cyborg
02-22-2008, 07:08 PM
Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner, 2007
Howard Gardner and his team of researchers/propagandists have been pushing the theory of “multiple intelligences” since 1983, without empirical data. They rely on anecdotal stories to show that all humans are equally intelligent—they just have different intelligences that each person has compared to others. The primary purpose of this program is to try and provide an alternative explanation for what constitutes intelligence, so that Jensenism/Spearman’s g can be undermined as the only empirical program that has any real validity. (See Wikipedia for a good explanation of the “MI” theory and its failures.)
When I ordered the above book by Gardner, I thought it would be expanding on his primary work on multiple intelligences. Instead, “The five minds posited in this book are different from the eight or nine human intelligences. Rather than being distinct computational capabilities, they are better thought of as broad uses of the mind that we can cultivate at school, in professions, or at the workplace.” The only thing I got out of the book was how muddled Gardner’s thinking is with regards to human biology, so I’ll elaborate on just a few anomalies I found.
Gardner admits that, “We now have well-developed, empirically based theories of intelligence, problem solving, and creativity—along with the tools, software, and hardware based (or purportedly based) on these scientific advances.” Yet his whole program is based on undermining those very empirically based theories. His multiple intelligences program is primarily used within the educational community as an excuse for racial differences in intelligence. With this book, he tries to lay out ways of advancing or programming children in such a way that they will exhibit these five traits or abilities: “discipline”, the ability to “synthesize”, “creativity”, “respect” for others, and “ethical” behavior.
Of course, there is always the obligatory assumption, without any evidence, that eugenics is a pseudoscience. Gardner claims that ability in synthesizing is helpful: “Take, for example, a high school course on Nazism. Secondary-school students cannot be expected to be scientific or historical disciplinarians. Neither the disciplinary knowledge nor the disciplinary tools will have been consolidated. Yet, these students are likely to acquire a better understanding of the rise of Nazism if they can appreciate the various perspectives that can be donned: genetic explanation of differences between populations, along with the various pseudoscientific claims made by eugenicists; historical explanation of the long-festering factors that created a fertile soil for Nazi beliefs and practices, as well as the contingent factors that led to the Nazis’ surprising, largely lawful takeover of the German governmental apparatus in the early 1930s.”
When it comes to creativity he really misses the mark. A recent article in The Mankind Quarterly discusses creativity and links it with the behavioral trait of “openness.” That is a dose of ambition, along with intelligence and the personality trait of openness is the apparent concoction for creativity. This also includes scales for measuring openness in individuals as well as differences in the average level of openness between racial groups: East Asians are more intelligent on average than Caucasians, but Caucasians are on average more open and therefore more creative—and we have the innovations to prove it. Gardner states, “Clearly, the aspiring creator needs a generous supply of intelligence(s), skill, and discipline.”
Like intelligence he does note that creativity may just be genetic, “It is far more likely, however, that those who value creativity will seek to cultivate—though hopefully not to breed!—human beings with those biological proclivities. We can be even more certain that those who seek totalitarian control will find ways to eliminate these creative outliers. Instead of burning books, future totalitarian leaders or their brutal henchmen will excise key brain centers or knock out telltale genes. What was once the province of science fiction may well become the realm of science fact.” Gardner seems to be paranoid in his “just so” stories about the future. If anything, where there is totalitarian control, the state would just as easily want more creative scientists as to eliminate them.
Of the five minds he wants to develop in children, only “respect” was of real interest. Gardner admits, “insights from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are genuine. No doubt human beings have deeply entrenched inclinations to delineate groups, to identify with and value members of their own group, and to adopt a cautious if not antagonistic tone to other comparable groups, however defined and constituted. But such biologically accented explanations have limitations. To begin with, they do not account for the contours, breadth, or flexibility of such ingroup-outgroup distinctions.” His claim here is apparently that such theories should be able to explain how differing environments push humans into varying alliances and antagonisms, yet most scientists clearly understand this is impossible because human behavior is flexible, including being maladaptive in many instances thanks to human indoctrinability. White people voting for Barack Obama is a clear example of this.
Gardner’s solution to respect is to indoctrinate children to respect all groups and all individuals, and if they don’t, then “isolate or otherwise penalize those who fail to show respect….” That’s right, if one fails to show respect to anyone, then punish them. That seems like a bizarre way of promoting respect. And does he really mean we should show respect to psychopathic serial killers, wife beaters, reckless drivers, oppressive and demeaning supervisors, etc. It would seem to me that having respect for others is a rather vacuous preoccupation of liberals—some bizarre way of trying to make everyone equal. Of course, it is mandatory that all right thinking people show disrespect and try to slander anyone who holds the scientific position that humans vary in many ways as well as races in measurable averages like stature, intelligence, wrist diameters, size of genitals, conscientiousness, etc. The argument for universal respect for others seems rather circular for as soon as someone does not abide with the arbitrary mandate to embrace diversity and multiculturalism say, they deserve disrespect. It is an odd argument.
