lNAp7WDxrcU.txt

Speaker 1:          00:00          You know, I'm always curious about the, let's say, the practical implications of scientific research both at a, at a personal level, familial level, social level, all of those things. You know. So I mean one of the things that I'm planning to do in the near future is to launch a website that will enable people to assess themselves with what we've developed. A scale called the big five aspects scale that breaks the big five down into 10 aspects, each of which, which provide some additional high resolution and useful descriptions of personality. So you build to go there and find out what your personality is like. You'd be able to compare yourself to other people who, you know, to find out where your similarities and differences are. But one of the things we've been thinking about doing as well is putting up on the same side or real Iq test.

Speaker 1:          00:46          Nicely validated. Probably focusing on fluid intelligence because it's a little bit less linguistically complex to do so. But maybe measuring verbal intelligence and then showing people the strata of occupations in which they're likely to find maximal success. Because you know, from, for me, given that I know that, that people vary in their cognitive abilities tremendously and that that's actually an important determinant of their life outcome, it seems to me. So let's say someone tests out in an icu of around a hundred and 50, and so you can say, look, you know, you're pretty damn smart. You're, you're up above 85 percent of the general population. You could, you could probably do a pretty damn good job as an undergraduate in university if you're also disciplined, right? If you were conscientious, he hit the books hard, you're gonna, you're gonna come out in the top core tile of your class, assuming that you're not at a spectacularly successful, a spectacularly selective university, but you're going to have a much more difficult time as a master's student and phd level stuff is going to be.

Speaker 1:          01:50          You're going to be pushing your luck to, to really master that. But you know, you could be, here's a, here's a domain of, of, of, of, uh, what would you call it? Industrial organizational activity where you could really be in the top 10 percentile. You know, it's like, so if you have an Iq of 115, like you might make one bang up plumber and you could have a spectacularly successful career as a plumber and maybe as a manager of other plumbers and all of that and you know, and I actually happened to be a real emphasis, he announced at one of the trade. So I certainly don't think of that as something that's a, that's a low quality or low status occupation in the least. But we would, we would like to tell people, okay, heres, heres, here's a, here's an intellectual domain that's probably too high for you to be successful without working insane hours to, to, to close the gap because you can do that within St.

Speaker 1:          02:47          work up to some, some limited degree. But it seems to me that the logical thing to do at least in part is to give people a sense of what their advantages and limitations are and then say to them, okay, well given that here's a place that you could go where you could be optimally successful. And so, you know, that's Kinda my take from a policy perspective, let's say, but like what have you thought about, you know, the massive diversity and intellectual ability, you mean what are the implications from a policy perspective as far as you're concerned?

Speaker 2:          03:17          Well, I think vocational guidance is clearly one. I actually did some consulting and some research for a nonprofit group called the Johnson O'connor Foundation, which is a vocational testing. They're not that big on ge, but they have their own battery of tests. They bring someone in and do a full day of, of cognitive tests. And from that they give some advice about what kinds of professions match their cognitive strengths and weaknesses. And I actually did some brain imaging a on their tests and it was very interesting stuff.

Speaker 1:          03:56          Did you think they do because it's hard to do the psychometrics properly with regards to vocational guidance because we don't really know. We don't have a good handle on how to classify jobs into their various subtypes. Like John Holland has done some good work doing that, but, but there's so many jobs and it's hard to figure out. Well, what makes two jobs the same or similar, you know?

Speaker 2:          04:19          No, I was at Hopkins when Hollen was there in some of my friends were graduate students work for him and I learned all about that vocational testing. That's very powerful. And as you know, it's, that's more of his, his scales have kind of morphed into more personality. White dementia.

