During my time there a nationwide coal miners strike occurred. In the
fiery social crucible of the desperation that was Thatcher's England a
scholar in the sociology department at Durham U. published a study that showed that
the coal miners that moved to where the coal mines were profitable were
in fact many IQ points higher than the miners that insisted on not
moving and working coal pits that were economically unfeasible. Durham
county was a county with old unfeasible coal mines that were now filled
with angry miners with below average intelligence. This was not a good
time to publish this study. I can remember looking out the chemistry
department window and seeing mobs of miners wandering the campus
ostensibly with the intent of dragging him out of his ivory tower and
introducing him to some learning from the School of Hard Knocks.
Thus I read with some amusement an article today that assesses the
intelligence of the inhabitants of the various silos in the Ivory Tower.
As anyone who has read the educational literature in the past 20 years
knows intelligence cannot be reduced to a simple number but must respect
the multifaceted character of multiple intelligences. What it does
basically is not identify the intelligent but it really, really does
expose to ridicule the less intelligent disciplines. Really. Go have a
look, it statistically shores up all the stereotypes and suppositions
that we have about the people we work with.
In my opinion Chemistry comes out of this looking pretty good. The authors make the claim that History ranks high because many historians were in fact interested in science before they saw the light of the humanities and therefore history is an anomaly among the humanities. It made me laugh.
And this is their crucial graphic (go to the article to see it in all its statistical glory).
This is the link to the article (LINK).
This whole issue make me think of the famous XKCD cartoon:
No comments:
Post a Comment