RE: IQ, EQ, Intuition, and college
Christ...@gs.com
OK, I’m going to rant for a bit about dodgeball. Dodgeball was banned in my elementary school a couple years after I left. As a kid, and to a lesser extent today, I had neither the interest nor the ability to hit people with balls. My girlfriends and I used to stand in the back of our zone and do nothing during dodgeball. We pretty much weren’t hit because we stood so far back and we were at an age (4th-5th grade, don’t remember playing it before then) where guys had begun to like girls.
Unlike most sports games, where groups of people compete against each other to achieve inherently neutral goals (put the ball in the basket, get the ball to the endzone, run around the bases, travel a certain distance), dodgeball only exists so people can hit and overcome each other. I’d argue that this makes dodgeball less like modern real life (where your goal might be to attain happiness or make $$, and achieving those goals may involve overcoming others but isn’t necessarily zero-sum) and more like barbarian warfare (I big, you small, I throw rock!!) I’ll admit that my dodgeball games might have been atypical, since the kings of the hill at my elementary school would probably been stuffed in lockers at Kane’s elementary school, but what I witnessed was a bunch of aggro little dudes jostling for power in the front and everyone else checked out in the back. Yes, this sounds depressingly like real life, but isn’t the point of primary school sports to shape kids for a better future? At least in baseball, everyone gets a couple swings at the bat.
Not even gonna to try to tie this back to the original conversation, but I think I see some tenuous threads..
From: Kane Hsieh [mailto:kane....@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2013 12:55 PM
To: Allen Yang
Cc: Zou, Christina [IBD]; Winston Yan; Daniel Suo; Lisa Yu
Subject: Re: IQ, EQ, Intuition, and college
Points:
Selection - Yes, the system does favor the elite, but that's a policy question - is it the responsibility of a *private* school to guarantee equality of opportunity? You don't expect a private company to hire anything but the best, so why would you expect a private school to accept anything but?
Athletes - the article and Princeton study stated that most athletes were from lower income backgrounds. But I do agree with you - team athletics are as important to primary and secondary education as book studies are. In fact, a lot of stupid new legislation is demphasizing it (seriously? no dodgeball? even as the kid that got my ass kicked all the time I still learned a damn lot from contact/competitive sports in school). Learning how to be a loser is as important as how to be a winner; otherwise people don't really handle bad situations well.
Legacies - I think that point is a very East Coast perspective - there have been significant Asian American populations on the west coast since the mid nineteenth century
On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 12:44 PM, Allen Yang <ajya...@gmail.com> wrote:
A few reactions I had:
IQ, EQ and the Third Q
I agree only in part with the third "kind" of intelligence you're describing. There's a lot of psychological research dealing with the idea of how experts in a field (including pro athletes and soldiers) can often "intuit" things about a situation within their field before consciously being aware of it. But I think this comes more with practice and with training yourself for years in that field as opposed to something that's more innate, which I think is a criteria for a new type of intelligence. Both IQ and EQ are things that can be somewhat trained, but which are generally genetic/innate; I think the average person has the ability to become an expert in a field and hence to develop intuition there.
What I do think is a kind of intelligence is a certain idea of "fluidity" of thought (not the same as fluid intelligence). It's the idea that some people can string ideas together faster and react faster intellectually to a situation. I think you tend to find this in people who are very strong in debate or are witty, as well as people who may not have a deep understanding of a topic but can bring out everything they've learned about the subject (aka "brain dumping") and, in some form, people who have the ability to make links between disciplines generally taught separately (so a lot of academics at the 'intersection' fields). That's just one of my theories though (and god knows I have enough crackpot theories about life). In school, this form of intelligence manifests as the ability to be extremely "well-rounded" and able to pick up many different subjects and dabble in them, even if that person is not going to be the best at any given subject in particular, for example.
Selection Criteria
I agree in general with your points here, but I'd like to note that the "American" system, that of taking into account things like extracurriculars, volunteer work, athletics, essays, an interview, etc., has plenty of flaws as well. For example, you could say that it favors the already-privileged (since they have more time/resources to take instrument lessons, or to participate in team sports), or that they aren't an accurate gauge of a child's inherent talent or intelligence. I think you could also argue that they don't have a high correlation with things like leadership potential or the ability to think interdisciplinarily in the future (since so much can change in adolescence/college years).
Athletes
Coming out of banking and seeing what the recruitment process was like there, I think a lot of athletes score better on the 'post-college income' gauge because there's a lot of in-hiring among athletes, ie former college basketball players will like to hire graduating basketball players. And this can come back to the income/privileged argument, where people from privileged backgrounds have more time/resources to play sports growing up (but may not have the talent to play at a professional level), and thus are more likely to end up in better jobs to begin with, etc. etc. Of course, being a college-level athlete does correlate with some other positive traits, such as perseverance, willingness to put up with difficult/challenging environments, etc.
Legacies
Well, it's kind of hard to tell how Asians interact within the 'system' with a 'Harvard' label, because it's really only been a couple of decades (as in, barely two?) when Asian-Americans have been a prominent subsegment of American society. There aren't that many Asian-Americans who have had kids in the US yet...the vast majority of us are the first generation of our family born in the US. I think it'll be interesting to see how second-generation Asian-Americans develop within the system...my bet is that you'll see a lot more Asian legacies (and not grad school legacies...Harvard undegrads who have kids who go to Harvard undergrad) coming up soon. That's why it's an exciting time!
