The Danger and Necessity of Intelligence Research

with Lex Fridman

We’re now used to thinking of the heritability of intelligence within groups as a true hot-button issue. For some, the topic conjures up disastrous twentieth-century experiments with implementing eugenic social policies and dystopian scenarios in which a central authority sorts individuals by intelligence into a ruling class and an underclass. We seem to fear what we might find if we pursue research into the relationship between intelligence and genetics too avidly. If there really are, for instance, identifiable differences in innate cognitive ability between racial groups, would we want to know?

I think we should want to know. If we halt research into the genetic component of intelligence, we risk abandoning knowledge that could aid humanity in ways we cannot now foresee. Copernicus knew the heliocentric model of the solar system would overturn the way humans conceive of their place in the universe, but he could not know his discovery would lead to the moon landing, the Mars rover, and the Hubble telescope. Likewise, we cannot know what we won’t know if we don’t pursue knowledge, even potentially dangerous knowledge, wherever it leads us. The presumption that we can foresee the consequences of scientific research is hubris disguised as social responsibility.

In this clip from my long conversation with Lex Fridman, he asks me to steelman the case against researching group differences in intelligence. I understand the arguments. Concerns about the social consequences of this research are not unwarranted. We need to manage whatever discoveries are made carefully. But not to go forward would, I fear, prevent us from exploring a potentially revolutionary avenue of scientific advancement. Ultimately, it would prevent us from achieving one of humanity’s most essential goals: self-knowledge.

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LEX FRIDMAN: You had this conversation—you put it on your Substack—with Jordan Peterson about cognitive inequality. I think it's titled, “Wrestling with Cognitive Inequality.” This particular topic of just IQ differences between groups, why is it so dangerous to talk about? Why this particular topic?

GLENN LOURY: It's like you're calling black people inferior. It's like you're saying they're genetically inferior. That's what people are saying. It's like you're rationalizing the disparity of outcomes by reference to the intrinsic inferiority of black people. If you say cognitive ability matters for social outcomes, if you say cognitive ability exists, people really are different in terms of their intellectual functioning, and if you say cognitive ability differences are substantial between racially defined populations, the sum of that—there is cognitive ability, it matters, and it differs by race—is the conclusion that outcome differences by race are in part due to natural differences between the populations. People find that to be completely offensive and unacceptable. So that's what I think is going on.

Can you steelman that case, that we should be careful doing that kind of research? This has to do with research. The Nazis used Nietzsche in their propaganda. White supremacists could cherry pick conclusions of studies to push their agenda. Can you steelman the case that we should be careful?

Yeah, I could do it at three levels.

One is, what do we mean by cognitive ability? So there's many different kinds of intelligence, a person might say. How good are IQ tests at measuring other kinds of human capacities that are pertinent to success in life, like temperament, like emotional intelligence, and so on? So intelligence is not a one-dimensional thing measured by G. The cognitive psychologists talk about G, the general intelligence factor, which is a statistical construction. It's a factor-analytic resolution of the correlation across individuals in their performance on a battery of different kind of tests, and they use that to define a general factor of intelligence.

And a person could say that is a very narrow view of what human mental capacities actually are, and that it's much better to think about multidimensional measures of human mental functioning rather than a single cognitive ability measure, a so-called “IQ,” which is a narrow construction that doesn't capture all of the subtle nuances of human difference in functioning.

Functioning is not just the ability to recite backwards a sequence of numbers. I say 879532, you say 235978. It's not just that. Intelligence is a complex management of many different dimensions of human performance, including things like being able to stick with a task and not give up. Things like being able to discipline and control your impulses so as to remain focused and so forth. That could be one dimension. I could start by questioning the very foundation of the argument for racial differences in cognitive ability by saying that your measure of cognitive ability is flawed.

I could go to a higher level. I could say, okay, what we're really interested in is social outcomes, and the question of what factors influence social outcomes extends well beyond mental ability to many other things. So here's an example. Visual acuity. How well do you see? You're not wearing glasses. I am. Visual acuity varies between human beings. Some people see better than other people do. Visual acuity can be measured. I can put you at the chart, and you can identify and read that bottom line in small print or not. So we can measure visual acuity, and it varies between human beings.

Visual acuity is partly genetic. I think that's undoubtedly true. We inherit genes that influence whether or not we are nearsighted or farsighted or astigmatic or whatever. So visual acuity differs between people and can be measured and is under genetic control. On the other hand, corrective lenses allow for us to level the playing field between people who are differently endowed in terms of visual acuity.

