Okay, so today we're going to talk about openness.
Now, you might say in some sense that openness
is the last discovered of the big five traits,
and it's also the one that comes up most weakly
in the factor analysis.
When Hans Eysenck formulated his trait representation
which was extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism,
he felt that he encapsulated all of the fundamental
variation in human personality and he was
loathe to include intelligence as a personality
trait.
Now, the relationship between psychoticism
and openness is rather complex.
Eysenck basically felt that people could be
extraverted and that would be the positive
dimension, and could be high in negative emotion
and that would be the negative emotion dimension,
and that they could also have a predisposition
to psychosis.
He was thinking about the brain systems that
underlie schizophrenia and that tendency to
dissociate and develop hallucinations, but
also maybe the systems in human beings that
are affected by hallucinogenic drugs, which
seem to affect human beings differently than
they affect other creatures.
Eysenck's psychoticism eventually was broken
down into low agreeableness and low conscientiousness--it
didn't predict the predisposition to psychosis
at all.
And later factor analysis found that you could
load out intelligence and creativity as a
personality dimension separately.
Now, it's a bit tricky because you have IQ
measures and IQ measures are much more direct
measures of intelligence then the personality
measures.
I mean the personality measure is something
like: do you think you're smart?
You know, I'm being a bit flippant about that
because it's more sophisticated than that,
but when you talk about someone as a smart
person, you're generally referring to the
trait that we would describe as openness.
You also are doing that when you refer to
creativity as a predisposition.
And you can measure the smart part a lot better
with IQ, and IQ is also a pretty good predictor
of creativity.
Well, so let's see how they're associated.
You remember that you have your big two traits--stability
and plasticity--and stability breaks down
into conscientiousness, emotional stability,
and agreeableness.
And then you can see how each of the aspects
are correlated--how highly they're correlated.
So industriousness and orderliness at about
.4, volatility and withdrawal in emotional
stability--or neuroticism actually--about
.6, and agreeableness and politeness at about
.4.
And then the next trait is extraversion and
openness--that makes plasticity--and people
who are high in plasticity tend to be good
entrepreneurs, by the way.
And extraversion breaks into assertiveness
and enthusiasm, correlated at about .5, and
then openness and intelligence--the correlation
there is lower--it's .35.
The average correlation between the big 5
is .2, and the correlation between the big
two is about .2.
And so you have to remember, you might ask
yourself, well is a correlation of .4 twice
as large as a correlation of .2?
And the answer to that is no, because you
have to square them to compare them arithmetically.
So a correlation of .2 gives you .04, 4% squared,
and a correlation of .4 gives you 16% squared,
so there's actually a difference of a factor
of 4.
And so you need to remember that when you're
considering effect sizes so that you can understand
exactly what they mean.
Now, if you're accounting for 16% of the variance
which would be a correlation of .4, then that
leaves 84% left unexplained.
But that's a bit of an overstatement most
of the time in psychology because our measures
are rather imperfect and so, for example,
if you give someone a personality test and
let's say that the validity of their self
report is about .6 or .7, which is probably
what it is--maybe it might be a little bit
higher than that--that means that their self-report
is only picking up 50% of the variation in
their personality.
And if an R derived from that measure accounts
for 16% of the variance, in some sense it's
twice as powerful as it appears to be.
Because the measure is so error-ridden.
And a lot of the things that we measure in
psychology are error-ridden, and what that
means is that the correlations--generally
what it means, although not invariably--is
that the correlations are bigger than they
look.
In any case, the correlations that come up
in personality research are certainly big
enough to be meaningful, and I would say meaningful
in terms of predicting major life outcomes
and predicting important economic outcomes
and that sort of thing.
One of the things you might ask yourself is,
exactly what does intelligence measure?
So we'll start with intelligence, and that
would be equivalent to intellect roughly speaking.
So intellect in the big 5, the aspect seems
to be associated with interest in ideas.
Whereas the openness proper aspect seems to
be associated with aesthetic sensibility and
creativity.
That's the best way to think about it, as
far as we've been able to figure out.
And the biggest relationship is between intellect
and intelligence, as measured psychometrically.
Now, intelligence is an interesting concept.
It's very controversial.
In fact, one of the things that continually
happens over and over again in psychology
is that psychologists discover all sorts of
new kinds of intelligence, and the biggest
two proponents of that sort of thing I suppose
were Bob Sternberg, who came up with this
thing he called practical intelligence, and
then Howard Gardner, who came up with the
theory of multiple intelligences, which had
a very large effect on educational psychology
when the theory was first proposed.
And that's not saying much because, generally
speaking, it's very difficult to find a discipline
that's more susceptible to fads than educational
psychology.
As far as I can tell, generally speaking,
each fad is worse than the previous one.
So, Gardner posited that, I think there were
7 or 8 different intelligences: linguistic,
musical, logical, mathematical, spatial, body/kinaesthetic,
intrapersonal, and interpersonal.
And people talk about emotional intelligence
and they talk about practical intelligence.
As far as I'm concerned, all of that's complete
rubbish.
And there's technical reasons for that.
I mean, there's technical and philosophical
reasons for that.
The first thing is, you can't just mess up
a word.
You know, the whole point of having a word
is so that it defines some things, it describes
some things, and doesn't describe other things,
right.
And so you can make the word intelligence
account for whatever you want.
And so you can say that the ability to dance
is a form of intelligence.
But the problem with that is you blur out
the word so badly, you can't tell what it
means anymore.
And so I would also point out: we had perfectly
good words for those major intelligences.
We called them talents.
And so it's perfectly reasonable to make a
distinction between a talent and intelligence.
Now you might say, well how the hell do you
know the difference?
If things look similar to some degree, then
how do you know if they're the same or different?
Well that's exactly what you do when you do
the construct validity process.
So let's say you rated a number of people
on their dancing ability.
And then you rated a number of people on their
ability to multiply two two-digit numbers
in their head quickly.
Well then, you see technically, if both of
those were intelligences, then the people
who could dance better could multiply two-digit
numbers faster in their head.
They would be slightly positively-- *coughs*
--see that's what happens when I don't have
any diet coke.
So anyways, if intelligence was the right
word to subsume both of those, then what you'd
see is there'd be a high correlation.
The people who were good dancers would also
be the ones who could multiply most rapidly--I
mean multiply in their head.
But you're not going to be able to extract
out a single factor like that.
It's just not the case that those things associate
like that.
So for something to be one phenomena, the
things that it-- *coughs* -- obviously I've
talked too much this semester.
All the things that are subsumed under that
definition have to be correlated.
And highly correlated.
Because otherwise they're not the same thing.
It's the definition of the same thing.
Now IQ is a very peculiar construct, a very
unique construct from a psychological perspective.
But also, more generally, from a social science
perspective because IQ has the most predictive
validity of anything ever discovered in the
social sciences, period.
