To Be Filed

(This is a living document. Originally written in 2018.)

• The separation between the ideal — the perceived, the desired, the dreamed — and the real — the sensed, the solid, the tangible — is a catalyst for creative and intelligent behaviour in those people who are drawn, whether by inclination or experience, to reduce the separation between reality and a given desideratum. We can call it ‘wanting’, but ‘wanting’ feels inadequate to describe this emotion. The German word Sehnsucht comes close, but does not quite fit, either. Idealism comes close, too; however, it has too many associations with naïvety to be fully appropriate.
• It is more basic than curiosity, nostalgia, saudade, sadness, pain, disappointment, hope, anticipation, anxiety, frustration or confusion. It gives rise to all these emotions, but it should not be confused with them. The separation I describe is perceived less consciously than nostalgia, pain, frustration or disappointment; it is a sort of Ur-emotion, rather than the more palpable manifestations that are easier to recognise and describe.
• This separation is one of the reasons why some people seek answers to life’s deepest questions: what are we made of? Where did we come from?
• Characterising this separation as ‘not always getting your own way’ is a superficial way of understanding the perception of disjunction between the real and the ideal and the desire to alleviate or eliminate this disjunction.
• Evangelical Christians characterise Hell as being the state of permanent separation from God and his divine grace; in this sense, it is an eternal lacuna between the directly experienced and the ideal condition in which a person wishes to live. I don’t believe in Hell in the slightest, but I can see how theologians derived the idea.
• When marginalised people perceive their own oppression, this is a form of recognising the difference between the ideal (equity) and the real (discrimination).
• The ability to perceive the difference between the ideal and the real, and the concomitant desire to bring the ideal and the real together, are morally neutral; after all, both Gandhi and Hitler were acutely aware of this difference and went to great lengths to reduce the tension they perceived, but one liberated India from the British Empire, whereas the other murdered millions of people in the Holocaust/Shoah/Porajmos. This basic Sehnsucht can lead to good or evil actions depending on one’s moral compass.
• People who do not perceive the gap between the ideal and the real, dismiss the importance of that gap, or believe that it is impossible to even attempt to turn the ideal into the real, may be more likely to tolerate the status quo or to support policies or ideologies that contribute to the oppression of marginalised people. People who do not perceive those gaps are less likely to understand the experiences of those of us who do. The rejection or dismissal of this gap’s existence is what produces conservatism in some people—after all, that’s just the way it is and there’s no point in fixing anything if they don’t feel a difference between how they are, and how they should be, treated.
• Similarly, the Dunning-Kruger phenomenon reflects an inability to perceive the difference between the ideal and the real; people cannot appreciate the extent of their ignorance if they do not know they are ignorant in the first place. People who are aware of their ignorance are more likely to remedy that ignorance.

(Originally written in 2018. Some edits in September 2024. CW for some brief mentions of child sexual abuse.)

I’ve noticed some troubling patterns amongst disability activists that have caused me to feel frustrated and alienated. Even though I may agree with these people conceptually—we all agree, for example, that disabled people deserve human rights and respect precisely because we are people—the approaches some people use feel needlessly reductive for me. I don’t mean to say that their approaches don’t have merit or that there hasn’t been significant thought put into their efforts, but that I find that they obscure the complexity of people’s individual and collective experiences. I’ll focus on two phenomena I’ve noticed: the fixation on lists of words as a way to combat ableism, and the idea that even discussing the ways in which people learn is an ableist concept.

The language fixation

I’m uncomfortable with the fixation on reforming language to the exclusion of other methods of activism as an effort to help dismantle ableist mindsets. I’m not saying that people should use cruel names to refer to disabled people. What I am saying, though, is that some people who tend not to think verbally or who have language-related disabilities may not be able to memorise the long lists of Words Not To Use that circulate on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. What I care about is people’s underlying attitudes toward disabled people, more so than I do the specific words they use. When people use metaphorical language, their brains may not process it in the same way they may an overtly cruel word directed at a disabled person. For example, There are also different historical contexts attached to words, but I don’t see that context discussed very often; everything is treated as equally offensive. For example, “r*tard,” “idiot,” “moron,” and “imbecile” were formerly used as diagnostic categories, often connected with the institutionalisation and social exclusion of people diagnosed with intellectual disability. “Stupid,” on the other hand, was never a diagnostic category. It’s insulting to call someone stupid, but it doesn’t come with the same cultural baggage that the aforementioned “r*tard,” “idiot,” “moron,” and “imbecile” have. The same goes for the “-phobia” ending; while phobia is now a diagnostic term, it’s also had a less specific, nonclinical meaning for years to refer to extreme fear or hatred. I have had disabled friends ostracised from groups that ostensibly exist to support people, but zero in on language to the exclusion of actually offering support.

I understand, on the other hand, that many autistic people and people with similar disabilities tend to use and interpret language literally: what they hear is what they see, and it is difficult for them to associate a meaning with multiple contexts. I am not one of those people; while I can often have a literal visualisation of a word in my head, I tend to see words in a holistic way that combines literal and figurative meanings, translations, shades of meaning, subtleties, and historical contexts. I actually have a hard time with overly simplistic, decontextualised explanations and will start tuning out or growing frustrated if people do that with me. That’s been the case since I was very young. I don’t just see a thing; I see the processes, ideas, concepts, history, and relationships connected with that thing. I have a hard time understanding overly concrete thinking. I think this issue is complex and can’t be collapsed into a list of dos and don’ts. If you have a hard time juggling multiple meanings of words and have an easy time with rote memorisation, then those “ableist word profiles” may work on you. For me, things intrinsically have multiple meanings. I’m also very poor at directed rote memorisation, even though my long-term memory is excellent. This isn’t a universal approach, though, and people should recognise that when constructing these profiles.

