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IQ as a concept (and specifically “g“) and the psychometric instruments used to quantify them has provoked fierce political and scientific debate for decades. The political debate tends to be heatedly emotional and revolve around the inescapably inegalitarian societal implications of crafting policy (education, public health etc.) in light of a wide spectrum of IQ scores being unevenly distributed through the population. Scientific debate tends to be more focused on defining or identifying the parameters of intelligence, the relationship between physical brain structure, cognition and human consciousness,  heritability, neuroplasticity, the accuracy of psychometric instruments and more specialized topics beyond my ken.

What’s usually seldom disputed by scientists is that large differences in IQ are significant and that a very, very small number of individuals – the top 1% to .0001% of the Bell Curve, have unusually gifted and varied cognitive capacities.  It is technically more difficult to measure people who are such extreme outliers with accuracy as their intelligence might very well exceed the parameters of the test. Stephen Hawking’s IQ is frequently estimated in the media to be in the 160’s and Albert Einstein’s in the 150’s but those are speculative guesses. Most of the people touted as being “smarter than Einstein” with astronomical IQ scores, like Marylin vos Savant or Christopher Langan do not (for whatever reason) produce any tangible intellectual work comparable to that of Stephen Hawking, much less Albert Einstein. Maybe we really ought to use that cultural comparison with greater humility until there’s a better empirical basis for it 🙂

[If you are curious what the extremely smart do think about, browse the Noesis journals of The Mega Society]

It is being asserted that any evolutionary improvements to human intelligence are apt to come with (presumably undesired) tradeoffs or deficits. That we are “bumping up against” our “evolutionary limits”. I’m not qualified to evaluate that hypothesis, but it’s assumptions are not stable as advanced societies are already radically changing their cognitive environments as well as approaching the ability to directly manipulate our genetic legacy. Whether it is Kurzweil’s “singularity” or not matters less than these things change the “natural” probability of our evolutionary trajectory. A one in a billion random genetic mutation is no longer so if you can design it in a lab.

How much higher could we push cognition? Or could we expand the existing range by adding a new dimension of senses?

Why would a dictatorship not bound by ethical scruples not do this, even at considerable cost to the individual subjects of such experiments, in order to systematically harness the results of “a genetic arms race” for the benefit of the state? Though a growing body of supersmart people would eventually become difficult to control if your secret police were not intelligent enough to comprehend what they were doing .

The potential economic rewards of increasing human intelligence would inevitably outweigh any risk assessment or ethical constraints.

[ by Charles Cameron — on war, life and death, IEDs, Carl Prine, prayer ]
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People in general — Americans, British, Israelis, Iranians, Japanese, people from all over — don’t much like the idea of having an atom split right in their faces. But the problem isn’t necessarily so much the splitting of the atom, a technical feat which can be accomplished safely in, say, the heart of the sun — it’s the splitting of life from body, the work of a split second.

Which can also be accomplished by IED.

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I’ve split these two images, both drawn from the same video one second apart, to give myself the fraying edges of a visceral sense of what that separation of life from body might be about.

See how little the car, bottom left, has advanced between the first image and the second.

The video the two images come from is embedded in Michael Yon‘s tribute to Carl Prine. I’d have embedded the video here myself if I could, but it’s in Vimeo rather than YouTube, and either because I’m incompetent or because Vimeo isn’t set up that way, I couldn’t figure out how to do the embed.

The Marine who sent Yon the video wrote:

This is the type of explosion that our troops are dealing with, not the puny kind we see on television or in the movies. Pass this on… so Americans will now understand what an IED truly is… and what our war veterans are dealing with.

Click on the link in red above if you haven’t already seen the movie nor lived through the event, and get that edge of a visceral sense — like a second-cousin-once-removed of the real thing.

My thoughts and prayers are with Carl Prine and all those battle-scarred in body, mind and soul.

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One second passes between the first screen-grab and the second: time enough to sneeze, but not time enough to respond, “God Bless you”.

Life and death: a snapshot, a split second.

I have been under the weather the past few days, but I decided to lumber off my sickbed and tend to the blog.

