On having a public voice.

Some of the world’s most interesting people have the least opportunity to say what they think.

I thought I should let that thought stand alone, for awhile, to settle in. By this thought, I mean that, often in the modern world, the people we empower with a public voice, are not the most interesting, or the most intelligent of people...yet they are the ones we end up listening to, in all their vapidity. The whole situation strikes me as particularly dim, for what it does to the level of public discourse. In particular, I think of all the missed opportunities we all, as a society, have to learn from those who would be most interesting to listen to.

In our world, it is often the celebrity that is heard above all voices. Yet, what makes a celebrity? Is it intelligence? Often not. Is it genius? Almost certainly not. Is it taste? Questionable. Is it insight? Hardly. Why then do we listen to celebrities? Because they are the ones who get to speak their "thoughts" to us.

I have quite a lot to say, on many things. I also have a lot to say that I have never had the chance to say - because it hasn't been permitted in public - it hasn't been given the nod, to be published. Yet, my reach is small. I have a blog and I have intermittent newspaper articles in one South East Asian country. My thoughts do not have global reach. Yet, I can't help but feel that not a few of those thoughts are more worthy of such reach, than the words of many celebrities, in this world. They speak, and all the world hears...yet what they say, is hardly ever worth the utterance.

It is strange, how a public voice is accorded. It is not done on merit. It is done almost magically. The person who ends up with the loudest public voice, is not the one whose thoughts are of most worth - but whose PERSONALITY, attracts most interest, or, indeed, who is just damn good looking. (Which is, of course, the only thing some celebrities offer). 

I would like to see a world in which the most interesting people, the ones whose thoughts are measured carefully and crafted well, are also the ones we most tend to hear and listen to. That is not our present world. We live in a world in which the trivial receives most attention and the profound is often ignored. That is not a healthy world. It is a world in which the Mind of Man, is slowly dying, as a corporate entity - the group of us all, thinking.

I invite you to consider who it is, you hear in public. Notice that often the quality of the mind, does not match the quality of the opportunity. Too often mediocre minds, have a great opportunity to speak - and brilliant minds have too little a chance to be heard.

Of course, most people don't even realize how often the best of Man, get few opportunities to be considered, by the public. The masses are too busy hearing out, those they should not bother to hear at all.

Perhaps, in a way, it is the choice of the public. Perhaps the public prefers to listen to people like the average person. Perhaps they don't want to hear, ever, what the best of thinkers, have to say. Perhaps such thoughts are regarded as unacceptable, or perhaps incomprehensible, in some way. Even so, there should not be a relative silence, by those most able to speak. Their thoughts should be part of the public discourse; their views should have the chance to be heard.

We all lose out when it is not the best of us, who are given the chance to speak. We lose nothing, if mediocrities were to be silenced, instead. However, I doubt they ever will be. The mediocre, shall dominate the media, forevermore. In the meantime, the profound shall watch from the sidelines, knowing all, telling none, for want of the opportunity to do so.

If we want a better world, all we have to do, as a mass, is to listen to the quieter voices, who have much more to say, than we have ever given them the chance to do so. 

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.) 

Are actors dumb?

It is not difficult to find someone who believes actors are dumb. Indeed, some actors encourage this impression by the kinds of interviews they give. However, my experience, in the past, with actors, is that, in general they are bright – at least the ones I worked with are. What makes film-making interesting, as much as anything else, is the conversations to be had, with the other cast members, during breaks in filming: why? Because they are relatively smart.

Now, my personal observation that actors seem smart and make for good conversationalists, has some interesting scientific backing. Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the LSE found, in his research, that attractive people have higher IQs than unattractive people. The average discrepancy was 12.4 IQ points – which is really quite a lot. The disparity was greater for attractive and unattractive men, with the difference being 13.61 IQ points. For women the difference was 11.39 IQ points.

It is not much of a leap to see that this supports my personal experience that actors are relatively bright. You see, to be cast as an actor, in a film, one usually has to be more attractive than the average person. Thus, the cast of a film will be selected for attractiveness and will be superior in that respect. Since attractiveness and intelligence have a correlation of 0.381, there will be a tendency for the more attractive actors and actresses, to also be smarter than the average person as well. Hence, my experience that they make for good conversation.

So, the next time you hear someone call actors “dumb”, you might just like to point their way to Kanazawa’s research on attractiveness and intelligence. If an actor or actress is good looking, they are also likely to be relatively intelligent, too – or at least 12.4 IQ points above their unattractive peers, anyway.

Satoshi Kanazawa made a very interesting point in an article he wrote for Psychology Today. He noted that the correlation of intelligence and attractiveness was exactly the same as the correlation of intelligence and education...0.381. Thus, he pointed out, quite tellingly, that you are as safe to make a judgement on someone’s intelligence from an assessment of their attractiveness, as you are from knowledge of their education. That struck me as rather interesting. So, all you have to do to see whether someone is likely to be intelligent is to judge whether are pretty or handsome!

