Irrationality

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Hello, I'm Robin Ins.

And I'm Brian Cox.

And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio.

Enjoy it.

Hello, I'm Robin Inn, and I'm Brian Cox.

And we are at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a month where the Edinburgh Zoo expands its boundaries across the whole of the city.

A comedian in every possible cage, a dance troupe in every possible avery, and angry packs of Shakespeareans roaming the parks.

Do not feed the Stephen Berkhoffs.

He's snappy.

Also, as well as being a home to nervous, weepy, and drunk performers, it is the birthplace of David Hume, one of the world's world's great philosophers and empiricists.

And today, much to Brian's annoyance, there is a possibility we will stray from science into philosophy.

Hmm.

Yes, today's show

for.

Today's show was inspired by a letter from a listener.

This was from Jago Tremaine, and he wrote, or asked us, whether there might be a genetic basis for narrow-minded intolerance, and if so, whether a cure might be found.

So, to paraphrase basically what he said, what he was asking is, is irrationality genetic?

The idiots are cockshaw, but the intelligent are full of doubt.

That's what Bertrand Russell probably said, or G.K.

Chesterton or Kurt Vonnegut.

It's normally one of those three.

Can we blame all we are merely on the shortfalls of our own genes?

Don't blame me.

It's my base pairs.

Your honour, I would like to take into account my client's genetic code.

Well, we have a panel to tackle this ethical and scientific quandary, and they are.

My name's Stuart Ritchie.

I'm a research fellow in the psychology department at the University of Edinburgh.

And my most irrational belief is that in the year 2014, it's still worthwhile listening to Morrissey.

Hello, my name's JC Long, and I'm a comedian and champion outdoor swimmer.

And

thank you.

And by that, I mean I was fast-tracked to the final because there weren't enough entrants, and I came last.

My irrational belief is that I genuinely think that I can predict the future.

Using differential equations, I just.

Yeah.

I warn you, Josie has just been doing her A-level maths exams.

That's true, isn't it?

I have, but it's not A-level, it's AS, which is the slightly easier one.

But I get the results on the 14th.

So you do calculus next year?

No, I'm not ready for calculus yet.

If you want something differentiated and then integrated again, I'll do that for you.

Thank you.

There's a cue for me.

X squared.

X squared, just X mate.

Oh, hang on.

A different.

Wait, no, 2x!

2x!

2x!

Wait, adapt to it, son!

Hey, Josie, you've just seen the future and you've seen your results.

Wait, do another one!

Do another one, do another one?

We're gonna do a contour integral then.

Sign X.

Oh, no, I can't do them yet.

That's the next year.

Do like 6x cubed.

6x cubed.

Okay, that would be 18x squared.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Ah, it's like watching the blooper reel of University Challenge.

Integrate it back again.

Oh, I'll integrate it back.

Okay, it's

6x cubed.

Plus a constant of integration.

Plus C, yeah.

That was a real thrill.

I have no idea what's going on.

I'm Richard Weissman, psychologist from the University of Hertfordshire, and my rational belief is that I'm totally rational.

My name is Paul Foot.

I am professor of horse physics

at the university.

And my most irrational belief is that I'm a carrot

and I live in a rabbit hutch.

I almost live in almost constant fear.

And this is our panel.

Richard, first of all, some definitions.

So, what is irrationality?

I don't think, I mean, I'm sure we've all got our own definitions.

I think that it's sort of just basically getting things wrong.

That's what I would say.

And I would say that we all get things wrong all the time.

There's lots of research that asks people, Do you think you're an above-average driver in terms of safety?

And about 80-90% of people go, Yes, that's me.

Have you got an above-average sense of humour?

That goes up to 99%

of people.

So we hold on to these things.

For example, if you support a football team and they win, then it's, you know, we won.

If they lose, then it's they lost.

You distance yourself.

So these sort of rational ideas that make life bearable, I think.

That just seems to be a misunderstanding of statistics.

I mean, is that you're using a statistical definition of rationality?

I think I'm using it in the sense that psychologists refer to what are called positive illusions, things we believe that aren't true.

Often it's obvious to other people they're not true, but we hold on to them because they make us feel better.

So I think as a social psychologist, that's the angle I would take on it.

So Stuart, do you think, as a scientist, is there a point where you think now I'm using my rationality, but at times there is a level of kind of gut instinct of things which are perhaps not at the forefront of your mind where that is required, that if we were merely rational, I mean, there's experiments that have been done with people who, for instance, no longer experience emotion, and they find it a lot harder to make decisions.

Yeah, absolutely.

We take into account all this information when we're making decisions.

And as Richard said, we're often extremely poor at understanding statistics.

So, yes, but as a scientist, there certainly are moments of gut instinct.

But I would, so I do research into intelligence.

I would emphasize the importance of high intelligence as well for real scientific breakthroughs and scientific achievements.