There is a problem with his program of indoctrination however, children are influenced more by their friends than by their families. That is, as children mature into their teens, the contribution to behavior and intelligence from the shared environment falls close to zero while the non-shared environment and genes take over. The split is about 50/50 for most personality traits and about 20/80 for intelligence as primarily genes complete the process of developing the adult brain. But Gardner rejects this research because it “mistakenly construes a situation that happens to characterize parts of contemporary American society as a law of evolutionary psychology.” The fact is, the data comes from a cross section of American culture, it is now readily established as credible, and it includes a 13 year study sponsored by the NIH and four universities, and a similar study is now following up on the first one because of its robust outcome. These are behavior genetic studies, and Gardner just doesn’t like them at all. He wants the power to mold the human mind to his liking.
On discipline he states, “As disciplined learners, it is our job to understand the world. But if we are to be ethical human beings, it is equally our job to use that understanding to improve the quality of life and living and to bear witness when that understanding (or misunderstanding) is being used in destructive ways. This is a reason why community service and other forms of giving are or should be—an important part of the curriculum of any school. Perhaps paradoxically, when students see that knowledge can be put to constructive use, they are most likely to gain pleasure from schoolwork and to find it meaningful in itself thereby achieving the other facets of goodness.” Now how does one define goodness? For those of us who believe in our genetic interests, goodness as acted upon would be radically different than how Gardner perceives it.
Finally, “A disciplined person should embody the ways of thinking and acting that distinguish her chosen discipline(s) and not just spew forth a lot of heterogeneous knowledge about the subject. A synthesizer should put ideas together in a way that is cogent and replicable, and not merely offer a convenient or cute package.” And yet, that is just what this book is, a just so cute book that is devoid of any coherence or capable of being replicated or falsified. These Five Minds are just so much mush.
http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/five_minds_for_the_future_by_howard_gardner_2007/
Howard Gardner and his team of researchers/propagandists have been pushing the theory of “multiple intelligences” since 1983, without empirical data. They rely on anecdotal stories to show that all humans are equally intelligent—they just have different intelligences that each person has compared to others. The primary purpose of this program is to try and provide an alternative explanation for what constitutes intelligence, so that Jensenism/Spearman’s g can be undermined as the only empirical program that has any real validity. (See Wikipedia for a good explanation of the “MI” theory and its failures.)
When I ordered the above book by Gardner, I thought it would be expanding on his primary work on multiple intelligences. Instead, “The five minds posited in this book are different from the eight or nine human intelligences. Rather than being distinct computational capabilities, they are better thought of as broad uses of the mind that we can cultivate at school, in professions, or at the workplace.” The only thing I got out of the book was how muddled Gardner’s thinking is with regards to human biology, so I’ll elaborate on just a few anomalies I found.
Gardner admits that, “We now have well-developed, empirically based theories of intelligence, problem solving, and creativity—along with the tools, software, and hardware based (or purportedly based) on these scientific advances.” Yet his whole program is based on undermining those very empirically based theories. His multiple intelligences program is primarily used within the educational community as an excuse for racial differences in intelligence. With this book, he tries to lay out ways of advancing or programming children in such a way that they will exhibit these five traits or abilities: “discipline”, the ability to “synthesize”, “creativity”, “respect” for others, and “ethical” behavior.
Of course, there is always the obligatory assumption, without any evidence, that eugenics is a pseudoscience. Gardner claims that ability in synthesizing is helpful: “Take, for example, a high school course on Nazism. Secondary-school students cannot be expected to be scientific or historical disciplinarians. Neither the disciplinary knowledge nor the disciplinary tools will have been consolidated. Yet, these students are likely to acquire a better understanding of the rise of Nazism if they can appreciate the various perspectives that can be donned: genetic explanation of differences between populations, along with the various pseudoscientific claims made by eugenicists; historical explanation of the long-festering factors that created a fertile soil for Nazi beliefs and practices, as well as the contingent factors that led to the Nazis’ surprising, largely lawful takeover of the German governmental apparatus in the early 1930s.”
