Are we the smartests!?

1. Human intelligence is determined by a variety of genetic and environmental factors such as socioeconomic status, health, education, race, nutrition … . Intelligece Quotient (IQ) is an estimate of intelligence which was originally defined as “mental age” divided by “chronological age”, multiplied by 100. So for example if a child is 10 years old and her mental age is estimated to be 12, her IQ would be 120. This definition which was based on Alfred Binet publication is not used anymore; however, the IQ tests that are used now still have the average of 100 (with the standard deviation of 15-16).

2. Based on anecdotal evidence and my own personal experience a substantial number of Iranians (even the most highly educated ones) strongly believe that we as a nation have one of the highest, or even the highest intelligence in the world! To provide evidence for their claim, they normally mention successful and famous Iranians like doctors, professors, businesspeople, etc. This type of reasoning is flawed enough that no discussion is required to disprove it (I am going to start a series of posts on the argument fallacies pretty soon).

3. Today I came across a post in a blog that listed the average IQ scores of different nations in which Iran had the 102th highest among 192 countries with the average IQ score of 84. I searched a little bit and found out that this figures had been actually taken from a couple of studies (see here and here).

4. Of course the results of these (or any other) studies are not definite and every experiment should be looked upon carefully and critically. However, first of all, the findings of even a “not perfectly conducted” study should be regarded superior to any anecdotal report or rumor, until proven otherwise by a better-conducted study. And second, the gap between what is shown by research and what is being claimed by people is high enough to challenge that delusion (Iranian are the smartest!).

5. Every nation needs some things to be proud of, even if those things are not real; at times they can boost people’s morale and give them the sense of unity as a nation. But depending on what those ‘things” are, they can have negative effects as well. Unfortunately, in a culture that working hard is not valued that much (and sometimes is even being ridiculed), bragging about our high IQ may serve as another excuse for us to be less diligent and hardworking than we should be.

Rationality in practice!

“Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.” In retrospect, it seems that this famous quote by Aristotle has been my guide in my close relationships. I’ve always been preoccupied by the truth, and more recently this truth has been restricted to what is obtained in the process of rational thought processes. Unfortunately several years was needed to realize how faulty this approach to life has been.

For several years I’ve been preoccupied by different forms of dogmatism. To this end, I tried to reject any mental apparatus which was not rationally justifiable as well as ideologies (of any kind). Everything should have passed my rigid “rationality test”, and if it failed to do so, I did not hesitate to reject it as harshly as I could. Now I think differently; I strongly believe we as human beings are not rational animals; our social interactions and decision makings are influenced by irrational feelings, dogmatic thoughts, and emotions more so than by rational thought processes. In fact, even our very intellectual life is defined within the context of our psychosocial and genetic background. This background plays a key role in the assumptions that shape our belief system and therefore for most people, any attack to those irrational beliefs is inevitably perceived as an attack to their personality. The irony is that the more irrational those beliefs are, the dearer they would be to the believer! So if you really wants to put your relationship at risk, you can easily do so by trying to find and challenge your friend’s irrational beliefs! This can happen even if the irrationality of those beliefs is certain and the challenge occurs in a respectful manner.

All that I have said so far are based on the assumption that there is only one way of rational thinking which is the way that you think! This assumption is almost always never met.  Besides, the result of that rational thinking relies on the information which is available to the individual; in other words, even if our arguments are valid, they would not be sound if our premises are not true (if “all A’s are B”, and “all B’s are C”; then “all A’s are C’s”. This is a valid argument and we are thinking rationally but how do we know that all A’s are B, or all B’s are C ?).

The Aristotle quote is still my motto, but I am trying to use it purely for my academic and intellectual life.

See also this

Problem solving and scientific approach (4)

“It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.”

William of Occam

“We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.”

Isaac Newton

“The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”

Albert Einstein

The concept of simplicity in theory bulding and scientific modeling dates back to William of Ockham, a prominent 14th centry philosopher and logician. The principle attributed to him is called Occam’s razor or principle of parsimony according to which from otherwise equivalent theories that explain a phenomenon, the simplest one should be chosen.