You get very few very, very high-performing, sort of Nobel Prize-winning super scientists who are not way up the high end of the bell curve of intelligence.

How do you define intelligence?

You're scoring an intelligence test.

And just very briefly, what would that be?

Well, so there are different tests you can do.

So you can take vocabulary tests, and then you can take a reasoning test, a sort of puzzle pattern-based reasoning test, a test where you have to simply move your finger off a button quickly when a light goes on,

and tests where you have to do reading comprehension and so on.

And the big finding of psychology in the past century, the biggest, most replicable, well-attested finding is that if you're good at one of those things, you tend to be good at them all.

And you can extract, so all those tests will correlate positively together.

So it's not just an education test then, because reading comprehension, for example.

Reading comprehension is one thing, so you have verbal and non-verbal things, but as I say, even just how quickly you can take your finger off a button, how quickly you can notice the difference between a shape that's shown to you, you have to decide whether it's one shape or another, that's shown to you extremely quickly, that will correlate with your performance on a vocabulary test, with your performance on a reasoning test, and so on.

And you can extract this general factor, which is called the general factor of intelligence, G, we call it, and that is a great predictor of education, occupation, health, loads of stuff like that.

Can I ask something?

Because I genuinely have sort of been developing a little belief recently that people who move faster, like their education must be a little bit about how fast your brain works and not other things.

That's exactly in line with the scientific evidence, yeah.

That's so good because to my mind, I like to walk really fast.

And I always see that as a sign of like superiority, like I'm gonna get there.

Well,

in our samples at the University of Edinburgh, we've shown things like walking fast, having stronger grip in your hands, Got a very strong grip.

Being able to exhale very quickly a large volume, forced expressive volume, those things will correlate positively with.

Having a stronger grip.

Yeah, the idea is that all these things will correlate positively together.

You have genes that will allow you to build a better system in general, and that includes your brain as well as your muscles and your lungs and all the other parts too.

So there's a kind of a theory about system integrity, and intelligence is just one part of that.

Paul,

you studied mathematics.

Do you feel that mathematics could be seen as something which is very rational there?

The ordering of numbers, certainly some people who've gone into mathematics, some of the great mathematicians have been searching for kind of patterns and certainty.

Do you consider yourself to be more rational because you're a mathematician?

Putting aside the carrot thing.

Yeah.

I consider myself to be.

My journey of my life has been to become the opposite of when I studied maths at university.

I don't even understand when people say it.

I can't.

I mean, when you said that just now, that I'd studied maths at university, I'd forgotten about it.

I just, you know, like sometimes I've actually been on a campus doing a show there, and I think, oh, that'd be nice to go to university.

And then I think, oh, I have been.

I can't remember it.

And then often I go on shows like this, I say, yes, we want Paul on because he's a comedian, but he combines that with mathematics.

But I just find mathematics incredibly boring.

The absolute antithesis of comedy and humour.

So I just try and think about it as little as possible.

I'm very annoyed that you mentioned it.

It's got no relevance to my life now.

I just make up silly things and on flights of fancy.

I think actually

my life is better now because I spend less time rationally working out what the best thing to do is and more time just doing what feels like the right thing.

So really it was good going to university because you got rid of all your rationality.

In a three-year course,

the final time you put down that calculation, you went, that's enough rationality.

I'm now going to pretend to be a horse or a carrot for a while which is what the Edinburgh Fringe is all about so Richard if we take the view that the so we define irrationality perhaps in one way as being not really reacting properly to statistical arguments so let's say that you might say I'd rather I don't want to get on that plane I think that's rather dangerous I'll ride a motorbike instead or something like that does it make you happier as a person to be irrational or rational I was say I think we are all irrational and it's that irrationality which keeps us happy because we end up believing things about ourselves that aren't true so we think oh you know this relationship will be great and we ignore the 50% divorce rate otherwise we just think the world is a dreadful place and we are dreadful people which is the truth of the matter so

and so there is some evidence that people who suffer from depression actually have a very realistic worldview that's why they feel so down a lot of the time so it's it's a slight irony so um yeah I do think it's part of being human is to have these positive illusions but the problem is sometimes we can take it too far and we start to to believe in things that really aren't true, like sort of, you know, ghosts and homeopathy and other silly things like that.

Let's get some letters.

Let's list them all.

Astrology, homeopathy, the supernatural.

Carry on, what are they?

Religion.

That's an interesting.

Well, are we learning to leave in the show with the fact that some of my research has shown that religion is negatively correlated with intelligence as well?

Is that possible?

I don't know if that's...

Well, this is

interesting.

Because you bring that up, and there have been.

so when you say for, again, we get caught up in definitions, don't you?

When you say religion, well, that covers an enormous array of kind of very liberal beliefs.

And then you have, are you at that point saying fundamentally religious?

Are you saying dogmatically religious?

Specifically, fundamentalist religion is most negatively.

