Tag Archives: intelligence

September 2026 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Concerns about the food supply over the next year or so have seeped from alternative media into mainstream media stories. I consider this indicator at least as frightening as the content of the stories themselves. Honorable mention: tactical nuclear weapons (these would not help the food supply).

Most hopeful story: While there has been somewhat of a rollback in the number of competitive electoral democracies over the last 20 years, this is a minor blip when you look at the democratic revolution over the past 250 years.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: While exercise lowers dementia risk in general, exercising at or on the way to work does not seem to help as much. I speculated this might be due to some combination of stress, noise pollution, and air pollution, with the latter two being solvable problems. But although raw “fluid” intelligence seems to peak around age 20, “crystalized intelligence” which accounts for experience does not start to decline sharply until well after age 50, and possibly not until after age 70. Reading, physical activity, and “engagement with arts and culture” are all good for the aging brain.

What age does intelligence peak?

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“Fluid intelligence“, which is your ability to solve problems without applying outside information, peaks around age 20. I find this discouraging. But then “crystalized intelligence”, which is your ability to apply outside information to problems, does not decline until later in life (50, 60, 70? there are a lot of numbers in this article.) I find this encouraging as I am entering this window now. It also suggests to me that multi-generational teams may be good at problem solving if we can get past some of the cultural issues (seriously, what is with the avoidance of eye contact by 20-somethings today?)

The article goes on to describe measurement errors and biases that have affected past studies. A big one is that when you test the intelligence of a sample of people of different ages all at once, you get one answer, whereas if you follow the same people for decades and test them repeatedly using the same methods, you get a different answer. The latter approach is the better one, but of course it is difficult because it takes 50 years to carry out an experiment.

“how genetics is changing our understanding of ‘race'”

This is a New York Times article by David Reich in 2018. This can be a taboo subject of course, but I think it is useful to know some facts on what the key studies have been and how serious scientists think about it. As Reich points out, because it is a taboo subject, serious scientists self-censor to an extent and this creates a vacuum where un-serious and ill-intentioned people step in. So here are some facts:

  • A key genetic study was done in 1972 by Richard Lewontin. He concluded that about 85% of human genetic variation is explained by differences in individuals and 15% by ancestral, aka racial, categories (which he created, resulting in a slightly circular logic). The categories he chose were “West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians”. Without digging into the paper, I imagine he tinkered with these categories to make the proportion of variation explained by the categories as large as possible, and this is what he came up with.
  • That study become the basis of a broad consensus that the term “race” has no real biological meaning, and is therefore a “social construct”.
  • Reich goes on to argue that even though race is a social construct, it is useful because the race that a person self-identifies as is correlated to certain genes, which in turn are predictive of the risk of certain diseases. So, it makes complete sense for doctors to use a person’s self-identified race as part of health screening. [At least until we just all get our genome sequenced and stored in a medical records?]
  • Reich then goes into the taboos against, and some studies that have dared nonetheless, the delve into correlations between genes, behavior and “cognition”. He doesn’t use the term “intelligence” by itself, but rather “performance on intelligence tests”. [To me though, the examples he gives all seem very marginal, such as a study of people in Iceland showing that certain genes are correlated with years of educational attainment. How well can we truly control for all the factors other than genetics that affect this?]
  • Reich points to an interesting study of the ancestry of modern western Europeans (aka “white people”). They (we) are a mix of ancient middle eastern farmers, western European hunter-gatherers (sometimes called “barbarians”?), and people of Asian ancestry from the Siberian steppes. One interesting thing is that those people from the Eurasian steppes have some genetic similarities to Native Americans. So if a white North American has their DNA sequenced and finds some Native American ancestry, that could have happened in North America in the last 500 years or so, or in Europe a lot longer ago.