Now the other thing that is interesting about
IQ is that a lot of the people who were interested
early in the measure of intelligence were
engineers turned psychologists.
And the engineers have actually had quite
a whopping effect on psychology.
Part of the reason that psychology has an
advanced methodology and advances statistical
techniques is because we got invaded by engineers
in the early part of the 20th century, and
so the engineers made our measurements much
more rigorous than they would have otherwise
been and it's been a huge advantage.
I mean, one of the things that's happening
to psychology is that it's starting to eat
other disciplines.
It's had a massive effect on economics and
it's going to have a massive effect on political
science.
And the reason for that is because we know
how to measure things, and it actually turns
out to matter that you know how to measure
things.
Obviously, I mean if you're going to be talking
about something that's specific and well-defined,
first of all, if you can't make it specific
and well-defined, all you can really do is
argue about it.
And there are better and worse arguments,
but the problem is that just because an argument
is good doesn't mean it's right.
And that's a big problem.
It's also something to remember when you're
arguing about people that you have a relationship
with because if you happen to be better at
structuring your arguments and you're more
verbally fluent, and perhaps more assertive
and perhaps less agreeable, you're going to
win the argument.
But that doesn't mean you're right.
Unfortunately it's not that simple.
And so as far as I can tell, the empirical
process is restricting or eliminating the
catastrophically detrimental effects of pure
theory.
Well, and our measurement techniques have
been pretty good about that.
Okay so now what happens with IQ here?
I can define IQ for you just so you know what
it is.
Imagine that you had a library of questions.
So here's some questions.
There's millions of questions in this data
bank.
What's 2 times 68?
What's the capital of Georgia?
What's the definition of hypertrixanemia?
What comes after in this sequence: 2, 4, 8,
16?
Remember these numbers--so I'd tell you the
numbers and you'd have to tell me them back--2,
4, 1, 3, 5, 7, 6, 12, 15, 14, 18, 20, 22.
And then I might ask you, in fact, to remember
them backwards, and that's a working memory
test.
Okay, so those are all questions that require
abstraction and mental operations: that's
the key as far as I can tell.
So you might say, exactly what constitutes
an abstraction?
And it looks to me like what an abstraction
is--there's the capacity to formulate an abstraction
and there's the capacity to manipulate them.
To formulate an abstraction, I think what
you do is you take a phenomena and you represent
it with something that's low resolution.
That's more or less what an abstraction is.
So, for example, if I imagine this classroom
later, my imagined representation is going
to be of much lower resolution than the actual
classroom, but it's sufficient for certain
purposes.
Just like a thumbnail on a computer is sufficient
for certain purposes.
And then once I simplify the phenomena in
question, then I can also perform certain
operations on it, say, in imagination or semantically,
and the capacity to generate that abstraction
and the ability to manipulate those seems
to be the core element of intelligence.
And I think part of the reason why intelligence,
roughly speaking, is a human dimension--although
obviously you can to some degree rank order
animals in terms of their capacity to learn,
but there's this whopping differentiation
between human beings and animals in this area
particularly--is because we can use abstractions.
Now, I heard a woman named Temple Grandin
speak once and it was a very interesting talk.
She's very autistic, but very brilliant, which
is not very common for people who are autistic
because usually it's associated with a substantial
amount of intellectual impairment.
But she also had an extraordinarily devoted
parent who spent almost all her time trying
to pull her daughter out of her autistic isolation.
Now Grandin has gone on to become a University
of Chicago professor--and she works in the
agricultural area--and she has redesigned
the chutes, the walkways basically, that take
cattle to the slaughter house.
And she's done that to make them much less
stressful for the animals.
And part of the reason she can do that, as
far as she's concerned, is because she thinks
like an animal.
And what that means, as far as she can tell,
is that she cannot generate an abstraction--not
easily.
Now she can speak so obviously she learned
to do it to some degree, but she talked more
about deficits in imagination or concretization
of imagination.
So one of the weird things that you see with
autistic kids, not frequently but now and
then--there's actually a famous example of
this on the web.
There's a guy, I think he's from Britain,
and you can take him in a helicopter and fly
him over a city, and then he can stand in
front of a piece of paper, like 12x8, start
anywhere, and draw the entire city.
Now and then you see autistic savants who
are children who can draw perfectly realistically,
and so maybe they'll draw a horse and they
don't even start the horse like a kid would--like
a normal kid would sketch the outline of the
horse and put some eyes in.
They put some eyes in and make the horse perfectly
detailed.
And what Grandin claimed was that-- she said
okay, you think of "house" or think of "church".
And she says, what comes to mind if you think
of church?
And maybe she'd say, well you get this little
image of something that's sort of shaped like
this with a steeped on top or a cross or something
like that, and that's a church.
And so maybe you think of house and it's like
a little kid's house.
It's got a rectangle and a parallelogram--that's
not a parallelogram, whatever the hell you
call that thing on the top--and then it's
got a chimney with smoke coming out of it,
right.
Two windows and a door.
House.
Yeah, but there are no houses like that.
Each individual house looks a lot different
than that.
And so in order to have that conception of
house, essentially what you have to do is
you have to take that class of all possible
houses and extract out the features that are
common across all of them.
And that's an abstraction.
And so, as far as Grandin's concerned, she
doesn't have abstractions like that.
When you ask her to think of "church", she
remembers "a church".
It's always singular instances.
Now the thing about human beings is that we
perceive singular instances to some degree,
although I think our abstraction capacity
often interferes with our ability to do that.
But we also perceive abstractions.
And you can kind of tell this if you're ever
trying to learn to draw.
Like if I say, draw a hand.
You guys, most of you unless you have artistic
training, you're going to draw what's essentially
a hieroglyphic hand.
I think the drawings that children come up
with aren't drawings; I think they're hieroglyphs.
They're abstracted representations that are
quasi-linguistic.
They're not artwork, they're proto-language.
And hieroglyphs of course were one of the
earliest forms of written language.
It makes sense, because if you want to communicate
about something, why not draw an image.
And eventually the image turns into a word.
But I actually think that's the developmental
progression of language among human beings.
It's the abstracted image first and then it's
the word.
Anyways, if you drew a hand, you'd likely
draw a hieroglyphic hand: 5 fingers or maybe
even 4, right, because that's what animators
do.
You can't fit all those sausages on one circle.
So they just simplify it down to 4 and no
one even cares.
You watch an animated program, which is highly
abstracted--I mean Homer Simpson looks nothing
like an actual person.
Like really tremendously unlike an actual
person, and it's completely irrelevant.
After two or three seconds it doesn't matter
at all.
Which is also why I think 3D movies--it's
never a technology that's ever caught on.
Because after the first 4 seconds, who the
hell cares.