So if you ask people questions, you know, rate out of five, how strongly you believe the Bible is the word of God, you should only marry people within your own religion.

I hear God talking to me every day, you know, how much do you agree, one to five?

Those sorts of questions, if you ask them, they will correlate, not strongly negatively, but they will correlate negatively with score and intelligence test, the kind of things I was talking about earlier on.

Which is slightly odd, because if I met a fundamentalist, I'd expect them to have quite a strong handshake.

There may be exceptions.

There may be exceptions to the

exceptions to the matrix of correlations that we're talking about here.

But is that just true of any dogmatic belief in anything?

So, are we unfair singling out religion?

Is it just not being able to see many many different sides of arguments?

Yeah, no, I think we absolutely are.

There's evidence showing that people with higher intelligence test scores will be, for instance, more socially liberal, so less racist, for instance.

So if you ask them, you know, you ask people a questionnaire about, you know, I think people from different races should be allowed to marry each other and things like that.

And apparently that's still controversial in some areas.

But intelligence will correlate negatively with people being more racist on those scales.

It will correlate positively with people believing in gender equality and people should be paid equal money for equal work, et cetera, et cetera.

These are are not massive correlations.

We're not talking that you know every racist is really stupid or whatever.

Sorry if there's any racist in the audience, I don't want to be

offending you at all.

But the the the general the the general point is

so one explanation is that there's an uh intelligence largely more abstract thinking skills that allow you to put yourself in other people's shoes and allow you to to think from their perspective.

One thing I should say, it's all very nice, you know, less

less racist, more

equal, etc.

More intelligent people are also more economically liberal as well as socially liberal.

So essentially, more intelligent people tend to be libertarians.

And I know that they believe that they are the most intelligent people, so it is quite annoying that it's also true.

Well, isn't that

the research for Josie?

I wonder how you feel.

Because in one way, you can go, oh, well that's good.

It turns out racists are idiots and all this kind of.

But in another way, because you are a liberal, you go, well, I don't really like the idea of thinking that so much might already be, you know, what we are and what we genetically are potential, that so much is already ingrained that in some ways as a liberal, you want everyone to have the equal potential to kind of change and all of those.

So there's a kind of clash.

I think people always do down the general level of intelligence.

And the way I see the world is that most people are more intelligent than you would think, and there's more talent and untapped potential and things like that.

And so I definitely want to see it much more as like nurture as opposed to nature.

I don't want to see it like...

Well, and the evidence from behaviour genetics, which is the study of psychological traits and how genetic, how much variance in those psychological traits can be explained by genes, doesn't by any means say that intelligence is 100% 100% ingrained in your genetics before you're born, not in any sense.

But on average, about 50% of the differences between people in their intelligence level on those tests that I was talking about can be explained by genetics, and the rest is environmental.

That environment, of course, tends to be what we call non-shared environment, which is not your parents, which is not things that you share with your siblings.

It tends to be things that are out there in the world.

We haven't actually nailed down what those things are in psychology, but we're working on it.

And one of those things might, of course, just be going to school.

It looks like for every year you stay in school,

you gain a few IQ points.

And that's not just people who are smarter staying in school for longer.

There's kind of evidence from where governments have sort of made it mandatory to stay in school for longer, you know, for everyone.

And it does seem that there's a sort of causal effect of being forced to stay in school on your IQ.

And what do you think about reading to kids when they're little?

Is that have you?

So

there's a big problem with that kind of research in reading to kids.

So you know, you'll you'll observe a correlation in the population that people who read more to their kids will have smarter kids.

Now, is that because the reading causally affects their intelligence, the reading to them affects their intelligence, or is it because you have passed on genes for being interested in reading books to the kids who then has those genes and is interested in reading books and therefore is intelligent anyway.

So there's this kind of genetic confound.

You see a lot of this kind of research out there that doesn't take into account genetic differences between people.

And so a lot of parenting studies and so on have this huge big problem where, well, you don't know if it's the parental behavior or if it's the genes that the parents have passed on.

And a lot of the cases it is likely that it is the genes rather than the parental behaviour.

So really the best thing to do would be to take all children away from their parents, put them with other parents for a whole generation, everyone in the country, mix it up and then we could do proper study.

Well I mean there are such studies, right?

There are adoption studies where you look at kids who have been adopted into bamboozling and you see whether their intelligence or personality or antisocial behaviour or whatever it happens to be correlates more strongly with their adoptive parents or their biological parents.

It turns out that things like intelligence tend to correlate more strongly with the biological parent than the adoptive one.

Which shouldn't be, I don't think it should be too depressing.

And it doesn't by any means say that you shouldn't read to your kids or whatever, because obviously reading to your kids

is an amazing thing to do and

it's fun and it's emotional bonding and all that sort of stuff.

Great.

But you shouldn't do it because you think it's raising their IQ because there's not necessarily any evidence for that.