The American Conservative (Kelly Vlahos) – Carl Prine’s Line of Departure 

Vlahos pens a touching tribute to Carl Prine, whose heath is suffering from the effects of his service in combat. All of us here at zenpundit.com wish Carl a speedy recovery and return.

A few days after military writer and critic Carl Prine — whom I did not know at the time — decided to skewer me on his popular new blog, “Line of Departure,” I got a call from an Army friend stationed in Germany. He saw it, and asked “are you alright?” It was that bad.

A little over a year later, I find myself emailing Prine, several times in the last few weeks, writing, “are you alright?”

It’s pretty bad.

….I don’t think I ever told him this, but Prine’s single broadside at my work helped to sharpen my writing. I was pretty stung at the time, mostly because he couldn’t be dismissed as a fool. To my mind, he was a self-serving heel, but it was clear he was well-read and a good writer, which made it worse.

I never responded online, but over the course of the next several months we came to a friendly reckoning and rather smooth path towards mutual respect and encouragement.He’s apologized too many times, and given my column at Antiwar.com a lot of props that I don’t think I necessarily deserve but secretly love because LoD is not the typical Antiwar.com audience and it’s nice when we feel we’re getting something across to the people we write about.

Plus, it feels good to be defended by someone who shows no quarter to the hucksters and court scribes who helped deliver us into these wars and continue to this day to downplay the failed counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and the pathetically tepid, mostly wrongheaded state of U.S. foreign policy everywhere else. Our burgeoning collegiality aside, Prine became over the course of his time at LoD one of the good guys, a veteran who obviously loves the military for what it could be and loathes it for what it has been used for, and ultimately for what it has become….

American Security Project (Ashley Boyle) –The US and its UAVs: Addressing Legality and Overblown Scenarios 

This piece was endorsed by the killer of egregious drone-nonsense, Dan Trombly. I have to agree. Boyle, unlike about 99% of the folks writing internet hysterics about drones, manages to get international law right before starting her analysis.

While the international community has the right to demand that the US provide a legal foundation for drone strikes, it should be understood that the US has a strategic interest in not providing any such justification. Similarly, the argument that US drone strikes are establishing a dangerous precedent is reasonable. However, extrapolating this assertion to a scenario of global drone warfare is not only alarmist and distracting, but has no factual basis at present.

The matter of legal justification for US drone strikes is straightforward. Critics have long claimed that US drone strikes violate laws on interstate force and sovereignty in that strikes are conducted extraterritorially in non-combat zones.

While laws governing the use of interstate force bar the use of force in another nation’s territory at times of peace, under Article 51of the United Nations Charter, a nation has “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence [sic]” until the UN Security Council takes action. Article 51 applies if either the targeted state agrees to the use of force in its territory by another nation or the targeted state, or a group operating within its territory, was responsible for an act of aggression against the targeting state.

These conditions are mutually exclusive; only one must be satisfied to justify a unilateral extraterritorial use of force by a UN Member. In the cases of Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, both conditions are satisfied: all three countries have consented, explicitly or otherwise, to the US operating drones within their territories, and all three are “safe havens” for groups that have launched violent attacks against the US and US interests.

If the US is well within its right to conduct drone strikes within these nations, why, then, does it not simply invoke Article 51 as a means of justification and end the legality debate?

David Brooks –Why Our Elites Stink 

Brooks gets some of this wrong and drastically underestimates active vice passive corruption eating away at the system bit he gets one critical point right:

….As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role. 

That’s exactly correct. An elite with no ethical guidance system are not merely prone to personal vice and policy disaster, they are dangerous to democracy.

ADDENDUM:

Peter J. Munson, USMC Major, SWJ editor and…author!

Advanced Praise for War, Welfare, and Democracy

War, Welfare & Democracy: Rethinking America’s quest for the End of History by Peter J. Munson

[ by Charles Cameron — numbers as analytic categories, two, the duel and the duet ]
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Charles Darwin once said of his fellow species biologists:

Those who make many species are the “splitters,” and those who make few are the “lumpers”.

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The diagram above represents a card-game I’ve played on occasion in my mind, asking myself the question: what is the opposite of one?

Two is the usual answer — and it’s interesting, you can get there from one two ways: by adding, or by dividing.

