Episode 122: Nothing but a "G" Thing (Intelligence Pt. 1)

I'm a very good man just a very bad wizard.

Welcome to very bad wizards. I'm Tamer Summers from the University of Houston. Dave. Well, we've had our 15 minutes of fame. How was it for you?

It was, you know, busy, because, man, Sam has a lot of Twitter followers. He's like, at almost a million. So what's up? Welcome. I'm David Fizaro from Cornell University.

So we were on Sam Harris's Waking Up podcast and yeah, experienced Twitter fame, which isn't real fame, I guess, but also serious itunes fame. As someone who lives and dies by.

The position on the charts, who just.

Measures my self worth based on where we are on itunes, I was pretty pleased with myself.

Yeah. If you ever wonder how Tamler is feeling on any given day, look at the top philosophy chart. Yeah. You know what I did realize, though, is that and we don't have nearly that many Twitter followers as real famous people, but there gets a point to where it is almost meaningless to check Twitter because there's so much I don't know what it is. Now it defaults everybody into the conversation thread. So when people are kind of fighting amongst themselves and they tag you, it just doesn't make sense to even have any alerts or anything.

Right? Well, there was like a period where our mentions would just be through the roof, but it was like, three people arguing about Sam's parents view on Islam, like, whether he's Islamophobic or not. Like, nothing to do with the podcast, nothing to do anything, certainly anything about us.

Now we're back to our normal, humble, selves, obscure lives.

We're like, what is it, Charlie? And flowers for Algernon. We start out really dumb and then we get really famous and smart and then go back to just reverting to where we were before.

Yeah. So thanks, Sam, for having or I.

Was thinking we're a little also like Naomi Watts.

This was our masturbatory fantasy and now.

We'Ve woken up to reality.

Oh, woken up. Very nice. But Flowers for Algernon is a very nice we have an intro segment, but Flowers for Algernon is something that might come back up again.

Yeah, that's actually a good segue.

It was actually little known fact it was based on a Simpsons episode. Homer has a crayon in his brain.

So today we're going to do an episode that we owe to our Patreon subscribers, our loyal Patreon subscribers. We asked all of our Patreon subscribers to suggest a topic for a listener selected episode. And then our $5 and up subscribers voted. I don't know why this is taking so long to say they voted in a Patreon poll for this topic, which is intelligence.

Yeah. For the record, because I love our Patreon supporters and all our listeners, we prepped for this.

We did. We really did. Like, we read a book, or almost a whole book in my case.

And I was delving through the research. Even though I teach it every year for intropsych, there's still a lot of stuff out there and it's just one of those topics. It's hard to filter through the controversy. So hopefully we'll do it some justice.

Yeah, we'll try. And I am really ignorant about all of it. So I will play the role of some of our listeners and just ask questions. But this is a topic I've never looked into, I've never had strong feelings about. So the book that we're talking about is Stuart Ritchie's. What's it called?

Intelligence all that matters.

And he says that a certain group of people in fact, he says smart people just kind of don't like to talk about IQ. Don't like to talk about intelligence, period.

Right.

And I guess that makes me smart because that's kind of like how I've never been interested in IQ. When people talk about it, it always seems it seems a little nouveau smart.

I'll put it like that.

Yeah, little nuvo smart.

It is a sign of your intelligence. So I was going to ask you they don't bring it up at your mensa meetings. Like, I would think that that's like.

A common I keep trying to get in there and they say my scores are too low.

You have a problem understanding statistics? Yeah, it's a weird topic. If you don't study intelligence or you don't have to learn about it, then it's like a weird thing to bring up. It's almost like the equivalent of guys talking about their ABS in the gym. And I'll say that we weren't planning on talking about Stuart's book. Stuart sent me an email with this book. I really like Stuart. I don't know him personally. He's on Twitter. He's a great guy to follow, but really nicely written book. So we'll put a link to that in our show notes.

Very accessible. I don't know if we can put a link to the whole book on Amazon.

We'll put to the throws.

Before we get to that, we always look for an opening segment topic that is a little more lighthearted. It has not been a lighthearted last few weeks.

Have I was going to say, have we ever had this much trouble either just because of what's out in the media or maybe psychologically. We're in a dark place. We were really having trouble.

It really is. It did feel, I think, some of that sort of I don't know, there was just this just bad, sick feeling after Charlottesville that it just was sort of pervaded everyday life. Even when you weren't talking about it or thinking about it or reading about it. It was sort of hanging over the week that followed, I think. And you could even see, like, I was scouring for funny articles that we could talk about. And it was very hard to find anything that just I mean, I'm trying to talk about something very serious, and I have to look at you fucking vaping right now.

I don't know what you're talking about. This incense. Incense? Yeah. No, the only funny stuff is, like, Tina Fey talking about Nazis, which I.

It just seemed from the reaction to it, I don't want to know. I just don't want to even know why people are worked up about things.

Are.

The thing that we finally found is, and I think you can always, when all else fails, look to neuroscience, or specifically popularization of neuroscience, and you will find now, I think originally I sent this to you. This sounds like it's kind of up our alley. It's a blog on Scientific American called What Does Your Dog Really Want?

Yeah. And honestly, I saw it. I skimmed it. I was like, oh, when fucking Nazis and potential race wars are looming over us, like talking about dogs, that seems fun. There's something interesting.

And I think we both had the same reaction to it, which is we skimmed it. We were like, there's probably going to be some that kind of misguided neuroscience talk, but there might be something interesting to think about. And then we both read it more carefully. And it just seemed like, even as these pop neuroscience articles go, that this one was at a level above or I guess below, or I don't know how you want whichever, like the dumber level or the more philosophically misguided level.

That's the thing. I guess we should just talk about it's. Not like, expect people to know the nuances of philosophy of mind. But this is the case in which if you're going to write about it and you're going to actually quote it and you're going to talk about the relevance of it for something