I just realised I'm away for two weeks and I won't be able to read to my son.

So very quick quickly, congratulations, today's your day.

You're off to great places.

You're off and away with your brains in your head head and your feet in your shoes.

You can choose any direction you choose.

You're on your way.

Anyway, I'll read part two when I get back.

Sorry,

I was thinking also about the racism thing, because that could be genetic, it might not.

So the best thing to do would be to force two racists of different races

to get together and have a baby.

And then that baby, on one level, that baby would genetically obviously have all the racism genes in them.

But on another level, the baby would think, well, I've got one black mother and one white father, so I'm not really racist because I've got all the races here.

I've got over the racism thing, so what would happen?

That's like a spoken word version of the song Ebony and Ivory.

It was really beautiful.

Absolutely beautiful.

Richard, the...

Just listening to the debate about the...

Well, first of all, I should ask, do you accept the evidence that there's a genetic basis for intelligence?

Well, it's interesting that when you look at all these wonderful things that people with high IQ apparently have, you wonder if the one thing they're all very good at is just lying on questionnaires.

But I think that there's no doubt that whatever aspects of psychology we look at, there is a genetic basis to it.

So personality, IQ, you know, any trait,

religiosity as well.

And so all those things, yes, have a genetic basis.

For me.

But that's quite, just to dig down, because that's quite a, to me anyway, quite a not shocking, but an interesting statement because it's not been thought, it's not been the case, has it, for a long time that that's been accepted.

Now, it's been the case forever, I do believe it's true.

Well, not forever, but 200,000 years since I'm a sapiens person.

But

just in terms of academic research, is this a relatively new idea?

Is it?

No, the idea has been kicking around for a very long time.

It has a fairly ugly history, as you might imagine, because it's coming from a particular, normally political point of view.

But it's been kicking around.

And of course, the data is there, and it's pretty good data, that every aspect of our psychology, to some extent, is genetically determined.

But for me, that isn't the interesting part, because there you're putting the spotlight on what we can't change.

What you have is a big area here that we can change.

We can learn to grow, we can learn to reach our potential, and so on.

And by always going on about genetics, then the message, particularly to kids, actually, can be very damaging, which is that, well, you are what you are.

And there's us and there's them and you're in this category and that's that.

And that to me is the damaging message.

So for me there's a couple of there are a couple of good reasons to still do this kind of research and understand which things are heritable and to what extent they're heritable.

So for instance, we used to believe that autism was caused by parents.

There was the refrigerator mother theory where it's caused by parents being cold to their child and people blamed the parents for the the children's autism.

But we know now that autism is strongly genetically influenced from these kind of twin studies where you look at the difference between identical and non-identical twins, and you can look at the proportion of genetic influence on traits, on autistic traits.

So, that's one reason to really get to the point where you can say to people, well, actually, let's stop blaming people for, let's stop blaming teachers for not getting kids, not getting every kid leaving school a genius.

Let's stop blaming parents for their children's problems, which are not necessarily caused by their parenting styles.

So, it is important to learn.

And, I mean, that's not even the most important thing about twin research, because the genetic research, because of course, the genetic research is attempting to understand the biological basis of illnesses like schizophrenia.

There was a very major paper in Nature last week about schizophrenia, and they've found about 100 genetic loci now that are associated with schizophrenia.

And this is a long time in the future, but we may, using this genetic research, understand the biological pathways that can then be targeted by treatments for illnesses on.

What is interesting to me, Josie, is that this actually touches on a subject we covered in a previous monkey cage in this series about knowledge and whether it's always a good thing.

So you can have

the maximum amount of knowledge.

The more knowledge you have, the better, which is what the suggestion is here.

Do you see a problem with this, a a moral problem in a sense?

If it were possible, for example, to test, to map the genome, which it obviously is, of every child that's born, and then select them out and say, Well, you have this gene that may mean you're statistically less likely to be intelligent, therefore we'll educate you in a different way, that seems to me to be intensely problematic.

Oh, yeah, well it's like what Richard said, it it's not taking into account the fact that everyone's lives are wildly different and that people can achieve things that are astonishing and

And I mean, in my own experience of like casual everyday sexism, you get that jump from

I've decided this is what is, and therefore that is what ought.

Like, it goes from descriptive to prescriptive, and all the time, like, you get people saying, like, you can't do what you're doing because of what you are, and it just makes you want to do it harder and sometimes worse, just to sort of get them.

But so, no, I think it's wildly dangerous to think about limiting people in advance on the basis of things no matter how accurate they are.

But who says it's about limiting people in advance?

Well, sure, sure, sure.

Who is he to say?

For the purposes of argument.

So Simon Baron Cohen, I remember fairly recently, was talking about this.

We need to have a debate now about what we should do if in X number of years we discover the genetic, the specific genetic associations with autism.

That's his research topic.

He's at Cambridge.

