoing.
Ngl, but the statement "He loved trashing the establishment, whatever it is" has been a sort of life statement for me being gen X and all, but also I learned early on that arguing for things like "purple is a fruit" is just that: a nonsensical attempt to mess with rigid standards the majority upholds. In the past, religion has been a great target for it (personally), and I view a lot of science as religion these days very similarly (as aforementioned, because you can easily find peer-reviewed studies on many topics that will contradict each other based on the funding's goal)...
Granted, I'm not justifying eugenics theories by any means, but I'd also wager a number of people who may disagree with my above statements would also be those suggesting the meme "when you come to realize that Idiocracy was supposed to be science fiction..."
I personally think that if you're just being racist as a meme/counter culture/to mock society or whatever, you're actually just being racist. This guy could have raged against the "man" in so many...
I personally think that if you're just being racist as a meme/counter culture/to mock society or whatever, you're actually just being racist. This guy could have raged against the "man" in so many different ways. Flat earth? Fake moon landing? So many better options than debunked racism.
I also think Idiocracy's whole intro makes it clear it's based on a eugenicist premise though.
I'll bite It is healthy science to go against the norm and question things Its not healthy science to continue to push a hypothesis that has been disproved as much as his "intelligence bell curve"...
I'll bite
It is healthy science to go against the norm and question things
Its not healthy science to continue to push a hypothesis that has been disproved as much as his "intelligence bell curve" hypothesis has been. That's bad science.
The premise of Idiocracy is a world where intelligence is no longer important, and so then it's no longer selected for at a population level, meaning everyone collectively becomes less intelligent. That's not related to what Watson is suggesting, that's just good old fashioned natural selection.
Idiocracy is a cartoonish movie that has to greatly exaggerate the effects of human natural selection, or else there would be no story. This promotes harmful popular misunderstandings of genetics...
Idiocracy is a cartoonish movie that has to greatly exaggerate the effects of human natural selection, or else there would be no story. This promotes harmful popular misunderstandings of genetics and it shouldn't be defended as in any way accurate.
Even deliberately selecting embryos (like with polygenic embryo selection) doesn't do all that much.
Well yea? Humans live forever compared to pea plants it would take like thousands of years to see any difference. Idr when the movie takes place I only saw it once as a kid and thought it was...
Well yea? Humans live forever compared to pea plants it would take like thousands of years to see any difference.
Idr when the movie takes place I only saw it once as a kid and thought it was kinda creepy but like even as a kid I knew it was an exaggeration.
Genetics matter, yes, but when you see people who talk about genetics like it is a personal destiny you should reject them full force. Genetics are only ever a portion of how a person will...
Genetics matter, yes, but when you see people who talk about genetics like it is a personal destiny you should reject them full force. Genetics are only ever a portion of how a person will develop. Lifestyle and environment are also huge factors. A person genetically predisposed to cardiovascular diseases, for instance, might counteract that risk by being the kind of person who goes out for a morning run and improving their cardio health.
There are multitudes of people on this earth who will look at one specific part of a person and judge them entirely based on it. But any given person has more facets than there are stars in the galaxy. What these people do is called prejudice, and it is a great social evil.
The type of person that is obsessed with this stuff doesn't care that it was associated with the Nazis. They divorce the effects of the science they're promoting with its conclusions. To them, it...
The type of person that is obsessed with this stuff doesn't care that it was associated with the Nazis. They divorce the effects of the science they're promoting with its conclusions.
To them, it doesn't matter what the social implications of of what they're studying are, only it's truth.
That is, it doesn't matter if by proving that different races inherently are more or less intelligent than one another, there will obviously be discriminatory laws passed against those less intelligent races. All that matters is that we discover the truth.
I do think that truth for truths sake can be virtuous, and I think that's what drives these people.
Unfortunately for them, association with Nazis isn't the only reason why racist science has fallen out of vogue.
It turns out it was never very scientific in the first place. There are no rigor, clear studies that correlate genetics as related to race with general human intelligence. The studies that attempt to do so have serious flaws because of how hard it is to separate culture, education, geography, racism, and testing methodology from genetic testing of human beings.
Not a whole lot of effort has been put into studying it recently either, because what would be the point? We already know that individual variation of intelligence within a race is far higher than variation between races. Any conclusions we could draw about genetic racial intelligence could only be used to justify immoral, racist policies, so it's one of those things that I think social scientists have accepted we won't ever truly know, and also, it really doesn't matter.
It seems quite clear that he didn't actually care about "the truth" though. I think this lets a lot of people who just want to support their existing racist beliefs with (bad) science off the...
