psychology | Digifesto

May 20, 2018

General intelligence, social privilege, and causal inference from factor analysis

I came upon this excellent essay by Cosma Shalizi about how factor analysis has been spuriously used to support the scientific theory of General Intelligence (i.e., IQ). Shalizi, if you don’t know, is one of the best statisticians around. He writes really well and isn’t afraid to point out major blunders in things. He’s one of my favorite academics, and I don’t think I’m alone in this assessment.

First, a motive: Shalizi writes this essay because he thinks the scientific theory of General Intelligence, or a g factor that is some real property of the mind, is wrong. This theory is famous because (a) a lot of people DO believe in IQ as a real feature of the mind, and (b) a significant percentage of these people believe that IQ is hereditary and correlated with race, and (c) the ideas in (b) are used to justify pernicious and unjust social policy. Shalizi, being a principled statistician, appears to take scientific objection to (a) independently of his objection to (c), and argues persuasively that we can reject (a). How?

Shalizi’s point is that the general intelligence factor g is a latent variable that was supposedly discovered using a factor analysis of several different intelligence tests that were supposed to be independent of each other. You can take the data from these data sets and do a dimensionality reduction (that’s what factor analysis is) and get something that looks like a single factor, just as you can take a set of cars and do a dimensionality reduction and get something that looks like a single factor, “size”. The problem is that “intelligence”, just like “size”, can also be a combination of many other factors that are only indirectly associated with each other (height, length, mass, mass of specific components independent of each other, etc.). Once you have many different independent factors combining into one single reduced “dimension” of analysis, you no longer have a coherent causal story of how your general latent variable caused the phenomenon. You have, effectively, correlation without demonstrated causation and, moreover, the correlation is a construct of your data analysis method, and so isn’t really even telling you what correlations normally tell you.

To put it another way: the fact that some people seem to be generally smarter than other people can be due to thousands of independent factors that happen to combine when people apply themselves to different kinds of tasks. If some people were NOT seeming generally smarter than others, that would allow you to reject the hypothesis that there was general intelligence. But the mere presence of the aggregate phenomenon does not prove the existence of a real latent variable. In fact, Shalizi goes on to say, when you do the right kinds of tests to see if there really is a latent factor of ‘general intelligence’, you find that there isn’t any. And so it’s just the persistent and possibly motivated interpretation of the observational data that allows the stubborn myth of general intelligence to continue.

Are you following so far? If you are, it’s likely because you were already skeptical of IQ and its racial correlates to begin with. Now I’m going to switch it up though…

It is fairly common for educated people in the United States (for example) to talk about “privilege” of social groups. White privilege, male privilege–don’t tell me you haven’t at least heard of this stuff before; it is literally everywhere on the center-left news. Privilege here is considered to be a general factor that adheres in certain social groups. It is reinforced by all manner of social conditioning, especially through implicit bias in individual decision-making. This bias is so powerful it extends not to just cases of direct discrimination but also in cases where discrimination happens in a mediated way, for example through technical design. The evidence for these kinds of social privileging effects is obvious: we see inequality everywhere, and we can who is more powerful and benefited by the status quo and who isn’t.

You see where this is going now. I have the momentum. I can’t stop. Here it goes: Maybe this whole story about social privilege is as spuriously supported as the story about general intelligence? What if both narratives were over-interpretations of data that serve a political purpose, but which are not in fact based on sound causal inference techniques?

How could this be? Well, we might gather a lot of data about people: wealth, status, neighborhood, lifespan, etc. And then we could run a dimensionality reduction/factor analysis and get a significant factor that we could name “privilege” or “power”. Potentially that’s a single, real, latent variable. But also potentially it’s hundreds of independent factors spuriously combined into one. It would probably, if I had to bet on it, wind up looking a lot like the factor for “general intelligence”, which plays into the whole controversy about whether and how privilege and intelligence get confused. You must have heard the debates about, say, representation in the technical (or other high-status, high-paying) work force? One side says the smart people get hired; the other side say it’s the privileged (white male) people that get hired. Some jerk suggests that maybe the white males are smarter, and he gets fired. It’s a mess.

I’m offering you a pill right now. It’s not the red pill. It’s not the blue pill. It’s some other colored pill. Green?