And we need to have a debate now about what we're going to do about that.

If we can predict from the womb that a child is highly likely to have autism or any other disorder that we're talking about, what do we do about that?

Do we not interfere?

Do we interfere?

Do we give parents the maximal information?

I mean, that's an extremely important ethical debate to be had.

But I think there's no argument against having the information.

It's not like we should just stop the science and tell people to stop.

I think that's right.

But I think we should also remember that in terms of being hardwired, the one thing we're hard-wired for of everything else is to change, is to respond to our environment.

We are the least hardwired creatures on the entire planet.

And so people change their point of view, they change their religion, they change their political stance sometimes, they grow as people.

And I'd rather put the spotlight on that aspect of human nature than on the notion of actually you're your genes or you're your brain, you're fixed, because that does lead and has in the past led to quite ugly political positions.

So it's just a question of where you put the balance for me.

But what if your propensity to change and adapt is also genetic?

Well, that's fine as well.

And obviously it will be.

But I'm just saying in terms of where you put that spotlight, I think it's damaging to say you are your genes, you're this type of person, because that stops people trying a lot of the time, particularly with kids, actually.

But if you knew in advance that someone would have really good genes for, like, I don't know, baking or

cold water swimming or whatnot, then you could be super prepared to like make them better from the get-go.

Yeah, you could be like, right, we've looked at your limbs and they're good swimmers' limbs.

We're gonna start you off day one

and then by 20 you would have created a man machine.

The thing is, people do that anyway, right?

I mean, Mozart's parents brought him up to you know play music from a young age, not because they did a genetic test, but because they were both musicians and they knew that and it was likely that the child would be able to, and it turns out that, yeah, he was pretty good.

And

although the early stuff's a bit facile, I think.

But anyway, he was only four years old.

He was only four years old, so I guess

we can forgive him that.

But we sort of do that anyway, right?

We're genetically selecting all the time.

When we reproduce, you know, you select a mate on some characteristics, whether it's physical attractiveness, whether it's intelligence, whether it's personality.

There's statistical evidence for people assortatively mating on these characteristics.

So there is a kind of, if you want to call it, the E-word eugenics going on just by people, you know, mating with each other and producing kids.

And so we can't forget that.

It's not a process you want to help along, though, is it?

Let's be honest.

Also, it is quite good, like, if like two really musical parents or something, they have a child and they assume that child's going to be really musical and intelligent, and it's absolutely thick.

It's a great life lesson, isn't it?

Well,

I mean, one shouldn't laugh, but it is great when it happens.

But I wonder, Paul, do you ever, you know, that idea that some of the things we as human beings want to believe that we have made every one of our choices, that we are the person, that we have the freedom to do that, and actually, it does appear, even whether it's tests about free will, even if it is looking at certain predilections that are genetic, that maybe you are losing some of your possible individual powers.

Does that ever kind of.

The way I've described that, I've made you sound like a wizard.

Some of your individual powers.

You have the wizard gene, don't you, Paul?

Of course.

I do.

And of course, as a comedian, you probably get this.

Different relatives will say, Oh, you get it from your grandfather.

He used to wear a dress.

Or things like, or you know, it's always someone I've got it from.

But if there's very unamusing relatives, they're not mentioned.

But, you know, my father, you know, I've got things from him.

Like, my father's quite an irrational man.

For a start, he's got an irrational hatred of the clarinet.

And then there's other things, like whenever he gets a pie out of the oven, he always drops the pie on the floor and he always gets it out and he says, I've dropped the pie on the floor because he doesn't use oven gloves.

It's totally against oven gloves.

That's not irrational.

He's nobody hates the clarinet.

He tried to play it with his burnt fingers.

Think he'd one day be like Hacker Bill.

It might well be, but you know, it's sort of irrational, and I suppose I'm a bit irrational, a bit different.

I'm irrational, but I do use oven gloves.

But then, on the other hand, I don't cook.

Richard, I wonder about,

again, trying when we define rationality, when we think for the last hundred years, for instance, of psychology, where we see things which were seen as very rational at the time,

we were seen as

ideas that were quite accepted, that there was a man who used to drive around with a van giving people lobotomies.

You know, this was nothing wrong with that.

Tragically, of course, then killed by someone he gave a lobotomy to, suggesting it wasn't the cure he'd imagined.

And these ideas how do we as human beings, when we're trying to take in the best examples, decide how we can rationally move forward?

What rationality of today becomes the irrationality of tomorrow?

Yesterday, both days.

Well, um so I I think that that's why you need psychology, because uh psychologists do experiments, you have randomly controlled experiments, you randomly associate people with groups and so on, and And you try and work out

how the mind works and what is the best thing to do.

And so I'm a social psychologist, so I'm interested in how people construct a sense of identity and that changes.

So, for example, in terms of the genetic debate,

it's rather reassuring if it's something positive like high IQ to think that's imbued within you.