It seems quite clear that he didn't actually care about "the truth" though. I think this lets a lot of people who just want to support their existing racist beliefs with (bad) science off the hook. This is a guy who thought that the truth was what his gut told him, not what science demonstrated.
The idea that this is somehow all innocent "truth seeking" is some serious white-washing.
Friend of mine saw him speak. Quickly devolved into "yeah so here's why the irish are subhuman". Well known problem and a reminder that smart people are not always good people. Edit- and yes he...
Friend of mine saw him speak. Quickly devolved into "yeah so here's why the irish are subhuman". Well known problem and a reminder that smart people are not always good people.
Edit- and yes he did steal a lot of his work so "smart" is even a questionable statement.
An American going full anti-Irish in the past, what, 20 years? (Assuming ... Though not like there's a date that makes this better...) He brought back all the old classics ಠ ل͟ ಠ Wild choice to...
An American going full anti-Irish in the past, what, 20 years? (Assuming ... Though not like there's a date that makes this better...)
He brought back all the old classics ಠ ل͟ ಠ
Wild choice to make.
Some people have one success and spend the rest of their lives trying to prove that it wasn't a fluke. Some of them never will.
For what it's worth it's a lot more common than people think. It doesn't get a ton of attention but even in newer generations the racism still pops up.
For what it's worth it's a lot more common than people think. It doesn't get a ton of attention but even in newer generations the racism still pops up.
I'm sure it does, just not usually the thing I expect from the scientific racism guy at age 90. Plenty of anti-Catholic sentiment out there too. But while I've been called a papist (as a child)...
I'm sure it does, just not usually the thing I expect from the scientific racism guy at age 90. Plenty of anti-Catholic sentiment out there too. But while I've been called a papist (as a child) I've never seen the "subhuman Irish" bits in the wild around here.
My pet theory is that intelligence is not a permanent property of a person, but it's kinda like health. You can be born with above-average health, but you can still ruin it with a bad diet. I...
My pet theory is that intelligence is not a permanent property of a person, but it's kinda like health. You can be born with above-average health, but you can still ruin it with a bad diet. I suspect the way we treat extremely successful people is a very unhealthy diet for the mind.
After reading The Enigma of Reason, I believe the ability to reason has not evolved as a truth-discovering tool, but as a social tool. We need to make good arguments to convince others to do what we want, justify ourselves to others, etc.
Now, imagine you win a Nobel Prize or launch a billion-dollar company. You get rich and famous, people label you as a genius, your followers keep showering you with praise and admiration even if you say the stupidest thing ever... well, maybe you no longer need to reason to maintain your social standing, right?
It must be brutally tempting to start believing the hype and convince yourself that you know better than everybody else. Especially if we are talking about a person with certain predispositions, like insecurity.
Eh personally speaking that flies in the face of a lot of people i've met. Intelligence in the vast majority of cases that spawn fame, is NOT some wide sweeping understanding of the wider world,...
Eh personally speaking that flies in the face of a lot of people i've met.
Intelligence in the vast majority of cases that spawn fame, is NOT some wide sweeping understanding of the wider world, people, and processes. It is often an extreme dedication to a specific skill or art, often helped by less graceful social skills.
The same insane dedication to one thing, for whatever reason, often leads to a total lack of understanding outside of it, and the ego of doing something like that (often because they want recognition) mixed with the general area worship it comes with (oh they're smart about X so of course they know about Y), is a pretty common thing.
This is how you get stuff like brain surgeons who can't change printer paper(Ben Carson/Dr Oz style), and yes A LOT of them have superiority complexes, and very easily subscribe to any beliefs that re-affirm that.
I guess point being I don't think it's an "oops it atrophied" thing so much as much like a soldier, you've had this person spend their life specializing in something hyper specific, and to expect them to perform or behave even on average, let alone well, outside of that specification is unlikely. Doubly so when the top of the curve often are there because of traits that helped them greatly in that field and harm them in most day to day situations.
I get what you're saying here but I also think we don't like to calculate the "intelligence" involved in the social aspects of fame. There are definitely people who have become...
I get what you're saying here but I also think we don't like to calculate the "intelligence" involved in the social aspects of fame. There are definitely people who have become famous/rich/whatever by their social skills and understanding of how people and society work. We just like to label that as something other than genius, which I think gets back to the bias inherent in the definitions of "intelligence" or IQ. What exactly are we measuring and how is it biased towards the people designing the measurement
I do think Watson is an example though of not even continuing to perform within his specialty.
I did a few searches and it looks like there is scientific research studying social skills, but no widely accepted test of social skill. That probably makes it harder to study than intelligence...