It's irrelevant whether you see in three dimensions
because you don't need much information to
actually structure your perception.
Now if you want to see your hand--weirdly
enough--so that you can draw it, you have
to snap out of your normal mode of perception.
I find often it's a lot easier to do that
with one eye closed because it flattens it
out.
And then you have to stop looking at your
hand as if it's a hand.
You have to look at it again like it's an
object.
And as soon as you do that it's actually rather
shocking because it's such a strange looking
thing.
If you put your hand in a non-canonical position
*gestures* --that's a canonical position,
I would say--if you put your hand in a non-canonical
position and then look at it, it's the weirdest
shaped thing.
It's quite shocking to see it, you know.
And then you can draw it--once you can actually
see it like that--but before that, you're
pretty much stuck in "hand".
So anyways, I think what happens with intelligence
is that people are capable of abstracting
and then they can manipulate abstractions.
And so let's take another look at what abstractions
might be.
Now part of the reason that I think abstraction
is so useful is because things are really
really complicated and it's going to be a
lot more difficult to manipulate the actual
thing than to manipulate some representative
abstraction of it.
So if you could get an abstraction that captures
the gist of the entity--now how we do that
is not exactly obvious--but if you can, then
you can expend a lot more resources concentrating
on the relevant parts of the entity and a
lot less time concentrating on the irrelevant
parts.
So for example if you ask a child to draw
a house, what colour the house is is irrelevant.
Now why it's irrelevant is not exactly obvious.
I guess it's because colour can vary across
houses.
And colour varies across all sorts of other
things, and so colour turns out to be a non-canonical
element of "house" and so you can just dispense
with it when you're thinking about a house.
You'd say, well it doesn't matter what colour
the house is--it's still a house.
So what exactly defines those features that
make something a house rather than something
else are not that easy to figure out.
You could say, well, a house has four walls
and a roof.
And those are the external walls and I guess
you could identify the minimal necessary components,
but even that's not so simple.
And you could say a house is also something
that someone lives in, which allows you to
put caves as houses because caves obviously
share very little in common with the standard
house.
My point is that it's difficult exactly to
figure out what set of features we do use
to determine whether something is a member
of a class.
There's this guy named Gigerenzer who’s
thought about this a lot, and he thinks that
they're a combination of objective and functional,
basically.
And that enables us to do things like come
up with a category of "things you would take
from your apartment if it was on fire".
Which is a really interesting category because
most of the things that you're going to take
bear very little resemblance--it's hard to
see why they make a category.
Pets, family members--probably in that order--photo
albums, identification, what else might you
take?
Your phone, I suppose.
What else would you take out of an apartment
during a fire?
Well you guys would be out on the street stark
naked obviously.
Well you get the point is that those things
that I just mentioned seem to share very little
in terms of objective features in common,
but there's some reason that they still cohere
as a category.
Alright, so why do you need to abstract?
Well, because you can handle the complexity
of the world better.
Even your perception is a form of abstraction,
you know, because when you look at someone,
a lot of the abstraction is done for you because
you just can't perceive very well, but when
you look at someone--first of all, you only
see the surface of them that's facing you
and not the other surface, so that's a big
limitation.
You only see them now in this split second,
rather than extended across time.
You don't see any of their microstructure
beyond the general pattern of the physiology
at this level of resolution.
You don't see anything beyond that.
I can't see your cells or your organs or anything
like that, which is actually a real problem
often for us.
And I can't see the systems that you're part
of.
So right off the bat, just to perceive gives
you a low resolution representation, and a
lot of that is limitations of your processing.
Your eyes just can't zoom in that far.
You don't have the cortical capacity to improve
your vision.
Plus, how much do you really want to see at
one time?
No more than necessary, whatever that means.
And evolution seems to take care of that problem.
So your perception abstracts for you right
away, but then I would say maybe you make
a leap from perception to conception, something
like that.
And so that would be the leap from the perception
of the actual object to the image of the object,
and then a leap from the image of the object
to the word.
So it looks to me that a word is a representation
of an image which is a representation of an
object or a situation--it's something like
that.
And you need those because you have to deal
with a complex world.
So here's one way of thinking about it.
Look at the top left corner of that diagram.
I call that the thing in itself, and what
it is is an array of dots, roughly speaking,
and--I think there's 350 dots there--and you
might say, well--and then if it was a real
world object you could imagine that would
be in three dimensions, not two, because that's
two, and it would be transformed because it
would be also extended across time.
And it would have microstructures that were
far smaller than that and macrostructures
that were far bigger, so even that is an abstraction,
but I'm using a fairly complex abstraction
to represent the thing in itself.
That's the thing you cannot perceive, right.
What something actually is.
You just get an image.
And then the next five things are ways you
could look at that.
So you could say, well, it's a rectangle.
You could say it's four rectangles, and forget
about the dots.
You could say that it's--I think that's 16
lines or, what is it, 32 lines?
24 lines.
So if that thing in itself was an orchard
and you were going to walk south to north
through it, that would be a good representation.
Those would be corridors, roughly speaking,
and then object four is a combination of object
one and object two.
And then object five is, well, all that's
blurred out are the little groups of six dots.
And so you might say, well, what is that thing?
And then the answer is, well it's any of those
five things.
And so that's an interesting way of thinking
about it too because one of the things it
shows you is that you can disagree about what
something is right at the level of perception.
And then you might say well which of those
is the best representation?
And the first answer might be, well, the most
complex one: the one in the left-hand corner.
But that's not necessarily the case--it might
depend on what you want the representation
for.
Like imagine--it's weird, it's weird--because
imagine you have a map, okay.
And so you think, well I'm going to make the
best map in the world, and so you make a map
that's exactly the same size as the territory
that it represents and has all the detail.
Well that's not any use at all, that thing,
because you could just use the territory,
right?
Just because, as a map gets increasingly detailed,
to some degree, it's increasingly useless
as a map.
And so what you need is this weird combination
between accuracy and simplicity.
And so you want your map to be no more complicated
than is necessary than to take you from point
A to point B, that's it.
Because otherwise, it wouldn't be simple to
use and the additional complexity would limit
the utility of the map.
So you might say that what we're trying to
do with our intelligence is to get what we
need with the least amount of effort possible.
And there's a sort of Piagetian idea that's
lurking behind that, which is: you have limited
resources, you don't want to expend more energy
than is necessary, and you want to build representations
of the world that suffice to keep you going
now and then next week and next month, and
then along and then in groups.
And so you build a representation of the world
that has some concordance of the thing in
itself, but has this functional simplicity
so that you can actually use it in the real
world.
Alright, so back to this diagram.
So I've got the object and five representations,
and then there are ways of representing it
linguistically at the bottom.
What that is--the words are basically a simplification
of something that's already simplified.
So intelligence seems to have something to
do with the process of functional simplification.