And when you do something stupid, that's bad luck.

So you make that attribution.

Or if there's someone you don't like, then it's very easy to go, genetically, they're irrational because they disagree with me.

What other explanation could there be?

So that's about constructing identity.

But psychologists do experiments to try and work out the best way of leading a sort of productive, happy, and successful life.

And over time, you know, we'll get there.

In the meantime, a lot of times it's a complete disaster because we come up with very silly ideas like doing lobotomies out of vans.

The idea that

we look back through history, I mean, so we're making a link between genetics and intelligence, and we're also using these words rational and irrational.

It seems to me that it's self-evidently true.

Let's take

Scotland, England, the Western societies, have got more,

they've got more liberal, certainly, democracies evolved, education standards have gone up.

In general,

I would imagine, well, although this is a question, that the intelligence level of the population has been raised, not by genetics, but just by the way we organise society.

We become more liberal as societies, undoubtedly.

We don't burn witches anymore.

We're not a medieval society.

Absolutely.

So there's a progression which is clearly not genetic.

It's to do with society itself.

So Steven Pinker's recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, was all about the decline of violence across history.

And he talks about that exact thing.

And one of the explanations, not

the only explanation, but one of the explanations he brings in is what's called the Flynn effect, which is the increase in intelligence that we've observed since intelligence tests were measured across at the start of the 20th century.

So every decade or so, there seems to be a three-point increase in intelligence.

If the average person now did an intelligence test from the 1960s that was normed on an average sample from the 1960s, they would get a much higher result than 100, which is the kind of arbitrary average IQ.

And one of the reasons, and so this is probably maybe because of better nutrition, better education.

James Flynn thinks it's because we all wear scientific spectacles these days.

We think about things in terms of abstract ways.

So if you ask someone at the start of the 20th century, what do a dog and a rabbit have in common?

And

this was done.

I just got to ask Paul

and a rabbit have in common.

Well, they both live in my hutch.

Right, but there we go.

That's the kind of concrete thinking that was

early 20th century, late 19th century.

I'm not saying anything about it.

But nowadays, people might say, if you ask that question, the average person might say, well, they're both mammals.

And that's a more scientific, abstract way of thinking.

And that, you know, you see these things.

They both bite sometimes.

But it's the rabbit that's a real danger.

Those teeth, it loves the car.

So it's ones you don't expect.

He loves the carrot.

The dog just sometimes just nibbles and then throws me away.

I like the dog, the dog's my friend.

I hate the rabbit.

I don't like the taste of either of them.

It's the carrot problem.

This is a fundamental point, which I think is easy to lose, is that

the genetic effect that comes out of twin studies and so on, and you don't even need twin studies anymore.

You can look directly at the DNA to look at genetic effects on traits like intelligence.

But the genetic effect is about the variance, right?

So it's about that there's a sort of rank order of people and there's variance around the mean.

It's not about the mean, and you could conceivably raise everyone's mean and retain the rank order

of people.

So that's AS-level statistics.

Right!

Again, exactly.

I was speaking about variance, and I was like, tell you what, I'll square root that, I'll give you standard deviation.

Not a problem, mate.

So, the width of the distribution stays the same.

So, if it was everywhere, in general, there was a 100 plus or minus 20, then you can go up to 110 plus or minus 20 or 130.

Well, the standard deviation is 15, but yeah, but 20.

Yes, yes, yeah, yeah.

No, I'm just trying to simplify it for the listeners.

I know, I couldn't.

Oh, I love it when it is.

Thank you as a ringer making you look like you're wrong.

You get so worried.

Because it's a normal distribution, so all you need is the chart, and then you just standardise it, and then you can just read it off.

Absolutely.

Thank you for making that a lot clearer, Joseph, because I didn't have a clue what Brian was talking about.

It's really succinct and proper.

Watch out.

Someone's on your team.

It's really simple, isn't it?

It's just that everyone's got better.

Yeah, that's right.

Everyone's got better.

But the rank order is still the same.

So I don't think we should worry about...

Because intelligence

there's a genetic effect on the differences in intelligence, that some people are geniuses and some people are not geniuses.

We shouldn't worry about it being immutable.

We should maybe resign ourselves to the fact that we're not going to be able to equalize everyone.

And I think there are still some people who think that people are blank slates and they're born, you know, with the, you know, that we can equalize them.

And you certainly get that impression from reading a lot of stuff in the media.

There is a way to make everyone equal, and that is to reduce everyone to the bottom level.

And

find what everyone is least good at and make them do that.

That is exactly.

Right, but that's exactly a point that comes out of behavioural genetics.

Imagine a world where imagine a world I say exactly I say exactly.

Imagine a world where in a world where everyone is is exactly the same has exactly the same environment.

They're brought up by robot parents who are exactly the same as everyone else's parents.

They go to a school by taught by robots and everyone, you know, so imagine the environment is exactly the same for everyone.

