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Navigation Of The Virtual Space

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As we rolled into Washington DC, national symbols emerging into view, I alerted my twelve-year-old son to the sites ahead.  He looked up, grunted an acknowledgement, and then immediately buried his head back into the device in his hands.  At which point, now frustrated, I let him have it with one of those classic back in my day dad speeches imploring that he join us in the real world.  

This episode segues well with a thoughts developed further this past weekend.

I had an informative conversation with a man who worked in the US Capital with prominent politicians and also knew a little about astronomy.  He showed me a picture of this formation of stars that he took while at his home in the Philippines.  I didn’t recognize it and he then proceeded to tell me that this is the Crux (or Southern Cross) and how early explorers had used this for navigation after the North Star slipped under the horizon.

I’ve been trying to define a problem that is more prevalent in to our time.  And it has to do with the difference between social constructs, suspended in language, and actual substance.  Before GPS, to navigate the globe required direct observation and accurate intuition.  A successful voyage depended on being grounded in the realities revealed by the tapestry of the stars above and celestial bodies.  Even without images from satellites they could properly deduce the shape of the Earth.

Today we are not looking up anymore, we look down to our smart phones and get lost in the mire of information space and tangle of interpretation.  It is sort of like the night sky is blotted out by artificial light, many do not know the difference between overlay of language or theory and the real bedrock of science.  They live in a world of distracting fantasies and imaginary monsters.  They float off into a sea of nothingness at very best and could potentially imperil the ship of civilization if their delusions took the helm.

Abstraction is great.  Thinking beyond what can be immediately seen is an important tool of human intellect.  Language, likewise, is a superpower.  And yet these things must be properly calibrated.  The sextant is only useful with the correct inputs.  Likewise, if the waypoints of our thoughts are incorrect and the final conclusions that we reach will be flawed as well.  Many sail boldly, despite having deviate far off course of sound logic and reason, with disaster ahead.

Collapsing the Narrative

The Francis Scott Key bridge was struck by a careening cargo ship after the first part of this of this blog was written and the many interpretations of that event provide even more fodder for thought.  Many have a hard time believing that this kind of accident can just happen without some kind of nefarious behind the scenes orchestration. 

These conspiracy minded folks are like the ‘woke’ who always see everything through the lens of race.  From my friends who tell me to not believe my eyes (or engineering intuition) and follow their gut feelings about “something fishy” or those on the opposite side trying to make a connection between this and “MAGA extremists” voting against a pork-filled ‘infrastructure’ bill—they mistake their ideological lens and partisan bias with special discernment.

The problem is, unlike the Key bridge that needs actual physical pillars to remain as a viable structure, there is no amount tonnage of reality that can knock down these towers of ignorance.  Those who confuse their own interpretive matrix with the actual substrate of reality can free-float in their fantasy lands and delusions pretty much indefinitely.  It is what Jonathan Swift explained: “You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.”

The other day I stumbled across a video, “Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things,” that discussed the motivated reasoning that is detached from reality and delusion.  The description “fashionably irrational beliefs” (or FIBs) gets to the heart of the matter and that is that our intelligence is oriented in the direction of social status or acceptance and group belonging rather than some notion of objective truth.  This identity protective cognition leads us to believe a pile of nonsense:

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

Saul Bellow

This disposition explains the eagerness of academics to join with their other colleagues in pushing agendas like transgenderism and concepts of white privilege. 

It also relates religious dogmas and doctrines, where you post a blog post questioning the idea that Anabaptists are the true church resulting in hate-mail from a self-described radical who couldn’t find polite words when their most cherished identity was challenged.  Whether the defense mechanism is middle-school insults or doctoral dissertations, it can all be lacking substance underneath.

As I’ve thought how to make this blog more concrete, I believe it all does come down to the disconnect between language (and the ideas contained) and the material world.  I can tell you that gravity is fake—something invented by the Pope in Rome to control and subjugate, but jumping off of a tall building will not likely go well for me.  In that case the ground rising up to meet me would be the final authority and my special “wisdom of the ages” splattered.

Unfortunately, while we can escape the virtual reality of our cell phones by looking up and just observing the world around us, we can’t ever be free of our own minds.  We’ll always be limited by our own perceptions and concepts—seeing the world as we are rather than as it is—but we can always at least be aware that we need constant calibration.  Abstraction needs to be grounded or it is useless for navigation and only good for entertainment.

What Does IQ Measure and Why Does This Matter?

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There are many alt-right types who use IQ statistics to distinguish between groups of people, and yet they themselves do not seem to grasp statistics or even understand what IQ actually measures. They suggest their own lack of intelligence through this. And, given that their use of IQ is most often directed at those whom they deem to be inferior races and is what makes them feel superior, this is deliciously ironic.

Yes, certainly IQ does matter. But it matters in the same way that hitting a golf ball and bench pressing do as being a measure of overall athleticism. Sure, it does differentiate natural ability for those with equal training, and yet says very little about the inborn abilities of those coming from vastly different circumstances. In other words, I can out bench many bigger men who never saw a gym. But not because they couldn’t outperform me if they put the same time in. And, likewise, the kind of intelligence that IQ tests measure is built on practice.

So, basically, without a multi-variant analysis, the results of IQ tests tell us very little. A person can score high because they are genetically gifted. They could score high because they had a stable home, good nutrition, and high-quality education. And, like Koreans getting taller on average, lower average IQ today does not mean the same will be true tomorrow or if all circumstances were equal. In fact, IQ tests are increasing generation by generation, this is called the “Flynn Effect” and not necessarily a result of people actually getting smarter than their grandparents.

No, IQ tests tend to focus on a kind of abstract reasoning that has no practical application for prior generations or those who are raised outside of an advanced economic system. My ability to reason through engineering problems may unlock earning potential in a very controlled environment and yet doesn’t mean I would survive a day in the Amazon basin or on the streets of Rio. So this assumption that my test scores prove something about my superiority is basically nonsense.

Sure, not everyone has the mental capacity to solve differential equations. But that doesn’t mean everyone who couldn’t solve them prior to Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz was an idiot.

The really crazy thing about racial supremacist mid-wits (or at least those who I know of European ancestry) is that they will so often make fun of the pointy-headed intellectuals (those who outscore them in IQ while lacking street smarts) only to turn around and use IQ statistics to create a racial pecking order. I mean, if IQ is a reason for some to rule, why do these same people turn to wild conspiracy theories to explain why many Ashkenazi Jews are disproportionately more successful (academically) and in positions of power or influence? Why not just assume they are the next stage of human evolution?

The truth is culture and environment have a large part to play in our development. What is prioritized in homes and communities can make a huge difference in outcomes. If my dad was an attorney and I was sent to a prep school, I would probably be more likely to score higher and go further in pursuit of a professional career. Alternatively, if I was raised in a place where everyone was obsessed with track speed and achieving celebrity status, I doubt I would’ve grown up playing with Legos or visiting various museums with my parents. My own 97th percentile IQ was likely built on experience as much as anything else.

Lastly, it is worth noting that outliers do not tell us a whole lot. Interestingly enough, men are both smarter and dumber than women and this has to do with standard distribution or how the bell curve works. What this means is that there can be more or less diversity within categories. Or, put otherwise, some Kenyans being excellent long-distance runners doesn’t mean all are and this superiority of some Kenyans will tell us even less about those on the other end of the African continent. Too often we look at the cream of the crop (or bad actors) as an indication of the whole and yet group statistics never tell us about individuals.