Likewise, social outcomes are what we're really interested in. Employment, earnings whether or not they're law abiding, how do they conduct themselves and their families and so forth amongst individuals. Yes, social outcomes are influenced by so-called cognitive ability, but they're influenced by many other things as well.

If there are interventions that can be undertaken in society that level the playing field between people who have different natural endowments of cognitive ability, the fact that people or groups differ in cognitive ability becomes less significant, just like it's less significant that people differ with respect to how well they see when corrective lenses allow for the leveling of that playing field.

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There are, in fact, interventions available—educational interventions, early childhood interventions—that have been shown to level the playing field to create better life outcomes for people, even if they happen to be endowed with low intelligence. So a second level of arguing against this whole program of research on human differences in intelligence is to observe that, yes, human beings and perhaps racially defined groups may differ on the average in intellectual endowment, but there may be social interventions that level the playing field, whether it's in education or in other kinds of programmatic interventions, especially for the poor.

A final level of argument is the one that you alluded to, which is that if you talk like this, you're going to encourage a kind of politics that is very ugly. And it's best to frame the discussion in ways that don't put emphasis on racially defined natural differences between populations. That's an argument that I am, myself, personally conflicted about.

On the one hand, I think, “Those people are just stupid” is racist. On the other hand, suppose I'm at the National Science Foundation. A research team submits a proposal. The proposal proposes to undertake a study. The study would explore the extent to which people and racial groups differ with respect to their intellectual performance and how that's influenced by their genetic and environmental interaction. And I decide not to fund the study based on a political calculation that the subject is too sensitive, and if you explore that subject, you might get the wrong answer. And if you get the wrong answer, the white supremacists will be encouraged.

That is presuming, before the research is done, that I know the outcome of the research and that I can calculate what the political consequence of the research outcome is going to be. That's assuming the thing before you even know what the thing actually is. It's a kind of omniscience. It presumes that you, as the Master of the Universe, can tell people, who are being treated like children, what it is that they're capable of knowing and what it is that they're not capable of knowing.

It would be like someone saying to Einstein, “I don't know about that special relativity theory. It could well lead to the development of technologies that would allow nuclear weapons.” Or someone saying to Oppenheimer, who is a physicist overseeing the Manhattan Project where the US developed nuclear weapons capacity, “Don't carry out that project because the results of acquiring that knowledge may be more than we can deal with.” Or someone saying to someone doing biomedical research who's interested in exploring the nature of the human genome, “Don't carry out that experiment, that cloning undertaking, because the consequences could be deleterious.” The consequences could be deleterious. The consequences could also be the cure of cancer. The consequences could also be being able to generate electric power without producing carbon effluent.

So who are you to tell me—“you” being the person in the political position to control the research—what the consequence of doing the research is? I think I don't want to cede that kind of power to politicians over the course of human inquiry.

So yes, I would want there to be regulations governing the use of biologically sensitive and potentially dangerous pathogens in a lab in Wuhan or anyplace else. I would not want to simply leave that to laissez faire. On the other hand, I think that the tendency to try to shut down inquiry on behalf of supposed adverse political consequences is the road to ignorance and impoverishment, at the end of the day, for humankind, denying ourselves the potential benefits of that kind of inquiry. I think we need to take our chances with inquiry rather than to try to control it. And I feel that way about the exploration of human intelligence as much as anything else.

So you've asked me to steelman the case against research on IQ of the sort that Charles Murray is famous for popularizing. And I've said, A, your measure of intelligence is single dimensional and it ought to be multi-dimensional. I've said, B, the consequences of people's differing in intelligence depends not only on the natural endowments of the people but also on the environment and the potential for intervening in that environment through one or another kind of instruments, as the metaphorical example of the use of corrective lenses to level the playing field between people with different visual acuity indicates.

But finally, I've said yes, research on racial differences in IQ can foster political beliefs that we would regard to be obnoxious. On the other hand, to presume that what we don't know yet and might find out from the research is going to be harmful is to assume to know what the outcome of unknown processes might be, which we ought to be very slow to embrace. Because if we had done so in the past, we wouldn't have nuclear power. There's a lot of things that we wouldn't know. What were people saying about Darwin and the exploration of evolution and origin of the species? They were afraid that it was going to, in effect, disprove religious-based accounts. What were they saying about Copernicus, and et cetera, et cetera.

That was a masterful layering of “Wrestling with Cognitive Inequality.” He dragged in nuclear research Copernicus, Darwin, biomedical research with genetics, even COVID and the lab leak. That was just fun to listen to.

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