What's the only thing that can vary there?

It's their genes.

So actually, in a world where everyone had a great environment, brilliant teachers, and everyone was raised up to that level, the heritability of intelligence would be 100%.

The only thing that would vary is intelligence.

So actually this is your recipe for utopia.

So here it is so simple to study.

That a high heritability of intelligence can actually be viewed as an index of

social meritoxy almost.

So everyone's doing that you're doing quite well, a social equality index.

In places where education is very poor, you'll find actually lower heritabilities.

because people aren't being able, being allowed to reach their genetic potential.

And so the heritability is almost an indicator of how well you're doing the environment, which is quite nice.

Josie, would you agree with Stuart that perhaps the main problem with society is the lack of sentient robots?

I know who's like robot teacher, I was like, I mean,

robot parents, yes, please.

It would be great.

Well, we're arguably sentient robots.

Oh, hang on.

Not even arguably, actually.

I'm a universal Turing machine and I'm proud of it.

So, see, that is so going to to be solved.

There's a mathematician old barn.

Josie, you're someone who's campaigned for kind of opportunities for everyone for levels of equality and in arts and money and education.

And do you feel optimistic hearing these things at the idea that in some ways, when we sometimes see this reported in the press, there is a fear that it will be used as Stuart's, you know, the idea that it could be used negatively, but in fact, there's a tremendous positive thing of knowing what is it that you have that gives you the advantage?

You know, you were talking there about the baking gene, for instance.

I don't have that gene.

I do feel optimistic because I think the thing that I find most inspiring is this idea that, like, we can push up our overall general mean of intelligence and achievement, and the idea that if society is better educated, then society is kinder and more cultured.

And so, those two things, regardless of like variance and regardless of being able to identify certain things in advance or anything like that, those two things are tremendously inspiring and positive and just reinforce all my pre-existing biases.

It has to be said that the genetics work there, being scrolled, is very complicated and very expensive.

And we still don't know the best way to run a school, the best way to inspire kids, the best way to teach kids, because those really basic questions don't get that much attention.

And it seems to me that that's the really important stuff because that's where you can change people and make the difference.

And by focusing on genes and genetics and brain structures and so on, it's all fine.

But where does it get you?

What do you say when you're standing in front of a class of kids?

You say, some of you have got the right genes and some of you haven't.

Right, end of lesson.

But it's not either or, it's not like...

No, no, no, but in terms of where you put that attention.

In terms of where you put that attention at the moment, the attention is on genes and brains and so on.

And we don't know the best way of inspiring kids.

And I think that's a disgrace.

But as far as that,

that's a good point.

But as far as that goes, I think that's not necessarily because scientists have been spending all their time doing genetics.

It's because educational researchers

have become victim to a certain postmodernism and a lack of appreciation of doing things like randomized controlled trials of new ideas and education and so on.

There's a certain, and I'm going to get myself into terrible trouble for saying this, but there is a...

I'm going to beg you on though,

get after those postmodernists.

Yeah, absolutely.

There's a dreadful postmodernism and

a sort of actual aversion to doing this kind of research.

But I think that's changing now.

And a lot of teachers, there are conferences popping up of people, you know, of teachers getting together who want to to run experiments in their schools and try the new latest teaching technique and so on.

I think we're gonna get we're gonna get out of that fairly soon and I'm quite optimistic about

changing those things ex exactly as you're saying, changing those things about how to run a school.

Postmodernism is the problem.

Well, I think the root of all evil.

It's got to complicate it.

I mean, I think schools worked perfectly well.

When I went to school, it was all right.

We got went in there, we were locked in our rooms.

They gave us a thing we had to do

off the blackboard.

It's not complicated.

You learn it.

Then you go out and kick a football for an hour and learn social skills.

Then you go back and you do double chemistry and you write it all down and then you quickly memorise it and you go into the exam, put it all, spout it all out, forget about it and get on with your life.

It works perfectly well.

And

Richard, again, the ideas of genetics, the idea of society, that you do a lot of tests where you confront people that perhaps they don't have the knowledge or the abilities they have.

And that even if we do find ways of going, we can make you more rational.

I mean, for instance, you did a test, I believe, with wine tasting.

We had some wine experts, and they really knew their wine.

And then you basically revealed that sometimes, the one they went, well, this is a 500-pound bottle, you went, No, it's four quid, it's around the corner.

But did they leave going, Thank you very much, Professor Wiseman, I've learned.

Or were they a little bit aggressive?

They went into what I would refer to as a state of denial, and then they criticized the tech.

I mean, I've tested lots of psychics and mediums over time, and it's always the same.

They always fail, which is ironic for those that can predict the future.

And I live for the day when even one of them would go, oh, it turns out I'm not psychic.

Thank you very much.

I'll get on with my life.

But they don't.

So they start to criticise the test, and then they'll criticise me, and then it all gets very personal.