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The human mind very often thinks in binaries, we talk about us and them, friend and foe, the Allies and the Axis Powers, and even an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – our ideas of warfare, contest and justice alike are predicated on the number two.

As I said in my intro post, one is a single data point, perhaps an anomaly: two is a duel or a duet, an opposition or a trend.

So we don’t always have to think of us and them — we could also think about me and mine, you and yours, two heads are better than one…

And what if you can “turn” your enemy? Then the duel turns into a duet.

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The duel is all about two competing, contending, fighting, agonizing to see who shall be the one. It is arguably the most basic form of combat, the simplest, and possibly the most profound. It can be close to symmetric — “they were perfectly matched” — or the very essence of asymmetric — David and Goliath.

The duet is about two collaborating, counterpointing, harmonizing — seeing how, together, they are one…

War-fighting and music-making, war and peace, regiment and free form, the march and the dance…

*****

I am eager to know what sorts of insights you can derive from or find echoed in this series of posts.

[ by Charles Cameron — numbers as analytic categories, one, self-reference ]
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Is that a self-eating watermelon?

Not exactly. It’s the ourobouros, the serpent in many mythologies which eats its own tail…

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The thing about one is that it’s itself: as the song says, One is one and all alone, and ever more shall be so.

One is itself, it is self-contained, sufficient — it refers only to itself.

And so it is that all things self-referential have a special quality to them. Douglas Hofstadter recognized this specialness of the self-referential, and made it a feature of his book Godel Escher Bach. And my point in writing this post is simply to say that whenever I as an analyst recognize a self-reference, I pay special attention.

And I am almost always rewarded, either by an aha!, a sigh, or a laugh…

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So for the last two months, I’ve been quietly noting down every self-referential structure in my twitter-stream. Insights, jokes, regrets, they’re all here:

@BryanAlexander, 120508: The trick is to have 3d printers printing 3d printers
@BryanAlexander, 120508: 3d printers all the way down

@tejucole, 120508: Perfectly sane except for persistent paranoia about being sent to an asylum, Miron, 20, of Elizabeth, N.J., was sent to an asylum.

@GEsfandiari, 120509: Kafkaesque Iran where Khamenei’s Fatwa on Antifiltering is Filtered http://www.rferl.org/content/iran_filters_khamenei_fatwa_on_antifiltering_internet/24575143.html

@emptywheel, 120514: MEK, about to be rewarded for its assassination of Iranian scientists, AKA terrorism, by being delisted as terrorists. http://goo.gl/4833u

@carlacasilli, 120515: “By default, Brackets shows its own source code (MIND BLOWN).” How’s that for recursive?

@imothanaYemen, 120529: Paradoxically, I can’t watch @frontlinepbs on Al-Qaeda in Yemen live because I am in Yemen :). Trying to do something about that!

@shephardm, 120612: Think someone has new chapter…Man hitchhiking across US writing “The Kindness of America” hurt in a drive-by shooting

@JimmySky, 120615: #ff @DaveedGR, one of the world’s foremost authorities on foremost authorities.

@DaveedGR, 120707: Ironically, the Brown Lloyd James firm is now in need of its own Brown Lloyd James firm.

@holysmoke, 120709: I wish sarcastic Tweeters would stay classy and STOP SAYING ‘STAY CLASSY’.

@rwhe, 120712: Attention, comedians! How’s “How’s that workin’ out for ya?” workin’ out for ya?

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Each of those very bright fellows noticed a self-reference and thought it noteworthy, worth tweeting on to their various followers. It was the shape they noticed, the form, the way what they were tweeting about turned back on itself, like that proverbial serpent eating its own tail.

And the same shape crops up in scripture and poetry:

Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men. Ephesians 4:8, KJV — the Vulgate has captivam duxit captivitatem.

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die! — John Donne, Holy Sonnets, X.

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Self-reference is an important analytic signal: pay special attention. It doesn’t tell you what kind of attention, or why it might be important, just that there’s something worth looking at. A data point, possibly an anomaly.

That’s the number one thing to note.

*****

I am eager to know what sorts of insights you can derive from or find echoed in this series of posts.