Now, back to the library of questions.
So you have this database of questions and
so then what is you is pull out a hundred
questions, randomly.
Alright, and you want to pick out a hundred
because if you just pick out one--like if
I asked you what the capital of Georgia was
and I asked you what the capital of Georgia
was, and you got it wrong and you got it right,
I couldn't really say with any degree of certainty
that that means that you have more intelligence.
Because the probability that I'd get an accurate
measure with one question is quite low, but
if I used three questions, well then, I would
start to become--my measurement would start
to become less error-ridden, and if I used
10 it would even be better, and if I used
20...
For a personality questionnaire, the rule
of thumb--and this is just a rule of thumb--is
that, if you don't have 20 questions in the
questionnaire then you don't have enough questions
to really generate a reliable measure.
So you'll still see single item measures used
in psychology, but you can add additional
accuracy by increasing the number of items.
I designed an IQ test a while back and we
got a pretty good reliability and pretty good
validity.
Reliability is, you know, you test the same
set of people twice and the rank order of
their performance stays the same.
So if you got 90 on the previous on the previous
test you'd get 90, and if you got 95, because
you're more intelligent in this example, if
you got 95 on the last one you'd get 95 on
this one.
So that's reliability.
We could get a pretty reliable IQ test with
nine items, but it was substantially improved
with 17.
And with increments you get a, what would
you call it, diminishing returns.
So a hundred is plenty.
Okay, so you pull out a hundred questions
and then you take 100 people and you gave
them those questions, and then you score them--right
and wrong, that's all there is--and then you
sum the scores.
Okay, so basically, the sum behaves like the
average--let's say you average the scores
just to make the argument a little bit more
straightforward.
You average the scores, and so each of you
gets the average calculated across the times
that you were right and wrong, so it's an
approximation of the frequency of how right
you were, and then we rank order you: 1 to
100.
That's IQ.
That's all there is to it.
Now people say IQ doesn't exist.
Well, that's annoying, because all they're
doing is gerrymandering the definition of
the word exist.
You know, because you can do that: if you
ask if A is equivalent to B, the answer is,
it depends on what you mean by A and what
you mean by B. It's almost always a foolish
question because you can take B and A and
bend them and twist them in such a way that
you can make one thing another thing without
too much problem.
People usually get around that by only using
a word in a context, right--in a sentence
or a phrase or a paragraph that defines the
word so that you can't weasel around like
that.
But more specifically in psychology, we have
methods to tell if something is real, and
if IQ doesn't pass the test of reality for
a psychological measure, then no other psychological
measures pass the test because they're validated
exactly the same way IQ is, and they don't
work as well.
So you can say, well no, that's not real,
but then you have to throw out--you probably
have to throw out the social sciences completely
insofar as they're actually sciences.
Because the same statistics are used to generate
their findings.
So you can't just say, well this really powerful
thing doesn't exist while a bunch of these
weak things exist and they're measured the
same way.
You don't get to play that game.
Okay, so does it exist?
Well you can measure it reliably, so that's
definitely something.
You know, because you might say, well does
your shadow exist?
Well, generally speaking under normal conditions
you could measure your shadow relatively reliably.
Does it exist?
Well, it passes one test of existence.
You can't detect it with a number of senses--you
can't touch it--for example, but whether or
not something exists is actually a rather
tricky question.
But 
you can measure it and it's useful, and that's
not a bad definition of "exist".
So, what's it good for?
Well, it predicts major life outcomes, and
importantly.
And we can talk about the power of intelligence
momentarily.
If you were actually going to calculate an
IQ score per se, you would take the rank order
that I just described and you would correct
if for age, because you can't really expect
a 7 year old to know as much as a 15 year
old or a 20 year old, so generally speaking
if you take a technical IQ test, it will rank
order you but it will only rank order you
with people the same age as you.
So that's just another, you know, it's an
additional correction, whether or not that
actually gives you a more accurate estimate
of IQ depends on what you mean by accurate.
A very bright 7 year old generally doesn't
know enough to do much useful in the way of
work, but they can learn extremely quickly,
and so if you compare 7 year olds to people
of other ages purely in terms of their score
on an IQ test, there's a high probability
that you would underestimate their speed of
learning.
By the same token though, by the time you're
40 you have a lot of accumulated knowledge,
and so if you only measured learning speed
then you would overestimate the 7 year old's
advantage over the 40 year old.
IQ is basically a unitary phenomena, but you
can fractionate it into...it's very very complicated,
for reasons that I'll tell you about in a
minute.
If you had to divide IQ into two, the way
you would divide it would be into crystallized
and fluid intelligence.
And fluid intelligence would be, roughly,
the ability to learn.
And crystallized intelligence would be, roughly,
a measure of how much you've learned.
Now those are separate to some degree, and
here's why they're separate: as you age, your
capacity to learn decreases.
It's quite ugly.
So by the time you're about 24, you're starting
to get stupider, from the perspective of being
able to learn.
And that's just pretty much a linear trip
downhill until you depart the world.
So it's nasty to see because it's quite a
steep generation.
You can stave that off, by the way, with cardiovascular
exercise and weightlifting--so that's the
best way to keep your learning capacity intact.
It's not to do cognitive exercises, it's to
do physical exercises.
And then as you age, the amount you know goes
up and what happens is those two things actually
tend to average out.
Now you might say, well if I'm claiming that
IQ is a unitary thing, how can I make the
claim that you can divide it into two elements
and that those elements are in some sense
separate.
And I think the reason is for this: your prefrontal
cortex, roughly speaking--so that's the part
of your brain here forward--you can think
about in part, it's the part that does the
programming of motor activity--voluntary motor
activity--but it also seems to be...so let's
say you're doing something new and you're
pretty clunky and awkward at it, and then
you do it more and more and you get smoother
and smoother and smoother at it, and you automatize
it.
What happens is you're using your prefrontal
cortex and, to some degree, your whole right
hemisphere as you're first doing it, and then
as you get better and better at it the ability
shifts to the left and then goes backwards.
So what's happening, to some degree, is your
prefrontal cortex is programming the rest
of your brain.
And you can think of fluid intelligence as
a measure of the ability of your brain to
program itself, and crystallized ability as
a measure of how much programming is there.
So they're separate in that manner because
they perform separate functions, but then
you can also understand that the better your
programmer is, the better your programming
is going to be so that inflates the correlation.
And so you can have to separate things functionally--that
are even dissociable in terms of age--but
because they work so tightly together--it's
like, how fast can you dig a hole and how
big is the pile of dirt?
Well obviously those two things are different
in some important sense, but they're going
to be highly correlated because the faster
you can dig a hole, the bigger the pile of
dirt.
So anyways, crystallized intelligence is also
often measured as verbal intelligence, but
the better measure fundamentally is crystallized
intelligence.
