https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=XqrYlEysBgs
This was a statistic that just absolutely shocked and staggered me when I went through the intelligence literature. So, you know, it is illegal in the United States to induct anybody who has an IQ of less than 83. And the reason for that is, you know, that the American Armed Forces have been conducting intelligence research for like more than a hundred years. And that was partly because they needed a way of sorting people rapidly during times of military expansion during wartime. But it was also because IQ tests, especially in the early part of the 20th century, were used to identify, let’s say, the deserving poor who could really benefit from additional educational attainment and advancement. And the military was hoping to identify people from lower class strata that could be streamed into, say, officer training programs and so forth, or even skills training programs, to move people from the underclass into at least the working class and maybe above. So they had a bloody stake in this, man. They wanted to find people. They wanted to sort them properly and they wanted to do social good when they weren’t just trying to win a war, let’s say, which often also is a social good. But what happened was that by, I don’t remember when this legislation was introduced, but it was in the later part of the 20th century. But their basic finding was that by, say, the 1980s, they had determined that if you had an IQ of less than 83, there was not a damn thing that the army could do, the armed forces could do, to transform you into someone who could do something that was more productive than non-productive. And the terrible thing about that is that it’s about 10% of the population. And so, you look at a statistic like that and you think, oh my god, you’ve got this enterprise, this massive enterprise that’s chronically hungry for people. That’s right, they’re always looking for people. They’re really oriented towards taking people from the underclass and lower working class and pushing them up the societal strata. And during wartime, they’re actually desperate to bring in recruits, period. And their conclusion is that 10% of the population can’t be trained to do anything sufficiently useful to make them militarily operable. It’s just, I just read that, my jaw just dropped. It’s like… Well, yeah, you know, in the United States we have about 330 million people. And because of the distribution, the relatively normal distribution of IQ scores, about 16% have IQs of 85 or less. Right, right. Which means they’re not going to graduate school. No, it means that from what I’ve read practically, it means the Wonderlet company has actually done a really… They have a nice IQ test from the commercial perspective. You know, it’s actually psychometrically valid. And they’ve linked IQ levels to job, specifically to job categories, you know. Yes, I know. And what I was going to say is they’re not only not going to graduate school, they’re not going to find a stable job that pays a livable wage. Yeah. Now, especially even given that so many of the service jobs now require a fair high degree of computational savvy, or… I mean, not computational, but ability to interact with complex computational technology. Even the typical till at a checkout market, or the till at a McDonald’s, because McDonald’s is actually very complicated, is often far beyond the ability of people who are on the low end of the intelligence distribution. They claimed… I think it was Wonderlet, although it might have been Hunt. What’s his name? IQ researcher. Is it Earl Hunt, I think, possibly? Earl Hunt. He claimed that if you have an IQ of below 90, that it’s difficult for you to read well enough to translate what you’re reading into action. So you can’t actually read instructions and follow them. You don’t have that level of literacy. That’s correct. So I was going to say that in the United States, this bottom 16% translates into 51 million people, including 13 million children who are in school. This is a very difficult problem. Now, I knew Earl Hunt. He passed away last year. I knew him pretty well. He also would say that there is this cognitive segregation in society. This is a point that Charles Murray makes. And Earl would often ask, when’s the last time you had someone over for dinner who wasn’t a college grad? Yeah. Well, that was something that Murray and Herrnstein wrote about in their book, The Bell Curve, which really struck me. Because I read that book twice, unlike most of the people who criticized it. And one of the things that they pointed out in there was, look, the typical educated person thinks that someone isn’t very bright if they have an IQ of 115. So we’re talking about graduate level and PhD level research institutions, right? Because 115, there’s as many people at 115 above as there are at 85 and below. And so it’s a minority of the population, and that’s the top 15%. And that’s the duller undergraduate. See, I’m a clinical psychologist, and I’ve dealt with people who had ranges in the low 80s and tried to find them jobs and tried to train them. And I have some real knowledge about the stunning gap between people at the low end of the IQ distribution and the high end. And it’s no bloody wonder people hate IQ research and intelligence research because it reveals a set of seriously dismal facts about the incredible range of ability among human beings. Well, yes, this is true. And moreover, I would add to this that people in universities, professors and graduate students, have a hard time understanding what everyday life is like if you have an IQ of 85. And you’re making your way, you’re living independently, you’re making your way in the world. But it is a challenge. It is a real, I mean, just to… It just barely begins to describe it. I had a client who, he probably had an IQ of under 80, the non-verbal portion of it anyways. He was indistinguishable in physical appearance from, let’s say, I hate to use the frame normal person, but there’s nothing that marked him out about particularly intellectually impaired, you know. And I tried at one point, this was so telling to me, I got him a volunteer job, which by the way is very difficult. It’s harder to get a volunteer job than a real job because you have to do police screening and all sorts of things and the selection process is just as extreme. But I eventually ended up getting him a job at a bike store, bike slash bookstore, but that place couldn’t hold him once the subsidy program had expired. And then I got him a job at a charity and his job was to fold letters into three so that they could be put into envelopes. Well, that sounds easy, except that he also had a bit of a motor tremor and, you know, it took me about 30 hours to train him to fold up a piece of paper with sufficient precision so that it could be put in an envelope rapidly. So that the envelope wasn’t so mangled that it would get stuck in the automatic sorting machine. And you know, there was high performance demands on him too. He had to whip through those letters pretty quickly and then sometimes the letters would have a photograph appended to them that was stapled on. And they weren’t always stapled on in the same place. So then he had to calculate how to fold the paper over the photograph without bending the photograph in precise thirds so that it would still fit in the envelope. And then he had to separate the French letters from the English letters and associate them with the proper envelopes. And like that level of complexity just did him in. Let me say two things about this. One is, I hope, common sense and the other is pretty provocative. The common sense thing is we have to be very careful when we have these discussions not to devalue the human dignity of people who aren’t in the upper end of the distribution. And if there’s one criticism that I think is fair is sometimes in these conversations it sounds like we’re devaluing people at the lower end of the distribution. And we have to be very careful that we don’t do that. Human life has dignity and IQ is not the most important thing that defines human beings. It’s not associated with wisdom. It’s not necessarily associated with truth or with courage or with many virtues that are being likeable. Right. It’s not related at all with being likeable. Or honest. That’s right. We know the psychometric relationship between intelligence and conscientiousness is zero. Right. So I think we have to make that point. Yes, I agree. I agree. I’m trying to make the point about how difficult it is for people who are on the low end of the cognitive spectrum to survive in an increasingly complex, cognitively sophisticated environment. The jobs are just disappearing. Thank you.