The bellow paragraph (taken from www.wikipedia.org ) illusterates this principle in scientific modeling and hypothesis making: 

“The primary activity of science, formulating theories and selecting the most promising theory based on analysis of collected evidence, is not possible without some method of selecting between theories which do fit the evidence. It’s easy, for example, to think of alternative theories which fit the currently available data equally as well as Newton’s famous theory that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. One such theory would be that for every action there is an opposite action of half intensity, but benevolent indetectable creatures magnify the opposing action with input of their own energy so it appears to be equal; these creatures will all die in the year 2055, and at that point the observable nature of the universe will instantly shift. Owing to the creatures being undetectable, the alternative theory is practically impossible to disprove by definition. These two theories have profoundly different implications for what we should expect of the future, and the number of such possible theories is at least trivially infinite by method of uncreatively incrementing the year (2056 is another theory, 2057 is another theory, and so on).”

…nostalgia (2)

Listen to Hotel California by Eagles from here .

On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim
I had to stop for the night
There she stood in the doorway;
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself,
’this could be heaven or this could be hell’
Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way
There were voices down the corridor,
I thought I heard them say…

Welcome to the hotel california
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely face
Plenty of room at the hotel california
Any time of year, you can find it here

Her mind is tiffany-twisted, she got the mercedes bends
She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys, that she calls friends
How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat.
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget

So I called up the captain,
’please bring me my wine’
He said, ’we haven’t had that spirit here since nineteen sixty nine’
And still those voices are calling from far away,
Wake you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear them say…

Welcome to the hotel california
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely face
They livin’ it up at the hotel california
What a nice surprise, bring your alibis

Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said ’we are all just prisoners here, of our own device’
And in the master’s chambers,
They gathered for the feast
The stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
’relax,’ said the night man,
We are programmed to receive.
You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave.

Problem solving and scientific approach (3)

In scientific research nothing is being proved; better to say nothing even CAN be proved. All what a scientist hopes is to” reject” what is called the “null hypothesis” in order to “provide support” for an “alternative hypothesis”.  Say we hypothesized that the earth is round; now instead of trying to find evidence that the earth is round, the scientific method suggests we ASUME that the earth is NOT round, and then try to reject this null hypothesis.  At first it may seems a bit redundant or absurd, because one can say that what we do would lead to the same conclusion; interestingly enough it is not the case! Discussing about this issue of course is beyond the scope of this blog.  In the next posts I will briefly introduce two related issues in the philosophy of science; namely, “falsifiability” and simplicity”.   To be continued …

…nostalgia

Image from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/50/Jlennon3.jpg

Listen to “Imagine” by John Lennon from here …

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

Problem solving and scientific approach (2)

Puzzle: The individuals are given a simple test; there are 4 cards on the table, and each card has one letter on one side and one number on the other side of it. Obviously everyone can see only one side of the card. Two of the cards have letters and two of them have numbers facing up; A, 3, B, 7. This is the hypothesis: If there is an A on one side of a card, then other side should have 7 on it; and here is the question: Which two cards should be turned back to test this hypothesis.  

The most intuitive answer of course would be A and 7, which is the wrong answer! A simple rule of formal logic tells us that “if p then q” is equivalent to “if not p then not q” (in logical term, these two are called Contrapositives). Going back to the question: “If there is an A on one side of a card, then other side should have 7 on it”.  Therefore, if one side is NOT 7, the other side is NOT A. Now, in order to test the hypothesis we need to show two things: First turn the card with A on it to see if the other side is 7; AND turn the card with 3 on it, to see if the other side is NOT A. Turning the card with 7 on it does not show anything about our hypothesis. So the right answer is A and 3.   

In the above example the hypothesis can be PROVED. This test by itself however has no practical significance; in the real world, we are interested in generalizing our results from our sample to a virtually infinite number of items. Let me give a simple example: I am trying to see if the coin that I have is fair. If the coin in actually fair, I expect that 50% of the time I toss it I get a tail and 50% of the time I get a head. But this expectation is fully satisfied only if I toss the coin infinite times (which of course never can happen). If for example I toss the coin 1000 times, I cannot PROVE that the coin is fair even if I have exactly 500 heads and 500 tails. All I can conclude is that the results PROVIDE SUPPORT for the idea that the coin is fair; nothing has been proved. Does it not sound a bit absurd? If in reality we cannot prove anything, so what is the point of doing all of that research? The shortest answer that I can give is that outside the fantasy world, everything is relative.  

To be continued …

Problem solving and scientific approach (1)

“All life is problem solving”

Karl R. Popper

Recently, some misconduct happened in the blogs that I read, with some people writing nasty comments either anonymously or using other peoples’ names. After contacting some of the blog owners and comparing more that 40 IPs (in total) everything became clear. I really do not want to hear anything about this because everyone (except maybe for those who did all of that) is already sick of it. The game is over! So any query about this issue will simply be ignored, sorry! What I want to do instead is just to use this as an example to talk about scientific thinking and reasoning.