Now, you know how we looked at the personality
hierarchy, right--that was this *gestures
to slide*.
And what you see is three strata, roughly
speaking: aspect, trait, superfactor.
And it looks like--the superfactors, I would
say, the validity of those superfactors is
not yet clear.
You can get a lot of useful prediction by
looking at the traits, and there's more and
more evidence--there's about 400 studies now
using the aspects--there's more and more evidence
that you can also derive additional useful
predictive validity from differentiating the
personality down to the aspect level.
So that's the highest resolution personality
level we have.
There are people who claim that there's something
at the apex which you might call "good personality",
but I don't think so.
I think it's--I don't think so.
You'd have to read the literature to understand
the dispute--it's a statistical dispute roughly
speaking--but we've found in our research
that stability and plasticity are only correlated
at 0.2.
They're pretty separate.
So I'm going to stick with that for now even
though it might be wrong.
Okay, so 
if you read the cognitive literature and the
neuropsychological literature, you will find
that neuropsychologists tend to assume that
there are forms of cognitive ability that
you cannot describe as IQ.
And they make that claim because they'll take
a test and they'll use the test to measure
something, and then they'll correlate that
with IQ and the correlation will only be about
0.2 or 0.3.
And they'll say, well that's not a high enough
correlation to justify saying that those things
are identical--because the correlation should
be more like 0.8 for them to be identical.
But the problem is, let's say I had a measure
if your IQ and your IQ and your IQ and your
IQ, and then I asked you two questions, and
you and you and you, and I summed your answers,
whether they correct or incorrect.
Now what would happen is, there'd be some
correlation between your total score on those
two questions and your overall IQ.
Maybe it would be 0.3.
But that wouldn't justify me in claiming that
the two question IQ test is different from
the full scale IQ test--it's just worse.
And you're going to run into this problem
when you read psychological literature and
if you ever do any research because it's very
difficult to determine whether you get what's
called "discriminant validity" which is, this
thing measures this thing, and this thing
measures this thing, and they're actually
different.
Or whether you just have a lousy measure of
this and a lousy measure of this and so the
correlation is low.
Now here's a neuropsychological test, and
you can make the case that this is measuring
something different than IQ.
So imagine that you see an array of 12 pictures--they're
just drawings, drawings of a telephone and
a booth and a chair--just common objects.
So you see 12 of them.
And then you have to click one, and then when
you do that, they move.
And then the next time you have to click one
you haven't already clicked.
And then they move again and you click, and
then they move again and you click.
And you see by about the time that you get
to about 8 of them, you're starting to run
into trouble because it's difficult to remember
more than 8 abstractions simultaneously--7
actually, and some people claim it's as low
as 4--that's the capacity of working memory.
Which is why we kind of like phone numbers
to be 7 digits long.
A lot of the things we want to just remember
are 7 units long, and if we want to remember
more than that, we chunk.
Although if I show you some dots *draws dots*
how many dots?
3.
You don't have to count them.
You can see 3 dots. *draws more dots* You
can see 4 dots.
It's not obvious that you can see 5 dots.
At that point you start to go "3 and 2".
And then if there's 6 dots, well that's how
they would be arranged on a dice, right.
The reason they'd be arranged on a dice that
way is because you can see two sets of three
and infer 6.
You know, if they're sort of randomly dispersed
like that, and I say well how many dots is
that, well you have to count them.
And what that shows you is that your working
memory--which is really a function of fluid
intelligence--is a very very narrow thing.
And it's like your vision.
You know, remember we saw the gorilla video,
right, and you can only pick up the thing
that you're attending to.
Well working memory is like that, it's this
narrow narrow form of attention and it sort
of specifies unitary phenomena--I mean that's
not quite unitary but it's close enough.
And I think the reason it does that--it's
like, why's your attention so narrow--is because
often what you're trying to do as you work
in the world is to make binary choices.
You know, you don't want to choose between
20 things, you want to choose between two
things, because then when you choose between
two things you can actually act.
If it's still two things you can't act, if
it's one thing you can act.
So imagine you go into a Chinese restaurant
is a good example, because Chinese restaurants
virtually always have like 400 items on the
menu. and you might ask yourself, well how
the hell do you figure out what you want.
And what you don't do is go through every
single menu item and contemplate it because
then you'd be there for a week.
So what you seem to do is eradicate chunks.
So you might say, well I'm not in the mood
for anything but fish.
Okay, bang, three-quarters of the menu disappears.
You know, and then you might go, well I don't
want it breaded.
Whack, and then another half is gone and now
you're down to maybe 8 choices.
And, you know, you reduce that to 4 and then
to 2 perhaps.
Well I'd like this or I'd like that.
But the waiter doesn't care about that.
The waiter wants to know which one you want,
because until it's reduced to one you don't
get to act.
And so the reduction, the reduced narrow strip
that we use to perceive the world in partly
is a consequence of processing inadequacy.
But it's also partly because we really are
trying to reduce things all the time to 0
and 1, yes and no.
Okay, so back to the three stratum theory
of cognitive abilities.
Now, you've got this array of 12 items and
it keeps shifting.
And what I would do is score you by the number
of duplications--if you pick the same item
more than once, you lose a point.
So the maximum points you can get is 12 and,
you know, people usually make 3 or 4 mistakes.
And so I can take your score on that test--maybe
I'd give it to you 2 or 3 times just to make
sure I have a reasonably stable indicator--and
then I could correlate it with your full-scale
fluid IQ.
And I'd get a correlation of about 0.25 or
0.3.
Now, if you don't know anything about psychometrics
you'd say, well that's obviously measuring
something different than full scale IQ because
it only correlates at 0.25 or 0.3.
But what it turns out is, no: it's more analogous
to the problem that we were just talking about
where I asked you three questions and tried
to derive your entire IQ from that.
It's just a bad measurement.
Now what happens is if you take the neuropsychological
tests that people have developed, that theoretically
assess the different parts of the brain, and
you factor analyze them and you extract out
a single factor, the single factor looks exactly
like fluid intelligence.
Now, is it exactly the same as fluid intelligence?
The onus would be on the person who claims
it's not to demonstrate the difference.
We did give university students a very extensive
battery of pre-frontal-cortical tests and
measured their IQ, and then we used the pre-frontal-cortical
test average and the IQ to predict grades.
And what we did find was the pre-frontal tests
predicted over and above the IQ.
But we thought maybe, if you took the pre-frontal
average and IQ and you added them to predict
grades, say--that's a regression analysis--they
both added in.
So they predicted different parts of the variation.
It added additional necessary information.
However, if you took all the neuropsychological
tests and all the individual IQ tests and
you put them in one data set and then extracted
out a single factor--so that would be fluid
intelligence, roughly speaking--that predicted
grades very well.
And then what was left over didn't predict
at all.