Speaker 1:          04:37          Yeah. Well that's it. That's exactly the nexus that we want to play out. It's like okay, because there is a reason. I know people have been mapping Holland Holland job categories onto the big five and we have a fair bit of success, you know, and we're hoping that the differentiation down to the 10 levels of personality will provide even more precision. But, but with more general policy let. Okay. So fine. So reasonable vocational counseling. That's a good idea. When does it start? Just starting junior high, like do you do what the Europeans do and start to track people into trades and, and, and higher education at that kind of early age. Your

Speaker 2:          05:16          opinion seemed to have had great success with that. So it's certainly Germans in particular. Yeah. So reasonable to look at. But the problem in the United States, there were so many problems with the way we conceptualize education and the whole idea of tracking. I don't know how it is in Canada, but in the United States, this idea of tracking it has a very negative balance. Do it, you know, segregating the smart kids into one, one a set of classes and the less smart kids into others. And then there's remedial education and there's been a tendency, a strong tendency, the United States to feel that kids are learning from each other. So you don't want homogeneous groups based on learning ability, your want.

Speaker 1:          06:08          It's so funny because people say that with regards to two, let's say academic achievement, but they play exactly the opposite. Stumped when it comes to such things as has childhood sports. You know. So if you look at football for example, it's like, well hey, let's segregate like ability. It's like you don't have the people who stumble around on the field dropping the ball all the time, playing with the top end quarterbacks and nobody thinks there's a problem with that is they don't say, well everyone learns from everyone else in that situation. So to me it speaks more of a refusal to admit to the stark reality that there are massive cognitive differences between people and to try to actually start to address that with some degree of seriousness and the serious should be something like, okay, well let's look at the bottom 15 percent of the population cognitively speaking.

Speaker 1:          06:55          It's like what the hell can we do for those people that's going to be useful? And you know, like the guy that I was telling you about, I was trying to think of some way that he could find a, a respectable and productive and relatively stable position in society that would be useful. And I thought there was a couple of things he could do. Like one of the things he could have done, I think he could have been encouraged, let's say, to to collect trash in the downtown areas like he could have been assigned a city block and it could have been said to him, look, your job is to keep this damn city block clean. Here's a bag, here's the stick. You get up in the morning, you go do this. It's like it makes everybody's life more pleasant. It's a valuable contribution. It's something you could do with a certain degree of pride and it and there's a socially valuable end of it.

Speaker 1:          07:46          Now what happens in Toronto is that people drive around these vacuum cleaner machines on sidewalks and pick up the scrap paper and all of that actually turns out to be a very cognitively demanding job because, well, you have to pay careful attention. You can't run over people. You have to have decent social skills and you know it's complicated, but it might be nice to see, but we were not mature enough to have a discussion like this. As a society. We might want to say is like, okay, well there's a group of people who aren't going to be able to compete in the, in the cognitive workplace, they're not going to do it and there's actually lots of them and we're not going to say they're lazy and we're not going to say they're not looking for work. We're not going to say any of that. We're going to say, look, we need to find occupations that have public utility that aren't just make work projects that people have. That level of abstract capacity could actually perform, but I don't think we have the maturity to have that conversation.

Speaker 2:          08:50          We don't have the economics. And so I would go even a little to the left of you and I would say there's wrong with work programs, you know, to, to allow people to work with dignity so you have that option. But you also had this interesting experiment being proposed on the minimum annual income.

Speaker 1:          09:12          Well, that one worries me because see if there's a couple of things about that when it concerns me because, you know, so we're having a conversation here where we're taking, um, differences in Iq seriously. But the problem with the guaranteed annual income issue, I think one of the problems, and I'm not denying its potential utility, it's something that I think that would have to be experimentally determined, you know, and all of that. And maybe it could replace a plethora of less efficient social welfare programs. But you know,

Speaker 1:          09:45          it isn't obvious to me. It's obvious to me that there's a substantial proportion of the population. And I would say it's probably five percent that would destroy themselves instantly if you gave them a guaranteed annual income and they would do it because they're very low in conscientiousness, for example. And very impulsive. And I've worked with many guys, quite often x, cocaine addicts who were often not all that high on the end of the cognitive distribution, but very, very low in conscientiousness in impulsivity. And those guys were absolutely fine as long as they were flat broke. But man, I tell you as soon as they had money, they were done. It was like three days in the bar, cocaine binge face down in a ditch and then they were fine until they got money again. And so I don't. The problem with the Guarente Dan annual income solution is that man does not live by bread alone. Let's say in the. If you have money and you have things to do, then you have a life. But if you just have money, you don't have a life.