In the blog comments example, the evidence that I collected was large enough to give me enough confidence that my conclusion is “unlikely to be wrong”. But why am I using this language? Why do I simply not say that “I am sure that my conclusion is right”? Although we use such words like “sure”, “confident”, and “100%” in our day to day conversations, surprisingly enough, such confidence neither exists in the real world nor it does in the world of science.

Long time ago I mentioned briefly some of the cognitive biases and reasoning flaws that human beings do all the time and I am not going to repeat that here. I just want to give one example that illustrates my point. Here is the puzzle: The individuals are given a simple test; there are 4 cards on the table, and each card has one letter on one side and one number on the other side of it. Obviously everyone can see only one side of the card. Two of the cards have letters and two of them have numbers facing up; A, 3, B, 7. This is the hypothesis: If there is an A on one side of a card, then other side should have 7 on it; and here is the question: Which two cards should be turned back to test this hypothesis? It turns out that more than 90% of the respondents give the wrong answer which is A and 7!

To be continued …

Culture Shock and Social Identity

The short article that you are about to read is just based on my personal observations, so its factual accuracy may be questionable. Any comments or feedbacks will be appreciated.

Cultural differences have always amazed me. One good thing about living in a cosmopolitan city is that you exposed to a variety of perspectives and cultural differences; a kind of experience that you would never gain anywhere else.

Reading books, watching movies, and traveling always helps to get a feeling of what goes on in different countries and with people with different cultural and ethnic backgrounds; but nothing substitutes actually living in a place with people with a variety of backgrounds. Once I wrote a post on how people used to be so egocentric before and how Nicolas Copernicus, Karl Marx, Charles Robert Darwin and Sigmund Freud helped us wake from this beautiful dream of egocentrism. Of course these scientific advancements have had impact on the understanding of ordinary people of the nature of our world and our selves. However, having said that, one cannot deny the fact that a majority of people still have some certain forms of egocentric attitude in some aspects of their lives.

Here I want to link this topic to the concept of “identity”; which is generally defined as what a person regards him or herself as a discrete, separate entity. More specifically I would like to refer what is called “social identity” which is “individuals’ labeling of themselves as members of particular groups (i.e., nation, social class, subculture, ethnicity, gender, etc.)”. It is clear that every one of us has a social identity comprising the aforementioned elements. This social identity for every person seems to be stable and stay more or less unchanged during time. The question now is that what happens to this deep-rooted social identity when individuals are exposed to different cultures and perspectives. The first reaction in most of the cases is what is called “culture shock”; the sense of confusion and anxiety accompanying being exposed to a different culture. This of course is not the most wonderful feeling to have! so the person experiencing culture shock seeks to find a way to eliminate it.

The most egocentric (and conservative) attitude makes one resist any change that appears to be a threat to the integrity of what is perceived as the social identity. Hanging out only with those people who belong to the same nationality or ethnicity, not acknowledging the cultural differences, and developing ultra-patriotic or chauvinistic viewpoints are the most natural responses in people with such attitudes.

On the other side of the spectrum, some individuals who has not have the chance to develop a mature social identity (mostly because they are too young to do so) tend to gradually absorb the new cultural elements and blend in the new society. How successful they are seems to be directly related to the tolerance and the capacity of the host society to accept new people regardless of their ethnicity backgrounds (Canada is the best example).

In the middle of our spectrum, are those persons who on the one hand has less egocentric attitude and are really eager to absorb the new values and cultural elements, but they have much trouble in doing so because of the already established sense of identity, as well as characteristics and habits that seem to die hard! These individuals (as well as those in the second group who live in the non-tolerant communities) are among those who are highly prone to experience “identity confusion”.

 

I’m back!

Hi all,

My break from blogging was a bit longer than I had expected. For a while I was really busy with my schoolwork, teaching, and research, but after that I think I was just being too lazy to write a new post.

I received some good news during the last week: First the book chapter that we wrote on abstract mental representations is ready for publication. You can download this manuscript from here. Second, I won an award to finish my masters. And last but not least, a full professor from UCLA contacted us to write a book chapter based on a paper that I worked on back in Iran. This last one was totally unexpected and that’s why I’m probably a bit more excited than I should be; more than anything else our happiness I think is determined by our expectations.

I really liked this Persian clip below; you may have already seen it, but I want to put it here for my own reference!