And it was exactly the same with the wine test of the wine experts.

We gave them a bottle of wine, which is about £1.99.

And as you say, many of them went, Oh my goodness, I would pay hundreds of pounds for this.

And then we lifted the tube and they went, Oh my goodness, I'm leaving now.

So,

yes, we don't like information that confronts our sense of identity and expertise.

But we need to have that experience in order to change and grow and be laughed at by others.

And

it's not just wine experts.

I mean, I'm not a wine expert, but I find whatever the price of the bottle of wine, after drinking a few, I also go into a state of denial.

So a lot of crying,

weeping.

It's normally the next morning the state of denial begins.

But it's.

Do you think, Stuart, that there's a possibility we'll be able to isolate the psychic medium gene so that

those people who do have the go when it comes down the family line?

I was talking to my great-great-great-grandfather the other day.

He was in a lovely dress.

If you're asking if there's a genetic basis to antisocial behaviour, deception, and lying, then I imagine there is, yeah.

So, So, um,

so

do you think you could work out in advance like who was gonna be the biggest fantasist?

At some point, you could get you could get that.

That is the kind of

microphone.

That is the kind of general sort of long, blue skies, long-term idea, but it's not gonna be, we're not gonna get anywhere near that for a very long time.

Totally.

Disappointment.

But generally, though, the biggest fantasist is just gonna be the one who walks in dressed as Napoleon, surely.

You don't have to then go to the whole kind of genetic thing.

And yeah, we shouldn't rely on brain scans and genetic scans and so on.

When we do have psychological tests that can predict these things pretty accurately, and we don't necessarily have to give everyone an MRI to predict their behavior.

And that is the kind of thing that people love to look at pictures of brains when really.

That was the psychopath stuff.

They did MRI scans on psychopaths and they said, look, we found out an MRI test for psychopaths.

And you think, well, how did you know who to put into the scanner?

Well, indeed.

I did.

How do you, Josie?

I just want to know, when you are trying to, you know, collating kind of arguments on a, you know,

do you have a system of thinking, I think I can trust these people, I don't think I can trust it.

Who are, you know, again, this is always the problem when we're trying to be rational: is who do we trust to be the rational people?

Yeah, I do think it's hard, like, especially when it comes to things that I am never going to be an expert on, but I do care about.

I do find like I'll try and have a pool of people that I consider to be reliable, and I try to read their stuff as critically as possible.

They've got that, they're called scientists.

Some scientists.

Paul, do you have someone who's your rationality advisor, or have you left all of that behind now?

No, I have

a whole team of people who feed me irrational thoughts all day long.

Irrational thoughts.

Yeah, irrational.

Well, I have to have they're irrationality advisors.

So you can't come up with your own irrational thoughts?

Well, yes, I can, but

obviously I can, but it's so the rational thing, therefore, would be not to employ a team of people to give me irrational advice.

In fact, having a team of people to give me irrational advice was one of my first irrational thoughts.

And in fact, I'm going to sack them next week, which is the only rational thing I've done in years.

So we asked our audience a question as well just to find out to use their hive mind and see what they thought was their most irrational belief.

And that we actually live in the stomach of a giant named George.

I don't actually think this is true, but it helps me get to sleep.

Absolute nutter.

Absolute nutter.

I think these are all from your irrational panel, actually.

I think they're all from

the panel.

I was getting very annoyed about this, and then I worked out, I just understood grammar for a minute.

Because the question is: what do you think is your most irrational belief?

And the answer was: there's no such thing as physics, there's only smoke and mirrors.

But that's irrational.

So it's a negative of that.

That's what I like about you.

You're always learning words on this show.

That That my cat cares about me.

That's definitely a rationalist, isn't it?

Because that's the sadness of that one, isn't it?

This is unfortunate.

This is from Dr.

Alex Thomas.

It's that people care about my research.

What's your research?

Where is that?

Alex Thomas.

Alex.

Isotope geochemistry.

No, you're right.

Thank you very much to our panel, Richard Wiseman, Stuart Ritchie, Josie Long, and Paul Foote.

This is the end of the series.

We'll be back for a Christmas Christmas special and a new series of the new year.

Thank you very much for listening and goodbye.

Feeling now nice again.

That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast.

I hope you enjoyed it.

Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio?

Hmm.

Anyway, there's a competition in itself.

What do you think?

It should be more than 15 minutes.

Shut up, it's your fault.

You downloaded it.

Anyway, there's other scientific programs also that you can listen to.

Yeah, there's that one with Jimmy Alkaceltzer.

Life Scientific.

His dad discovered the atomic nucleus.

That's Inside Science.

All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond.

Richard Hammond's sister.

Richard Hammond's sister.

Thank you very much, Brian.

And also, Frontiers, a selection of science documentary on many, many different subjects.

These are some of the science programs that you can listen to.

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