There is no such thing as either general intelligence or group based social privilege. Each of these are the results of sloppy data compression over thousands of factors with a loose and subtle correlational structure. The reason why patterns of social behavior that we see are so robust against interventions is that each intervention can work against only one or two of these thousands of factors at a time. Discovering the real causal structure here is hard partly because the effect sizes are very small. Anybody with a simple explanation, especially a politically convenient explanation, is lying to you but also probably lying to themselves. We live in a complex world that resists our understanding and our actions to change it, though it can be better understood and changed through sound statistics. Most people aren’t bothering to do this, and that’s why the world is so dumb right now.

4 Comments

November 26, 2016

reflexive control

A theory I wish I had more time to study in depth these days is the Soviet field of reflexive control (see for example this paper by Timothy Thomas on the subject).

Reflexive control is defined as a means of conveying to a partner or an opponent specially prepared information to incline him to voluntarily make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action. Even though the theory was developed long ago in Russia, it is still undergoing further refinement. Recent proof of this is the development in February 2001, of a new Russian journal known as Reflexive Processes and Control. The journal is not simply the product of a group of scientists but, as the editorial council suggests, the product of some of Russia’s leading national security institutes, and boasts a few foreign members as well.

While the paper describes the theory in broad strokes, I’m interested in how one would formalize and operationalize reflexive control. My intuitions thus far are like this: traditional control theory assumes that the controlled system is inanimate or at least not autonomous. The controlled system is steered, often dynamically, to some optimal state. But in reflexive control, the assumption is that the controlled system is autonomous and has a decision-making process or intelligence. Therefore reflexive control is a theory of influence, perhaps deception. Going beyond mere propaganda, it seems like reflexive control can be highly reactive, taking into account the reaction time of other agents in the field.

There are many examples, from a Russian perspective, of the use of reflexive control theory during conflicts. One of the most recent and memorable was the bombing of the market square in Sarejevo in 1995. Within minutes of the bombing, CNN and other news outlets were reporting that a Serbian mortar attack had killed many innocent people in the square. Later, crater analysis of the shells that impacted in the square, along with other supporting evidence, indicated that the incident did not happen as originally reported. This evidence also threw into doubt the identities of the perpetrators of the attack. One individual close to the investigation, Russian Colonel Andrei Demurenko, Chief of Staff of Sector Sarejevo at the time, stated, “I am not saying the Serbs didn’t commit this atrocity. I am saying that it didn’t happen the way it was originally reported.” A US and Canadian officer soon backed this position. Demurenko believed that the incident was an excellent example of reflexive control, in that the incident was made to look like it had happened in a certain way to confuse decision-makers.

Thomas’s article points out that the notable expert in reflexive control in the United States is V. A. Lefebvre, a Soviet ex-pat and mathematical psychologist at UC Irvine. He is listed on a faculty listing but doesn’t seem to have a personal home page. His wikipedia page says that reflexive theory is like the Soviet alternative to game theory. That makes sense. Reflexive theory has been used by Lefebvre to articulate a mathematical ethics, which is surely relevant to questions of machine ethics today.

Beyond its fascinating relevance to many open research questions in my field, it is interesting to see in Thomas’s article how “reflexive control” seems to capture so much of what is considered “cybersecurity” today.

One of the most complex ways to influence a state’s information resources is by use of reflexive control measures against the state’s decision-making processes. This aim is best accomplished by formulating certain information or disinformation designed to affect a specific information resource best. In this context an information resource is defined as:

information and transmitters of information, to include the method or technology of obtaining, conveying, gathering, accumulating, processing, storing, and exploiting that information;
infrastructure, including information centers, means for automating information processes, switchboard communications, and data
transfer networks;
programming and mathematical means for managing information;
administrative and organizational bodies that manage information processes, scientific personnel, creators of data bases and knowledge, as well as personnel who service the means of informatizatsiya [informatization].

Unlike many people, I don’t think “cybersecurity” is very hard to define at all. The prefix “cyber-” clearly refers to the information-based control structures of a system, and “security” is just the assurance of something against threats. So we might consider “reflexive control” to be essentially equivalent to “cybersecurity”, except with an emphasis on the offensive rather than defensive aspects of cybernetic control.

I have yet to find something describing the mathematical specifics of the theory. I’d love to find something and see how it compares to other research in similar fields. It would be fascinating to see where Soviet and Anglophone research on these topics is convergent, and where it diverges.

