IQ is very important to a lot of people in the TESCREAL movement. Many of them are, as they would put it, “IQ realists.” They think IQ measures something real about the human mind, and that this thing is very important.
A lot of psychologists, philosophers, and so on think IQ is complete nonsense. There was a really good critique of the idea of IQ by a statistician named Nassim Taleb. He points out that IQ tests can potentially be useful for identifying individuals who would score very low on IQ tests, but when it comes to people who are above average, it’s basically meaningless, because there are a million different ways to be “intelligent.” There are some people who are great at math, some people who have amazing common sense and wisdom, and some who are brilliant scientists but have no common sense and no wisdom to share.
I would liken the idea of intelligence to that of skill. If somebody says, “You should meet my friend Joe, he’s really skilled,” I’m wondering, “In what sense? In what way?” I need more information. Can he write a string quartet? Can he cook a really nice dinner? Can he build a good cabinet?
Historically, IQ was intimately bound up with eugenics. The tests were developed by leading eugenicists, many of whom had deeply racist and sexist views. They believed that the “white race” had superior intelligence relative to other racial categories, and they developed the test to confirm exactly what they wanted to show.
There is a very clear continuity between the eugenics movement of the twentieth century and the emergence of the TESCREAL movement. Leading figures within the TESCREAL movement have sounded the alarm about the possibility of dysgenic pressures, “dysgenic” meaning the opposite of eugenic, where eugenic means literally “good birth.” The idea is that intelligence is heritable, which is highly questionable from a scientific perspective. Dysgenics would occur if, for example, individuals who…
Auteur: Émile Torres