Allen
On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 11:02 AM, Kane Hsieh <kane....@gmail.com> wrote:
Bear with me, this is a pretty long email, but something I've been thinking a lot about. The full article is here, but I've annotated some points below: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlarge?currentPage=all
It's a New Yorker piece by Malcom Gladwell on the Ivy admittance process. Tina and I had a conversation about the differences between abstract/academic intelligence (IQ), empathy and human intelligence (EQ), and a third intelligence that we were trying to define along the lines of "intuition," or "situational intelligence" - the type that pro athletes and soldiers have that enable them to make extraordinarily hard decisions under high pressure with very little information.
Naturally, we also talked about the Asian stereotype and what intelligences actually make one "successful" given a definition of success to roughly equal acknowledged leadership in a chose field (with the exception of things like pure math which are innate talents).
A lot of the article revolves around the idea of admitting the "best students" versus the "best graduate," and what the best process for Ivy League colleges are.
Selection criteria:
It seems some threshold of IQ is necessary but not sufficient. Harvard often says they could admit a class of all perfect SAT scorers or valedictorians, but they chose not to.
Wilbur Bender, Harvard Dean of Admissions: "If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered). “Above a reasonably good level of mental ability, above that indicated by a 550-600 level of S.A.T. score,” Bender went on, “the only thing that matters in terms of future impact on, or contribution to, society is the degree of personal inner force an individual has.”"
They use the example of Hunter College, the elite prep school, which for a while admitted the top scorers in a test: "But what did Hunter achieve with that best-students model? In the nineteen-eighties, a handful of educational researchers surveyed the students who attended the elementary school between 1948 and 1960. [The results were published in 1993 as “Genius Revisited: High IQ Children Grown Up,” by Rena Subotnik, Lee Kassan, Ellen Summers, and Alan Wasser.] This was a group with an average I.Q. of 157—three and a half standard deviations above the mean—who had been given what, by any measure, was one of the finest classroom experiences in the world. As graduates, though, they weren’t nearly as distinguished as they were expected to be."... Being a smart child isn’t a terribly good predictor of success in later life, they conclude. “Non-intellective” factors—like motivation and social skills—probably matter more. Perhaps, the study suggests, “after noting the sacrifices involved in trying for national or world-class leadership in a field, H.C.E.S. graduates decided that the intelligent thing to do was to choose relatively happy and successful lives.”"
This sounds very much like the gaokao system, and to be honest, China has done very little in producing radical progress (until maybe the last two or three years) - the gaokao process produces excellent fast-followers: Chinese trains, planes, and automobiles run fine, but the ideation is still western. There has been very little radically innovative technology out of China - and if the Asian-American stereotype emphasizes IQ and "best student" above all, then the Asian American stereotype will be "fast follower" at best, and "tool" at worst (in the sense of "they are very good analysts and developers but I wouldn't promote them to management").
Athletes:
Lisa and Tina were talking about preferential admittance of athletes at Ivy institutions in the taxi:
In the 2001 book “The Game of Life,” James L. Shulman and William Bowen (a former president of Princeton) conducted an enormous statistical analysis on an issue that has become one of the most contentious in admissions: the special preferences given to recruited athletes at selective universities... they have markedly lower G.P.A.s and S.A.T. scores than their peers. Over the past twenty years, their class rankings have steadily dropped... [but] Male athletes, despite their lower S.A.T. scores and grades, and despite the fact that many of them are members of minorities and come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than other students, turn out to earn a lot more than their peers."
Excerpts from Bowen's book cite drive, energy (physical capability), gregariousness and the ability to work in teams, confidence, and competitiveness as factors that make Ivy athletes successful post-graduation - these are components of "SQ" or intuitive intelligence.
The "success" is of course from athletes' performance on Wall St - but if you want "best graduates," then really the post-graduation performance that is quantifiable (income, Fortune ranking) is at least as valid as the pre-admittance performance that is quantifiable (SAT, GPA) - Ivy athletes certainly do better (monetarily) than any other cohort except maybe legacies.
Legacies:
"This is, in no small part, what Ivy League admissions directors do. They are in the luxury-brand-management business, and “The Chosen,” in the end, is a testament to just how well the brand managers in Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton have done their job in the past seventy-five years... "Yale judged its symbolic capital to be even more precious than its economic capital.” No good brand manager would sacrifice reputation for short-term gain. The admissions directors at Harvard have always, similarly, been diligent about rewarding the children of graduates, or, as they are quaintly called, “legacies.”"
Let's be honest - Harvard is not academically the best or most rigorous. If we wanted that we would go to CalTech, U Chicago, hell even West Point - Harvard is a high value brand, and to be perfectly honest, Asians are not a part of that - yet. Our influence and ability is growing, but so long as the prototypical Asian student is a "best student" and not a "best graduate," we will be lucky to have gone to Harvard, and we will be luckier still if we are ever a legacy that Harvard is proud of beyond just asking for a few hundred bucks every year.
Kane Hsieh
www.kanehsieh.com
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Allen Yang
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Kane Hsieh
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Da Junto, mon
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