4 Comments

May 23, 2016

discovering agency in symbolic politics as psychic expression of Blau space

If the Blau space is exogenous to manifest society, then politics is an epiphenomenon. There will be hustlers; there will be the oscillations of who is in control. But there is no agency. Particularities are illusory, much as how in quantum field theory the whole notion of the ‘particle’ is due to our perceptual limitations.

An alternative hypothesis is that the Blau space shifts over time as a result of societal change.

Demographics surely do change over time. But this does not in itself show that Blau space shifts are endogenous to the political system. We could possibly attribute all Blau space shifts to, for example, apolitical terms of population growth and natural resource availability. This is the geographic determinism stance. (I’ve never read Guns, Germs, and Steel… I’ve heard mixed reviews.)

Detecting political agency within a complex system is bound to be difficult because it’s a lot like trying to detect free will, only with a more hierarchical ontology. Social structure may or may not be intelligent. Our individual ability to determine whether it is or not will be very limited. Any individual will have a limited set of cognitive frames with which to understand the world. Most of them will be acquired in childhood. While it’s a controversial theory, the Lakoff thesis that whether one is politically liberal or conservative depends on ones relationship with ones parents is certainly very plausible. How does one relate to authority? Parental authority is replaced by state and institutional authority. The rest follows.

None of these projects are scientific. This is why politics is so messed up. Whereas the Blau space is an objective multidimensional space of demographic variability, the political imaginary is the battleground of conscious nightmares in the symbolic sphere. Pathetic humanity, pained by cruel life, fated to be too tall, or too short, born too rich or too poor, disabled, misunderstood, or damned to mediocrity, unfurls its anguish in so many flags in parades, semaphore, and war. But what is it good for?

“Absolutely nothin’!”

I’ve written before about how I think Jung and Bourdieu are an improvement on Freud and Habermas as the basis of unifying political ideal. Whereas for Freud psychological health is the rational repression of the id so that the moralism of the superego can hold sway over society, Jung sees the spiritual value of the unconscious. All literature and mythology is an expression of emotional data. Awakening to the impersonal nature of ones emotions–as they are rooted in a collective unconscious constituted by history and culture as well as biology and individual circumstance–is necessary for healthy individuation.

So whereas Habermasian direct democracy, being Freudian through the Frankfurt School tradition, is a matter of rational consensus around norms, presumably coupled with the repression of that which does not accord with those norms, we can wonder what a democracy based on Jungian psychology would look like. It would need to acknowledge social difference within society, as Bourdieu does, and that this social difference puts constraints on democratic participation.

There’s nothing so remarkable about what I’m saying. I’m a little embarrassed to be drawing from European Grand Theorists and psychoanalysts when it would be much more appropriate for me to be looking at, say, the tradition of American political science with its thorough analysis of the role of elites and partisan democracy. But what I’m really looking for is a theory of justice, and the main way injustice seems to manifest itself now is in the resentment of different kinds of people toward each other. Some of this resentment is “populist” resentment, but I suspect that this is not really the source of strife. Rather, it’s the conflict of different kinds of elites, with their bases of power in different kinds of capital (economic, institutional, symbolic, etc.) that has macro-level impact, if politics is real at all. Political forces, which will have leaders (“elites”) simply as a matter of the statistical expression of variable available energy in the society to fill political roles, will recruit members by drawing from the psychic Blau space. As part of recruitment, the political force will activate the habitus shadow of its members, using the dark aspects of the psyche to mobilize action.

It is at this point, when power stokes the shadow through symbols, that injustice becomes psychologically real. Therefore (speaking for now only of symbolic politics, as opposed to justice in material economic actuality, which is something else entirely) a just political system is one that nurtures individuation to such an extent that its population is no longer susceptible to political mobilization.

To make this vision of democracy a bit more concrete, I think where this argument goes is that the public health system should provide art therapy services to every citizen. We won’t have a society that people feel is “fair” unless we address the psychological roots of feelings of disempowerment and injustice. And while there are certainly some causes of these feelings that are real and can be improved through better policy-making, it is the rare policy that actually improves things for everybody rather than just shifting resources around according to a new alignment of political power, thereby creating a new elite and new grudges. Instead I’m proposing that justice will require peace, and that peace is more a matter of the personal victory of the psyche than it is a matter of political victory of ones party.

Category: psychology