So what we concluded was that neuropsychological
tests--pre-frontal-cortical tests--test intelligence,
and they test a slightly different thing than
fluid intelligence tests do, but that isn't
because they're testing something different,
it's because fluid intelligence tests the
way they're currently constituted--don't sample
the universe of potential questions as well
as they should.
So it wasn't that we discovered something
different, we discovered a measurement error,
roughly speaking.
That only took 5 years by the way.
It took 5 years to figure that out.
It was very annoying because when we started
I was trying to predict grades, you know,
and I didn't know the IQ literature very well
at that point, because psychologists don't
usually teach it very much, because IQ bothers
the hell out of everybody.
And so, and the neuropsychologists who have
their own field are motivated to make the
claim that they've discovered something new
and I just took that on face value.
But then we tried to predict--like okay if
I'm going to predict how well you do at your
job, well I want to get a good cognitive measure
because if it's a complex job it keeps changing
and you have to learn to keep up, and if you
can't do that, you're not going to do very
well.
So that would be bad for you and it would
be bad for everyone around you.
And so we were trying to pick up additional
information that would enable the accuracy
of the prediction to be increased, and looked
at the neuropsych literature but, at most,
it was an ambivalent success.
(00:49:25)
Okay, so how does that relate to this?
Well at the bottom tier, where it's the most
differentiated, you have single tests.
And they're only correlated with each other
at about 0.2, maybe 0.3.
So you might say, well, they're all measuring
different things--they're not.
They're all measuring the same thing badly.
And then you might clump them.
So let's say I ask you--oh god--maybe I give
you a test that asks you--that tested your
vocabulary with 6-letter words, and then I
gave you another test that tested your vocabulary
with 7-letter words, and then another one
that tested your vocabulary with 8-letter
words.
And I said, well those are all different tests.
Well they would correlate quite highly--not
perfectly--but I could clump them together
and make one sort of super test out of them.
And then I could take supertest A and supertest
B and supertest C and look at the correlations
between those, and those would climb to about
0.5 or 0.6.
And then if I clumped the supertests together,
which would be happening by the time we got
to stratum 2 there, then the correlation between
the tests would start to rise to about 0.7.
And then if I collapsed all the supertests
into a single measure, then the correlation
between any of those stratum 2 tests and G,
because that would be the highest level thing--G
is general intelligence, that's roughly speaking
fluid intelligence--the correlation between
any of the supertests and G would be about
0.8.
So the point of all this--there's no way of
discussing this sort of thing without doing
it statistically and technically because they
are statistical and technical processes.
So what happens is that, now let's say now
you have a measure of fluid intelligence.
Okay, you've got this measure.
And you take one of the stratum 2 sets of
tests and you use both to predict academic
achievement.
What happens is that the superfactor, G, kills
the rest of them.
You're just not going to be able to find any
of the tests in the bottom strata that are
going to add to the prediction of what the
general factor can give you.
Now with personality, that's just not the
case.
You can't pull out a single factor that predicts
how personality is going to influence job
performance across your life.
If you add neuroticism--if you take a single
factor and you add neuroticism, neuroticism
is going to kick the single factor out.
Conscientiousness is going to kick the single
factor out, and so forth.
Because there isn't a single factor.
It's not--the tests aren't highly correlated
enough to say that they're all measuring the
same thing to some degree.
The personality traits really are different.
You know, you can clump them into plasticity
and stability, but even there you're maintaining
a lot of validity.
So if I took stability and used conscientiousness
to predict job performance, conscientiousness
would wipe out stability--it'd be a better
measure.
But you never get that--you virtually never
get that with the lower tests in the IQ strata.
Okay, now *mumbling*.
That's a good representation of how these
things are associated.
So at the bottom you have the single tests
and then they chunk into, say, sequential
reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and induction
on the fluid intelligence side, and general
knowledge and language development on the
crystallized intelligence side--that's the
red--and then they're all subsumed underneath
fluid intelligence, which is the measure that
you really want to have.
Okay, so what good is that?
Well, it basically correlates 0.5 with major
life outcomes.
And that's 25% of the variance, and maybe
you can get it a bit higher than that, but
we'll just stick with 0.5 as a representation.
And so, let's 
say you take a bunch of students, 100 of them,
and you want to sort them into those who will
pass the class with a 50% failure rate.
So you just pick them randomly--you're going
to pass, you're going to fail, you're going
to pass, you're going to fail.
So that's no knowledge.
I have no predictive knowledge whatsoever.
So my validity--the validity of my classification
is basically going to be equivalent to chance:
zero.
Right, I'm only going to have a 50% chance
of picking who passes and who fails.
If I used IQs--if I had all your IQ scores--and
I did the prediction, I'd get it right 75%
of the time.
So it's a huge difference.
It cuts the failure rate in half by using
IQ.
And IQ is a very good predictor of health,
it's a predictor of longevity, it's a predictor
of resistance to post traumatic stress disorder,
it's a predictor of--obviously--occupational
status, it's a prediction of educational success,
it's a predictor of income.
It's a very powerful predictor.
And here's another way of conceptualizing
its effects.
So imagine you could choose how you were going
to be when you were born--this is in North
America because it's going to vary by society,
at least to some degree.
You get to be born into a family that's at
the 95th percentile for wealth, or you get
to be born at the 95th percentile for intelligence.
Who's better off at the age of 40?
And the answer is the person who picks being
born with an IQ in the 95th percentile at
birth.
It's a more powerful predictor of long-term
life outcome than familial wealth.
And it shows up everywhere.
One of the things we did recently was look
at disgust sensitivity--we're going to talk
a little bit about that when we talk about
conscientiousness because orderly people seem
to be more sensitive to disgust than disorderly
people.
That seems to be why they’re orderly.
But, the higher you are in IQ, the less disgust
sensitive you are.
Now we don't know exactly why that is.
Maybe it's because, you know, maybe you could
make the inference that IQ is related in some
way to the physiological integrity of the
cortex rather than the limbic system, which
is the source of, say, emotions and motivations.
And the more powerful it is, the more inhibitory
capacity it has over the more fundamental
motivations and emotions.
You could make that case.
The problem is that intelligent people don't
necessarily seem to be any less impulsive,
so... and you can have a pretty vicious personality
disorder that's characterized by extremely
disorganized behaviour and a complete inability
to put long term plans into operation, and
still have a high IQ.
So, one of the things we really can't figure
out--it's just a hell of a thing to try to
figure out.
Like the relationship between IQ and industriousness
is zero.
And that just makes no sense to me because
most of the brain models are predicated on
the idea that your ability to engage in long-term
planning is a factor that's associated with
intelligence.
But then industriousness people seem to not
only engage in long-term planning, they seem
to do it right so that if they're more industrious
and they put their plans into operation, then
the plans seem to actually work.