I did a few searches and it looks like there is scientific research studying social skills, but no widely accepted test of social skill. That probably makes it harder to study than intelligence where there a lot of different tests and they roughly do the same thing. (And there is apparently only a small, positive correlation between intelligence and social skills.)
There are pretty widely accepted measurements for personality (such as the big five traits) and some research proposing or maybe inventing a “general factor of personality” which seems to predict life satisfaction (see this article) but it doesn’t sound like it’s widely accepted?
It seems like IQ tests have a pretty strong influence on how people define intelligence, rather than starting from a definition and coming up with ways to test it. It turned out that puzzle-solving was a lot easier to test for than other traits we are interested in.
I think the closest we have to an objective measure is the ability to read facial expressions, detect lies, etc. Granted, there are people with preternatural social awareness that have no clue...
I think the closest we have to an objective measure is the ability to read facial expressions, detect lies, etc.
Granted, there are people with preternatural social awareness that have no clue what to say. Reading the room is only so helpful if you have no idea what to do or say.
Nice theory, makes sense. I will add it to my collection of theories explaining why smart people can be so stupid. I will call it Eji1700's theory of extreme dedication.
Nice theory, makes sense. I will add it to my collection of theories explaining why smart people can be so stupid. I will call it Eji1700's theory of extreme dedication.
No I just know some nurses who’ve complained and Oz/Carson are verifiably talented surgeons with, being extremely charitable, some less than stellar takes on the world.
No I just know some nurses who’ve complained and Oz/Carson are verifiably talented surgeons with, being extremely charitable, some less than stellar takes on the world.
I, like many, hadn't paid attention to James Watson after learning about the double-helix of DNA back in school. I found this via a Bluesky post where one of the writers of STAT said "I wish I could have read what Sharon [Begley] would have written. And it turned out she had pre-written an obituary, as many celebrities have done to them. And I learned a lot about how Watson was turned having a large scientific discovery at age 25 into proof that he was inherently smarter than anyone else, especially when it came to being racist.
This is such a familiar pattern, it's hard to even pick who to compare him to.
It is fascinating how this man, who could have been content with a Nobel Prize and a tenured faculty position decided to burn it all to the ground in the name of being certain his racism/sexism was right because it felt right to him.
I think what this says to me is that racism and sexism can't be pinned on "low education" as if, patronizingly, those of us with degrees look down on people without and declare how we cannot blame them for their bigotry, they lack a college degree and thus cannot understand it! It's much more of an active choice, whether to retain a taught worldview or to accept a new one, to cling on to debunked (whether by simple observation or scientific evidence) bigotry because you think it's right.
But the Great Man model of history never worked for me for reasons like this.
People forget, or perhaps never learned, that eugenics and race science had prestigious journals and many Nobel-winning scientists were involved with the field. The field really only died out among serious scientists because it was so associated with the Nazis who have applied it, and the world got to witness firsthand what a eugenicist government did.
And yet, people like this guy and Richard Dawkins still consider it sound science (though the latter at least concedes it's immoral which… yeah)
Well the science has also since been debunked, but there has been in a resurgence recently because it's not so bad to be associated with Nazis anymore.
The Dangerous Resurgence of “Bad Genes” Language | Psychology Today
The Dangerous Resurgence in Race Science | American Scientist
Silicon Valley Is Reviving the Discredited and Discriminatory Idea of ‘Race Science’
I did a whole post on scientific racism before, that I hope still stands on Tildes because I don't have the enery. But it's fascinating and frustrating that the guy who wasn't an expert in the field (despite his discovery) decided to die on this hill, despite others, including the experts, debunking it. His PhD couldn't protect him from his ego
Rarely does. You'd think proper scientists would be willing to be open to new discoveries and evidence. But Sinclair's principle ("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.") applies here just as much as any other field. People like fame and money and we for some reason have this very primal urge to associate "wrong" with "not smart".
It's a real shame because there may be some interesting discoveries to find based on how genes evolved in different cultures. But knowing someone is going to inevitably try to use it to tout superiority/inferiority makes a lot of that field a pandora's box to remain sealed. And all of that is before getting into the actual ethical quandaries a la GATTACA. We're not even far enough in the conversation for that discussion yet.
The irony is his salary didn't depend on it. He chose this path, but wasn't forced there by his paycheck.
The problem is it can be a great and useful thing to look at genes from different populations, but believing in a genetic concept of "race" that somehow aligns with a sociological one (usually the American sociological one) throws you into that race science bullshit so fast.
