Who Were the Sea Peoples?

reading Malcolm Gladwell. There, now you all know: I hope by going public, I can finally put the shame behind me. In any case, the book is Outliers , and it is about what I expected: a very readable but probably overhasty and overgeneralized survey of a bunch of serious research. But this passage definitely caught my attention: "[Practical intelligence] is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It's practical in nature: that is, it's not knowledge for its own sake... And, critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are 'orthogonal': The presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other." (That last bit is a little sloppy: what he really means to say is that the presence of high analytical intelligence does not imply the pres...

In response to one of my posts discussing IQ recently, a commenter contended that, for IQ to be truly measuring "general" intelligence, the test must be aimed at gauging abstract reasoning using symbols, otherwise what it measures would not really be general. I think this is exactly backwards. Abstract reasoning using symbols is a very specialized form of intelligence, highly developed in only one species (as far as we know), and, even then, engaged in as a primary life activity by a very small percentage of the members of that species. General intelligence is the intelligence that steers one around in day-to-day life, so that one avoids being hit by cars, doesn't eat poisonous things, stops arguing before making someone so angry that they beat or kill you, figures out how to get enough to eat, and so on. Think about it this way: You all know some Cal Tech or Harvard or MIT grad with a 4.0 average, about whom it is said, "He has trouble crossing the street by ...

C.S. Peirce famously posited a trinitarian division of the sign into indices, icons, and symbols, where an indexical sign works by proximity, and iconic one by similarity, and a symbolic sign by convention. For our purposes here we will be mainly interested in indices and symbols, so let us give an example of each: smoke seen over a distant ridge is an indexical sign of there being a fire over that ridge as well: the smoke, in a sense, "points to" (indexes) the fire. Each of these words I am writing is a symbolic sign: they mean what they do by the conventions of the English language, and may mean something quite different or nothing at all to non-English speakers. I bring this up because in Ron Unz's recent series of pieces on race and IQ at The American Conservative , he has noted that urban populations generally have higher IQs than rural populations, and that urbanization has been a major factor in large IQ increases in a number of people: the Irish urbanization fr...

India, with a population of 1.2 billion, has won 3 Olympic medals . (I believe this page will update as the games proceed, so the number may be greater when you check!) New Zealand, with a population of 4.4 million, about 250 times smaller, has won 9 medals. Per person, New Zealand is taking roughly 2000 times as many medals as India. Well, New Zealand is much richer, and so the people have more time for athletics, right? But North Korea, Kenya, and Ethiopia are all poorer than India, with many fewer people, and each has won more medals. China is not a particularly rich country, but is leading the medal count right now. China's ($ of GDP / medal) is $150 billion, while India's is $1 trillion. I doubt the correct explanation is, "Well, Indians are spazzes." No, they seem innately just about as coordinated and physically capable as any other people on the earth. Aside from the very real help that wealth provides, I think the explanation is almost entirely cultural...

Money quote : "In effect, I would suggest that the heralded 300-page work by Lynn and Vanhanen constituted a game-ending own-goal against their IQ-determinist side, but that neither of the competing ideological teams ever noticed."