But it's not correlated with IQ.
So then I can't figure out, well obviously
the industrious person, in some way, is able
to regulate their own behaviour.
You know, well they're not procrastinating,
for example.
And you'd think that that--the ability to
not procrastinate--would be a cognitive feature,
but it doesn't seem to be.
And we have no idea what makes people industrious,
and we can't figure it out.
So it's this incredibly potent predictor--it's
just about as powerful as IQ--and we have
no idea what it is.
So if you think you have a smart idea about
that and you want to pursue it, feel free
because there's a big mystery there that no
one's been able to crack.
And we've been at it for a long time and have
had almost no success.
You know, we had people do things like, we'd
give them sentences of n’s, m's and u's--sort
of randomly distributed--and then we'd have
them count the u's.
You know, like a whole page of sentences--they’re
not sentences, they're just strings of letters.
Count the u's--how useless!
You'd think that someone industrious would
do that better.
They don't.
That's an IQ test.
The people who can count the u's faster have
higher IQs.
Almost everything that you would do where
it has to do with manipulations of abstractions
of any sort--even something that basic--seems
to be fundamentally associated with IQ.
People with higher IQs have slightly bigger
heads, if you control for body size.
They have slightly bigger brains, if you control
for body size.
The axons on their neurons are a bit thicker,
so the electrical messages seem to travel
a little bit more efficiently.
They are slightly faster in simple reflex
tests.
So it goes right down to the level of...because
a simple reflex--a light goes on, you push
a button--there's not many neurons mediating
that response.
You know, chains of neurons.
There's only a few neurons communicating so
that you can do that.
But even at that relatively simple processing
level, IQ is associated with speed.
So there's a physiological component.
You're less likely to develop Alzheimer's
disease if you have a high IQ.
And maybe that's just because your brain is
more robust.
You know, so you could sustain damage, say,
of up to 50% of your brain and you wouldn't
even show it if you have a sufficiently high
IQ.
Whereas if you're on the bottom end of the
IQ distribution, you're much more--you seem
to be much more susceptible to physiological
damage.
Nutrition is a big predictor of IQ variation.
And a lot of that's been hammered out of modern
societies.
You know, so 150 years ago people's IQ was
pretty tightly associated with their nutritional
status, but now there are very few people
in North America who don't have enough to
eat, even though there's some variation in
quality of diet.
And that's flattened out a lot of the cultural
variability in intelligence.
Okay, so this guy named Hemphill did this
paper--an American psychologist a while back--and
one of the things he was interested in doing--remember
we talked about effect sizes, right.
How big is an effect in psychology or in social
sciences in general?
And people have used rules of thumb that 0.5
was a moderate effect and 0.3 was a minimal
effect and 0.2 was starting to diminish to
the point of non-utility.
But what Hemphill did instead of guessing,
because that was just a guess, was actually
go and look at papers that were published
in psychology to see what effect sizes were
being reported.
So it's empirical analysis of how big the
effects that psychologists and other social
scientists report.
And so what he found was that the highest
third of paper or the third of papers that
had the biggest effects reported effects from
0.35 to 0.78, the middle third from 0.21 to
0.33, and the lower third from 0.02 to 0.21.
*mumbling* If you look on the left side here
you see an r of less than 0.15 characterizes
the first quarter of published studies.
An r of 0.15 to 0.35, the next quartile.
So 50% of psychological studies report an
r of less than 0.35.
90% report an r of less than 0.5, and only
7 to 8% report an r of 0.5 or above.
So what that means is that the relationship
between IQ and, say, academic performance
or long-term life income is higher than that
reported in all but about 5% of psychology
studies.
Okay so here's an interesting--you might say,
again, in order to determine that something
exists, you have to be able to measure it
and then it has to be good for something.
So it has to be grippable and it has to be
useable as a tool, we'll say for the sake
of argument.
What sort of IQ do you need for what kind
of job?
This was derived from a company called Wonderlic,
and Wonderlic does employment testing.
Psychologists usually don't use the Wonderlic
test.
It's a relatively short IQ test, and it's
a good test.
I think psychologists don't use it because
it was developed commercially, but we tested
the Wonderlic out a lot and it has excellent
psychometric properties.
It's a very good IQ test.
It probably errs a little bit in testing crystallized
IQ rather than fluid IQ, but we won't argue
about that for the time being.
Alright so, if you have an IQ from 116 to
130, that puts you in the 86th to 95th percentile.
Right, so that means you're minimally--if
there were 8 people in a room, on average
you'd be the smartest person.
I should tell you, just so you know, that
if you're a state college student--we'll use
the US as an example because there's more
differentiation between the American universities
in terms of quality than there is the Canadian
universities--if you're in an average American
post-secondary institution, your IQ is 115.
And so, you think, that's not all that bright.
But that's brighter than 7 out of 8 people
in the general population.
And so the are as many people--if you look
at the North American distribution...so you
have the 50th percentile in the middle of
the normal distribution, you have the 85th
percentile here, and you have the 15th percentile
here.
So about 70% of people fall between the 15th
and the 85th percentile.
At the 15th percentile you're not really very
literate.
And so what that means is that in the United
States there's just as many people who aren't
literate as there are people who are in college.
And what I would mean by literate is not so
much--like here's a bare bones definition
of literate: you can follow written instructions.
And so what that means is it's kind of a two-fold
issue, right.
You can make out the words and the phrases
and the sentences, but then you can translate
them into actual action--you can use them
as information.
And at 85 you're going to have not a very
good time doing that.
And so, when you're wondering things about
the way society is structured and why people
don't necessarily make the most intellectually
sophisticated choices, one thing that's very
much worth remembering is that there's just
as many people who are functionally illiterate
in north America as there are people who are
in tier-one colleges.
It's quite shocking.
Anyways, okay so you want to be an attorney,
a research analyst, an editor, an advertising
manager, a chemist, an engineer, an executive,
a systems analyst, an auditor--so you're up
in the professional levels there.
You need an IQ of at least 116.
And so 130 would be better.
My suspicions are that the average IQ of people
in this room is about 120 to 125.
It might be a little higher than that.
It's hard to measure IQ in the U of T population
because a lot of people have English as a
second language and so that makes it harder
to measure crystallized intelligence obviously
using an English language test.
But we've found, when we've done our studies
at the U of T, that the average exceeds 120.
So, you know, so you guys have the cognitive
power to basically pursue professional level
careers.
From 110 to 115: manager, supervisor, programmer,
teacher, general manager, purchasing agent,
registered nurse, sales account executive.
These are actually empirically derived, by
the way.
So the Wonderlic company has tested a very
large number of people.
And so these are the actual averages of the
professions that they are describing--it's
not hypothetical.