But where my head is on this is I literally just had a conversation where someone floats that bigotry is due to lack of education and we should care only about economic solutions and not make uneducated (unspoken: white male cis het) people have to "keep up" with "identity" issues. I think that view is short sighted, a bit classist or at least snobbish, and acts like that group of people being bigoted is the "norm" and represents all non-college educated people. It's clearly not the degree or lack thereof that is the key
Eugenics was hugely popular amongst intellectuals of all stripes during the early 20th century. Even black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois promoted eugenics (Wikipedia).
Genetics is full of slippery slopes. Identical twin studies clearly show that genetics matter, but they're not easy to trace. Things like epigenetic markers caused by famines contribute to obesity rates, yet those aren't even a part of DNA as it's popularly understood.
[Disclaimer: I should probably just go to bed, but instead I've hit enter...]
I'd venture that a lot of science is still slippery slope, or at least heavily biased by the funders of whatever research is ongoing.
Ngl, but the statement "He loved trashing the establishment, whatever it is" has been a sort of life statement for me being gen X and all, but also I learned early on that arguing for things like "purple is a fruit" is just that: a nonsensical attempt to mess with rigid standards the majority upholds. In the past, religion has been a great target for it (personally), and I view a lot of science as religion these days very similarly (as aforementioned, because you can easily find peer-reviewed studies on many topics that will contradict each other based on the funding's goal)...
Granted, I'm not justifying eugenics theories by any means, but I'd also wager a number of people who may disagree with my above statements would also be those suggesting the meme "when you come to realize that Idiocracy was supposed to be science fiction..."
I personally think that if you're just being racist as a meme/counter culture/to mock society or whatever, you're actually just being racist. This guy could have raged against the "man" in so many different ways. Flat earth? Fake moon landing? So many better options than debunked racism.
I also think Idiocracy's whole intro makes it clear it's based on a eugenicist premise though.
I'll bite
It is healthy science to go against the norm and question things
Its not healthy science to continue to push a hypothesis that has been disproved as much as his "intelligence bell curve" hypothesis has been. That's bad science.
The premise of Idiocracy is a world where intelligence is no longer important, and so then it's no longer selected for at a population level, meaning everyone collectively becomes less intelligent. That's not related to what Watson is suggesting, that's just good old fashioned natural selection.
Idiocracy is a cartoonish movie that has to greatly exaggerate the effects of human natural selection, or else there would be no story. This promotes harmful popular misunderstandings of genetics and it shouldn't be defended as in any way accurate.
Even deliberately selecting embryos (like with polygenic embryo selection) doesn't do all that much.
Well yea? Humans live forever compared to pea plants it would take like thousands of years to see any difference.
Idr when the movie takes place I only saw it once as a kid and thought it was kinda creepy but like even as a kid I knew it was an exaggeration.
I don't think anything good ever comes out of statements prefaced in this fashion.
Genetics matter, yes, but when you see people who talk about genetics like it is a personal destiny you should reject them full force. Genetics are only ever a portion of how a person will develop. Lifestyle and environment are also huge factors. A person genetically predisposed to cardiovascular diseases, for instance, might counteract that risk by being the kind of person who goes out for a morning run and improving their cardio health.
There are multitudes of people on this earth who will look at one specific part of a person and judge them entirely based on it. But any given person has more facets than there are stars in the galaxy. What these people do is called prejudice, and it is a great social evil.
The type of person that is obsessed with this stuff doesn't care that it was associated with the Nazis. They divorce the effects of the science they're promoting with its conclusions.
To them, it doesn't matter what the social implications of of what they're studying are, only it's truth.
That is, it doesn't matter if by proving that different races inherently are more or less intelligent than one another, there will obviously be discriminatory laws passed against those less intelligent races. All that matters is that we discover the truth.
I do think that truth for truths sake can be virtuous, and I think that's what drives these people.
Unfortunately for them, association with Nazis isn't the only reason why racist science has fallen out of vogue.
It turns out it was never very scientific in the first place. There are no rigor, clear studies that correlate genetics as related to race with general human intelligence. The studies that attempt to do so have serious flaws because of how hard it is to separate culture, education, geography, racism, and testing methodology from genetic testing of human beings.
Not a whole lot of effort has been put into studying it recently either, because what would be the point? We already know that individual variation of intelligence within a race is far higher than variation between races. Any conclusions we could draw about genetic racial intelligence could only be used to justify immoral, racist policies, so it's one of those things that I think social scientists have accepted we won't ever truly know, and also, it really doesn't matter.