Please note the limitation on this. The mean difference in intelligence between the attractive and the unattractive was only 12.4 IQ points. It wasn’t 50 IQ points. So just because someone is pretty, that doesn’t mean they are a genius, too. However, it does mean that they are less likely to be seriously dumb – and that they are more likely to be a genius than someone who is less attractive. Appearance is just one more useful characteristic for assessing how intelligent people are.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

Living in a time of morons.

For the gifted, particularly the most gifted, the world can seem a dull place, sometimes. By this I mean that the most gifted people are accustomed to encountering people who don’t seem very bright (to them). For such people, life can be difficult in ways that few people understand. Many people will, of course, have no sympathy for the plight of the more gifted members of society. “So what?”, such people might think, if they can’t find people to talk to, who will understand them. Many people would dismiss their concerns as the meaningless worries of an “elite” or, worse still, “an elitist”.

Well, the irony of the world situation is that many of these people, who dismiss the gifted, and their concerns, will one day find out exactly how the gifted feel. I shall explain. You see, the modern world is in decline, owing to dysgenic fertility – such that the bright have fewer children than the dim and so the intellectual quality of human populations is in decline – and has been so declining since at least 1850, according to the research of Richard Lynn. Now, you might think, surely we shouldn’t be worried, since human evolution is slow? Well, no, it isn’t slow in this respect at all.

Our view of the world is limited by our own lifespan and what that has allowed us to see. However, it doesn’t take much time in a library comparing the literary works of say the 19^th Century, to the vapid effusions of many modern writers to be led to wonder if Man has degenerated over that timescale. Well, research shows that Man, has indeed fallen pretty far, in that time. Richard Lynn calculates that the mean IQ of English people has fallen 6.9 IQ points between 1920 and 2010. Helmuth Nyborg further calculates that Danish IQs have fallen 10 IQ points since 1850. So, we already live in degenerate times – but what is to come, is far, far worse than what has been.

Helmuth Nyborg has written a paper on the future of Denmark, entitled, “The Decay of Western Civilization: Double Relaxed Natural Selection”. His example is Denmark. Now, I am not going into the details in this first post – I shall revisit his work further in another post. I would just like to point your attention to a couple of choice items from his paper. He calculates that the phenotypic (expressed) IQ of the Danish population will fall about 21 points from 1850 to 2072 – that is, it will fall a further 11 points, by 2072. The underlying fall in genotypic potential IQ is 17 points or so over that period. Furthermore, by 2050 children with IQs between 70 and 85 will dominate the school system and will constitute the MAJORITY OF THE POPULATION, shortly after 2075. Now, I should remind you that children whose IQs are in that range are the kind of kids that, when I was growing up, would have been singled out in school as “slow” and “stupid” and subject to teasing over their dimwittedness. (Yes, school children can be cruel, I know.) I suppose that the only “silver lining” is that, in a time when most kids have such low IQs, they will no longer be teased. Then again, the teasing of the few bright ones will undoubtedly be more intense.

What does this mean for a young person who is not gifted, now, in the present world, but who is of above average intelligence? Well, it is simple. The mean IQ of the world population (because Helmuth Nyborg’s observations apply to the whole Western world, to a great degree…and there are similar problems in most of the rest of the world), will fall, to such a great degree, in their lifetime, that, when they get old, the world will seem to them, as it does to the gifted now. The young, but not gifted person, will get old in a time of morons. The average person in this future world will seem rather dim to the person who is now only a bit above average. The great irony of this is that many, who now have no sympathy for the social problems of the gifted, will face exactly the same social problems themselves as they get old. The whole world is becoming stupid, at an astonishing rate.

Of course, those who are now gifted, will be even less happy about the situation than they are now - but at least more people will come to understand the situation, of the gifted, from personal experience.

I am not looking forward to this demographic shift. Much that is great about Humanity, depends on higher intelligence – and that is precisely what is going to be in short supply, as I get old. It seems ultimately ironic that old people in that time, will be the brightest people – not the young, at all. This is the ultimate reversal of age stereotypes, of the senile oldies, and the vibrant, bright young things. It is the old, who shall be bright – and the young who shall seem “senile” to them. What a sad world is coming to us all – a time of morons.

Note: I am not denigrating those of low IQ. All who are human, can contribute in certain ways, to the world and may live lives of happiness that add to the quality of life of others. However, my concern is that the elements of civilization that require higher thought, are not accessible to low IQ people and these people are not able to contribute to the maintenance and advancement of civilization and society, in complex ways. They thus do not raise the world in which they live, technologically, scientifically or culturally. However, if they constitute the majority of people, they WILL LOWER IT. This is not to devalue them as people - but just is to note that they are not mentally equipped to contribute to higher civilization. The world is not improved, in any way, by increasing the numbers of low IQ people, until they constitute the majority of the population. Anyone who thinks they do, is just looking for an easy population to control and manipulate...but that is another blog post altogether.

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.htmland here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

Thought for the day.

Almost no-one thinks anymore.

I wish they would.