Here’s one that’s been making the rounds: it’s an Op-Ed from yesterday’s Times making a point that in a less Orwellian world would come as no surprise to anyone, namely that innate qualities make a significant difference in the statistical distribution of life outcomes. We read:
Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised’ intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only’ in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile ”” the profoundly gifted ”” were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.
… It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.
No, it doesn’t. Neither does pretending it isn’t so, or insisting it isn’t so, or making public policy based on the assumption that it isn’t so.
Here’s a related statistical fact, of no less significance: the qualities under examination here have been repeatedly demonstrated to be highly heritable (another commonsense datum that would once have been obvious to all, but nowadays only to professional psychometricians, black-hearted curmudgeons, and breeders of livestock).
Taken together, what are we to make of these results? Gee, I really can’t say. And you’d better not, either.