It seems quite clear that he didn't actually care about "the truth" though. I think this lets a lot of people who just want to support their existing racist beliefs with (bad) science off the hook. This is a guy who thought that the truth was what his gut told him, not what science demonstrated.
The idea that this is somehow all innocent "truth seeking" is some serious white-washing.
Friend of mine saw him speak. Quickly devolved into "yeah so here's why the irish are subhuman". Well known problem and a reminder that smart people are not always good people.
Edit- and yes he did steal a lot of his work so "smart" is even a questionable statement.
An American going full anti-Irish in the past, what, 20 years? (Assuming ... Though not like there's a date that makes this better...)
He brought back all the old classics ಠ ل͟ ಠ
Wild choice to make.
Some people have one success and spend the rest of their lives trying to prove that it wasn't a fluke. Some of them never will.
For what it's worth it's a lot more common than people think. It doesn't get a ton of attention but even in newer generations the racism still pops up.
I'm sure it does, just not usually the thing I expect from the scientific racism guy at age 90. Plenty of anti-Catholic sentiment out there too. But while I've been called a papist (as a child) I've never seen the "subhuman Irish" bits in the wild around here.
My pet theory is that intelligence is not a permanent property of a person, but it's kinda like health. You can be born with above-average health, but you can still ruin it with a bad diet. I suspect the way we treat extremely successful people is a very unhealthy diet for the mind.
After reading The Enigma of Reason, I believe the ability to reason has not evolved as a truth-discovering tool, but as a social tool. We need to make good arguments to convince others to do what we want, justify ourselves to others, etc.
Now, imagine you win a Nobel Prize or launch a billion-dollar company. You get rich and famous, people label you as a genius, your followers keep showering you with praise and admiration even if you say the stupidest thing ever... well, maybe you no longer need to reason to maintain your social standing, right?
It must be brutally tempting to start believing the hype and convince yourself that you know better than everybody else. Especially if we are talking about a person with certain predispositions, like insecurity.
Eh personally speaking that flies in the face of a lot of people i've met.
Intelligence in the vast majority of cases that spawn fame, is NOT some wide sweeping understanding of the wider world, people, and processes. It is often an extreme dedication to a specific skill or art, often helped by less graceful social skills.
The same insane dedication to one thing, for whatever reason, often leads to a total lack of understanding outside of it, and the ego of doing something like that (often because they want recognition) mixed with the general area worship it comes with (oh they're smart about X so of course they know about Y), is a pretty common thing.
This is how you get stuff like brain surgeons who can't change printer paper(Ben Carson/Dr Oz style), and yes A LOT of them have superiority complexes, and very easily subscribe to any beliefs that re-affirm that.
I guess point being I don't think it's an "oops it atrophied" thing so much as much like a soldier, you've had this person spend their life specializing in something hyper specific, and to expect them to perform or behave even on average, let alone well, outside of that specification is unlikely. Doubly so when the top of the curve often are there because of traits that helped them greatly in that field and harm them in most day to day situations.
I get what you're saying here but I also think we don't like to calculate the "intelligence" involved in the social aspects of fame. There are definitely people who have become famous/rich/whatever by their social skills and understanding of how people and society work. We just like to label that as something other than genius, which I think gets back to the bias inherent in the definitions of "intelligence" or IQ. What exactly are we measuring and how is it biased towards the people designing the measurement
I do think Watson is an example though of not even continuing to perform within his specialty.
I did a few searches and it looks like there is scientific research studying social skills, but no widely accepted test of social skill. That probably makes it harder to study than intelligence where there a lot of different tests and they roughly do the same thing. (And there is apparently only a small, positive correlation between intelligence and social skills.)
There are pretty widely accepted measurements for personality (such as the big five traits) and some research proposing or maybe inventing a “general factor of personality” which seems to predict life satisfaction (see this article) but it doesn’t sound like it’s widely accepted?
It seems like IQ tests have a pretty strong influence on how people define intelligence, rather than starting from a definition and coming up with ways to test it. It turned out that puzzle-solving was a lot easier to test for than other traits we are interested in.
I think the closest we have to an objective measure is the ability to read facial expressions, detect lies, etc.
Granted, there are people with preternatural social awareness that have no clue what to say. Reading the room is only so helpful if you have no idea what to do or say.
Nice theory, makes sense. I will add it to my collection of theories explaining why smart people can be so stupid. I will call it Eji1700's theory of extreme dedication.
#offtopic
Is this an actual reference? Because I find it a chuckle-worthy example but can't Google up a reference for either of them.
No I just know some nurses who’ve complained and Oz/Carson are verifiably talented surgeons with, being extremely charitable, some less than stellar takes on the world.