103 to 108, so that's the 60 to the 70th percentile:
clerk, customer service rep, computer operator,
medical debt collector, secretary, accounting
clerk, general sales, telephone sales, assistant
manager, credit clerk, drafter, designer,
bookkeeper.
There's a lot of white-collar, like low level,
entry level, white collar jobs in that particular
category.
So that would be the brighter people among
the high school students who didn't go to
college and university.
IQ, this is dead average, 50th to the 55th
percentile: police officer, receptionist,
cashier, general clerical staff, inside sales
clerk, meter reader, printer, teller, data
entry, electrical, helper, dispatcher, general
office.
So that's right at 100.
95 to 98, so that's the 42nd to the 45th percentile:
quality control checker, claims clerk, security
guard or unskilled labourer.
So look, the unskilled labourers are up at
95th of 98, so that's--at the unskilled labour
level you still have an IQ that's higher than
40% of the population.
Ark welder, die setter, mechanic, medical
dental assistant.
IQ 87 to 93: messenger, factory production
worker, assembler, food service worker, nurse's
aid, warehouseman, custodian, janitor, material
handler, and packer.
Okay, so now what you see happening--it looks
to me like you can conceptualize jobs most
simply with a two by two matrix.
Okay, so there's managerial/administrative
jobs and creative jobs--that's the first one--and
then there's low complexity/high complexity.
And so, what you're starting to fall into
at the 21st to the 37th percentile--so that's
still one person in three--are low complexity,
managerial jobs.
And so what I mean by that is, if you're in
a low complexity job, imagine you're responsible
for 30 things.
But roughly speaking, it's the same 30 things
all the time.
And roughly speaking, they have to be taken
care of the same way each time.
So you have a finite domain of responsibility
and you can master it.
And IQ will predict how fast you master it,
but once you master it, it won't predict how
well you do.
What happens then, in all likelihood, is that
conscientiousness starts to predict, or maybe
emotional stability starts to predict, or
some of the other personality factors start
to become more important.
So, but at 87 to 93, you're down at the level
of custodian and janitor.
And then that's that.
And that's not so good because you have the
bottom 15-20% of the population who don't
have a cognitive ability at that level.
And so one of the things that you're going
to hear a lot about as you get older is reasons
for unemployment.
And one of the prime reasons for unemployment
in the future is increasingly going to be
that there is just nothing for someone of
that level of intelligence to do.
And this is partly why people hate IQ, because
you think, that is a nasty nasty thing to
conclude.
Let me tell you a story.
So, I had a client at one point who I suspected
he had a verbal IQ of about 85 and a non-verbal
IQ that was lower.
He had other psychological issues, but we'll
just concentrate on that one for the time
being.
And he had a hard time finding a job.
He was socially anxious and that didn't help,
but even if he could overcome that it was
very difficult for him to master the basic
skills that were involved in what you would
consider even relatively straightforward tasks.
I spent a lot of time trying to find him a
job, which was insanely difficult.
He went to the government first to get help,
and they told him to type up his resume on
a computer and distribute it--it's like, well
that wasn't very helpful because he didn't
know how to use a computer and he wasn't going
to type up his damn resume.
It was, "if you want to get a job, go out
and do the things that it would take to get
a job."
Well yeah, if you can do that then you don't
have a problem.
And so the government agencies were completely
useless, and they were staffed by people who
would assume that if you didn't do what you
were advised to, then you just didn't want
to have a job.
Instead of ever thinking that maybe you couldn't
do it.
It's not the easy to use a computer.
And then I tried to get him a volunteer job--well
you can bloody well forget about that because
it's harder to get a volunteer job than it
is to get a real job.
And the reason for that is that you have to
step through a number of complex bureaucratic
hoops, including having a police check.
And you know, first of all that's intimidating
as hell for people, even if they haven't done
anything wrong.
And second, it's not that straightforward.
It involves manoeuvring through a complicated
bureaucracy, and that's not the only step.
There's all sorts of other steps.
So volunteer work, that's out man.
That's just not going to happen, not generally
speaking.
And then I found him a job helping a guy out
who had a bicycle shop/book store--kind of
a strange combination--but it was a government
subsidized temporary position.
And then, he did a good job at it--he was
reshelving books and that sort of thing--and
so he was reliable.
He could do that.
But, you know, the subsidy program ended and
of course, if you run a bike shop/book store
it's not like you have additional money to
hire someone because, that's a store that's
just not going to be generating maybe any
income, but certainly not enough to hire someone.
So that fell apart.
Then I made a bunch of personal contacts with
charity organizations to see if I could get
him a volunteer position.
I finally got him a volunteer position.
And then I went with him to train at the volunteer
position, and that was so enlightening.
So what he had to do was, he had a stack of
pieces of paper here and then a stack of envelopes
here, and in principle the pieces of paper--which
were letters--were in the same order as the
envelopes were.
And so what he had to do was fold the pieces
of paper three times and stuff the folded
piece of paper into the envelope and the seal
the envelope and then put it here.
But it was a bit more complicated than that
because sometimes the letters were in French
and sometimes they were in English, so what
that meant was that he had to watch and see
that the French envelopes went into this stack
and the English envelopes went into that stack.
So that's one degree of complexity, right.
But then it also turned out that those damned
envelopes had to be run through an automatic
letter sorting machine.
Now you might think, well that doesn't matter,
but it does matter because those things have
very tightly defined tolerances.
And if you make a mistake--imagine you fold
a piece of paper and the first time you fold
it you made a mistake of an eighth of an inch.
And then the next time you fold it you make
another eighth of an inch mistake.
That means your piece of paper is now one
quarter inch out of truth.
And then you stuff it in the envelope and
fold it, but then you crinkle the envelope.
And so then the envelope gets stuck in the
automatic processing machine.
So I taught him probably 20 hours, how to
fold this piece of paper into three.
You know, and he was a bit shaky, and he just
didn't have the fine motor ability or the
cognitive ability to do that.
And then--I'll end with this--when he finally
couldn't do it anymore, what happened was
the letters came with photographs attached
to them.
And then he had to fold the pieces of paper
around the photographs in a way that didn't
crumple the photographs so that they could
still fit into the envelopes.
And each photo was stapled, maybe half an
inch different, per piece of paper.
So then he had to fold them properly with
a different folding technique for every piece
of paper, and he had to sort them into French
and English, and then also if the envelopes
and the papers ever got out of sync--which
they did now and then--he had to figure out
how to sort the envelopes and the pieces of
paper to make sure that they were matched
with the proper envelope.
It was like, no.
That was the end of it.
And so I'll tell you the rest of this story
later.
So anyways, the moral of the story is if you're
smart, you're privileged and, thank god, make
use of it.
And if you're on the low end of the IQ distribution,
man, you've got one tough life ahead of you.
It has nothing to do with willingness to work,
or virtually nothing.
And it's a good thing to know, even though
it's horrible.
