Trego's Mountain Ear

I saw a headline that read “One in Three Britons Are Really Stupid.”  My thoughts were, “OK, how is that surprising?  IQ Percentile Calculator 📊  makes it real easy to quantify these numbers – and the cutoff for an IQ rarity of  33% is somewhere between 93 and 94.  When 68% of the population is in the normal range, and half the population is above average, knowing the headline was wrong was easy:  50% plus 34% (half of 68) is 84%.  Statistically and by definition, only 16% of the population is below normal – so the headline should have read “One in Six Britons Is Below Normal.”  Come to think of it, the headline writer also screwed up the grammar – the subject was One, so the verb should have been singular – is, not are.

No matter what our IQ scores are, we all have the ability to make stupid decisions, to think stupid thoughts.  Thoughts that can defy reality, and really cost us. 

That thought, and a recent chat, brings back aspects of science, of research and analysis.  Taxonomy is the science, the practice, of classification.  I’m weak at taxonomy – I tend to see things in terms of similarities.  In terms of soil taxonomy – one of my wife’s strengths – my tendency is to see how it fits in with what I need to build.  She sees a much broader, more vivid group of traits – while my view is more limited, to the aspects I can quantify.  I group insects by similarities – while Jed easily notices the small differences, the distinctions that are needed for precise identifications.

It’s not that the end results are particularly different – I’d hit the same range condition that Jack Cloninger arrived at . . . but his analysis would have an elaborate web of plants identified, while mine would have a large category of miscellaneous forbs.    A forb is any non-woody flowering plant that isn’t a grass.  A lot of the scientists I have worked around are awesome at taxonomy.  Happy Jack was much more at home with plant identification than with the hydraulics and hydrology that were my focus at that time.

Evaluating grazing condition is a task that requires plant identification – taxonomy – and estimating population numbers or percentages.  It took many years before I realized that my abilities to estimate populations made up for my weaknesses in plant identification.  I basically understood that, like the Britons, I was in the bottom third.  I’m not sure that it is easy for our teachers to recognize that we have differing strengths – I know that the taxonomists who taught me must have despaired.  As an old man, it is easier to recognize that we have different strengths, different gifts, and that our teachers are more likely to teach their strengths than ours.  My plant ID prof, in frustration, announced, “McCurry, you sort by similarities and you have to sort by differences.”  Of course, I never did become a plant ID professor.

So I don’t believe that one Brit in three is really stupid.  On one hand, that population is too large to be an accurate estimate.  On the other hand, gifts differ.  I suspect that at least half that population that the author categorized as ‘stupid’ actually have gifts, strengths, that the author didn’t recognize.