When it comes to creativity he really misses the mark. A recent article in The Mankind Quarterly discusses creativity and links it with the behavioral trait of “openness.” That is a dose of ambition, along with intelligence and the personality trait of openness is the apparent concoction for creativity. This also includes scales for measuring openness in individuals as well as differences in the average level of openness between racial groups: East Asians are more intelligent on average than Caucasians, but Caucasians are on average more open and therefore more creative—and we have the innovations to prove it. Gardner states, “Clearly, the aspiring creator needs a generous supply of intelligence(s), skill, and discipline.”
Like intelligence he does note that creativity may just be genetic, “It is far more likely, however, that those who value creativity will seek to cultivate—though hopefully not to breed!—human beings with those biological proclivities. We can be even more certain that those who seek totalitarian control will find ways to eliminate these creative outliers. Instead of burning books, future totalitarian leaders or their brutal henchmen will excise key brain centers or knock out telltale genes. What was once the province of science fiction may well become the realm of science fact.” Gardner seems to be paranoid in his “just so” stories about the future. If anything, where there is totalitarian control, the state would just as easily want more creative scientists as to eliminate them.
Of the five minds he wants to develop in children, only “respect” was of real interest. Gardner admits, “insights from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are genuine. No doubt human beings have deeply entrenched inclinations to delineate groups, to identify with and value members of their own group, and to adopt a cautious if not antagonistic tone to other comparable groups, however defined and constituted. But such biologically accented explanations have limitations. To begin with, they do not account for the contours, breadth, or flexibility of such ingroup-outgroup distinctions.” His claim here is apparently that such theories should be able to explain how differing environments push humans into varying alliances and antagonisms, yet most scientists clearly understand this is impossible because human behavior is flexible, including being maladaptive in many instances thanks to human indoctrinability. White people voting for Barack Obama is a clear example of this.
Gardner’s solution to respect is to indoctrinate children to respect all groups and all individuals, and if they don’t, then “isolate or otherwise penalize those who fail to show respect….” That’s right, if one fails to show respect to anyone, then punish them. That seems like a bizarre way of promoting respect. And does he really mean we should show respect to psychopathic serial killers, wife beaters, reckless drivers, oppressive and demeaning supervisors, etc. It would seem to me that having respect for others is a rather vacuous preoccupation of liberals—some bizarre way of trying to make everyone equal. Of course, it is mandatory that all right thinking people show disrespect and try to slander anyone who holds the scientific position that humans vary in many ways as well as races in measurable averages like stature, intelligence, wrist diameters, size of genitals, conscientiousness, etc. The argument for universal respect for others seems rather circular for as soon as someone does not abide with the arbitrary mandate to embrace diversity and multiculturalism say, they deserve disrespect. It is an odd argument.
There is a problem with his program of indoctrination however, children are influenced more by their friends than by their families. That is, as children mature into their teens, the contribution to behavior and intelligence from the shared environment falls close to zero while the non-shared environment and genes take over. The split is about 50/50 for most personality traits and about 20/80 for intelligence as primarily genes complete the process of developing the adult brain. But Gardner rejects this research because it “mistakenly construes a situation that happens to characterize parts of contemporary American society as a law of evolutionary psychology.” The fact is, the data comes from a cross section of American culture, it is now readily established as credible, and it includes a 13 year study sponsored by the NIH and four universities, and a similar study is now following up on the first one because of its robust outcome. These are behavior genetic studies, and Gardner just doesn’t like them at all. He wants the power to mold the human mind to his liking.
On discipline he states, “As disciplined learners, it is our job to understand the world. But if we are to be ethical human beings, it is equally our job to use that understanding to improve the quality of life and living and to bear witness when that understanding (or misunderstanding) is being used in destructive ways. This is a reason why community service and other forms of giving are or should be—an important part of the curriculum of any school. Perhaps paradoxically, when students see that knowledge can be put to constructive use, they are most likely to gain pleasure from schoolwork and to find it meaningful in itself thereby achieving the other facets of goodness.” Now how does one define goodness? For those of us who believe in our genetic interests, goodness as acted upon would be radically different than how Gardner perceives it.
Finally, “A disciplined person should embody the ways of thinking and acting that distinguish her chosen discipline(s) and not just spew forth a lot of heterogeneous knowledge about the subject. A synthesizer should put ideas together in a way that is cogent and replicable, and not merely offer a convenient or cute package.” And yet, that is just what this book is, a just so cute book that is devoid of any coherence or capable of being replicated or falsified. These Five Minds are just so much mush.
http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/five_minds_for_the_future_by_howard_gardner_2007/