I’m not sure I have great words of wisdom to end this one with. Continuing to study the genetic basis of disease seems like a good idea. Trying to link “race” to “intelligence” seems like a waste since neither of these concepts is clearly defined, and even if they ever are, most peoples’ failure to live up to their innate potential is going to be due to factors other than genetics. “Highly intelligent” people who can beat me easily at checkers are not much use to society if they fall for obvious lies and logical fallacies coming from politicians and advertisers. In fact, they are a danger to society. So we need to focus on removing barriers that prevent people from living up to their potential.

CIA officer displays human head in Oval Office

Okay, it’s a mask, but as far as I can ascertain, this happened. One imagines the CIA is happy to leak disguise technology from 30 years ago. Who knows what they have today. Of course, donning a mask does not infuse a person with language skills or cultural empathy. For that, you just need to hand a suitcase of cash to a person who grew up in another language and culture. The only thing that might have changed about that technology is the suitcase.

Daily Mail

dolphins and extraterrestrials

No, dolphins are not communicating with extraterrestrials that we know of. This Aeon article is pretty interesting stuff though about how the study of dolphin intelligence and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence have been intertwined over time though. The consensus these days seems to be that dolphins are as about as smart as a human toddler, which is pretty smart if you think about it, but not smart enough to build a technological civilization. This article contains some musings about whether technological civilizations are the inevitable end state of the evolution of intelligent life, whether another one would arise on Earth if ours disappeared for some reason (but life itself did not), whether there are likely to be others out there, whether they are likely to have come and gone, and if so why.

Later, at the first Soviet-American conference on communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) in 1971, it was suggested by some attendees that we don’t see evidence of supercivilisations across the galaxy because the only ones that persist are the ones that give up the risky path of technology and instead pursue immersion in nature. Ageing civilisations either self-destruct or shift focus to something like Zen Buddhism, it was conjectured: pursuing spiritual and qualitative self-perfection at the cost of all interest in external reality or ‘“quantitative” expansion’. The Russian astrophysicist Vladimir M Lipunov speculated that, across the Universe, the scientific mindset recurrently evolves, discovers all there is to know and, having exhausted its compelling curiosity, proceeds to wither away. By 1978, the philosophers Arkadiy Ursul and Yuri Shkolenko wrote of such conjectures – concerning the ‘possible rejection in the future of the “technological way” of development’ – and reflected that this would be tantamount to humanity’s ‘transformation into something like dolphins’.

Aeon

It’s a bit of a puzzle why we haven’t discovered any signals out there despite looking for around half a century. I recently listed to this Science Vs. podcast where someone likened our search so far to dipping a cup in the ocean and not coming up with any fish. You wouldn’t conclude from that that fish do not exist, just that they do not exist where you dipped the cup. The expert interviewed went on to say that technology is improving and those cups are now turning into buckets.

the Flynn effect and the reverse Flynn effect

When IQ tests are taken by each generation, they are always normalized so that the average is a score of 100. However, when people are asked to take tests from older generations, they tend to do better than the older generations did. This is the Flynn effect. It was very consistent throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, but a number of studies in Scandinavia indicate that it may have reversed more recently. Immigration is one controversial explanation that has been suggested, whether due to genetic or cultural reasons. But the study I link to here tested the effect within families against the effect across unrelated people, and found that it is just as strong within families. This suggests environmental factors such as education and nutrition as the culprits, although the article does still put “migration” in this category. I suppose if you had a society with a high quality of nutrition and education, and you then have an influx of new people with more bad habits (let’s say, a high rate of smoking), that could have an effect.

Wikileaks and the NSA

Wikileaks has released a set of documents about NSA activities, which is covered by the Intercept. Here’s one tidbit:

The NSA, it turns out, likes to stay on top of the latest scientific developments. Writing at the end of 2004, an NSA cryptanalyst described her experience working as an intern, and using her cryptography skills, on looking for information about genetic sequencing in the signals intelligence collected by the NSA. “The ultimate goals of this project are to gain general knowledge about genetic engineering research activity by foreign entities,” she wrote, “and to identify laboratories and/or individuals who may be involved in nefarious use of genetic research.”