Learning ability: throwing the baby out with the bathwater

I’ve seen some disability activists claim that the concept of intelligence—meant here to refer to differences in the ability to learn, recognise patterns and interact with with information, and the neurological differences that are associated with these differences—is ableist in and of itself (I hate that article). I disagree with this idea, but I understand why people may say things like this: they may know about the sordid history of IQ testing to determine people’s right to live within the community and to raise a family, or racist interpretations of the achievement gap that insinuate or claim baldly that Black and brown people are inherently less intelligent than white people, or other ways in which hateful people have misused the concept of learning differences to marginalise, abuse, and punish. Some advocates for gifted education have expressed ableist or elitist attitudes toward people with more typical learning ability or people with intellectual disabilities, too. I’ve also seen nondisabled people use the intelligence of some disabled people as a bludgeon: “If you’re so smart, you should be able to manage a bank account / work a 9-5 job / clean your house every Saturday / make meals.” Sometimes this is even an institutional requirement; some developmental disability organisations and government agencies will only serve people with an IQ below 70, even though developmental disability encompasses other conditions besides intellectual disability. The assumption is that disabled people of average or above-average intelligence can fend for ourselves without help. Of course, things aren’t so simple; there are many disabled people who learn with great facility but have a hard time with certain activities of daily living. (Hello, there!) These things are not mutually exclusive and can coexist in the same person. I get why people say things like “Intelligence is an ableist concept,” even if I think that that conclusion is too reductive and flattens the complexity of people’s internal experiences and the outward expression of those experiences.

Unfortunately, I’ve noticed some patterns amongst the people who say, “Intelligence doesn’t exist at all,” or “The concept of intelligence is intrinsically ableist.” These statements typically come from highly intelligent disabled people who are overcompensating for Gifted-Child Syndrome. More specifically, it’s a kind of intelligence that allows them to do well in school and doesn’t isolate them from other people because of their divergent thinking. Things come to them easily and they are easily understood. They may be intelligent, but they’re not monsters. Some of the psychological and sexual abuse I endured growing up was for my kind of intelligence. I was treated like a monster when I wasn’t being treated like an invalid for being autistic. I generally passed most of my classes as a kid, but I didn’t feel fully invested in most of them because I didn’t have the opportunity to really challenge myself intellectually in most of them. I scared my parents (especially my father), who tried to suppress my curiosity by restricting what I was allowed to read. They also dismissed me when I tried to communicate with them in a more conceptual or abstract way; they’d often look at me as though I’d grown two heads or accuse me of being evasive or using “psychobabble” or “woe-is-me stuff” if I tried to give them nuanced explanations of my behaviour. They tended to perceive things very concretely and literally, at least relative to me. I know the common stereotype is that nonautistic people are conceptual, while autistic people are literal and concrete, but I don’t think that’s true.

I thought I was crazy for years until I read more about how different kinds of learning ability can affect people’s cognition and perception. I thought it was an autistic trait until I encountered autistic people, both in person and online, who thought more concretely and focused primarily on immediately observable phenomena rather than their underlying complexity. For a few years, though, I actually internalised the idea that intelligence was a disablist concept and started wondering what the hell was wrong with me again. I attributed everything to my being autistic again even though I knew autistic people who didn’t see things the same way I did. To claim that these things don’t exist, or that they can be subsumed under another label that doesn’t necessarily come with those traits (for example, autism), feels like a form of gaslighting. I certainly felt different for being autistic, too, but these phenomena were separate from my being autistic. If intelligence is an unalloyed good in your life, it’s easy to see it as a privilege. But if it’s something that isolates you from your own family, makes you grow bored and disenchanted with formal education until you start using it instrumentally as an adult, leads you to see things that other people can’t, and makes you doubt your perceptions because you confuse people, it is not the same thing. The idea of intelligence as an absolute privilege is wholly alien to me.

I’ve also noticed that the vast majority of these people are also white or East Asian. Neither white people nor East Asians are routinely associated with low intelligence in the same way that Black, Latino, or various indigenous groups of people are. This isn’t to say that East Asians don’t experience discrimination or oppression. They certainly do experience racism, but this is not a stereotype typically applied to them. As a Black person, I’ve definitely seen people of my race routinely treated as stupid or incompetent just because of the colour of our skin. Entire books like The Bell Curve have been published to disparage us and our abilities. There’s a cottage industry of “researchers” receiving money from the Pioneer Fund to “prove” that we’re less intelligent than white people.

Of course, these anecdotal observations aren’t a universal statement; I’m uncomfortable saying that an attribute applies to the totality of a population for a number of reasons. It’s just a pattern that I’ve repeatedly noticed and that I find frustrating and deeply alienating.

If differences in learning ability did not exist, then we would not recognise the existence of intellectual disability and offer support for people who struggle with learning. I think that it’s possible to recognise that people’s ability to learn and interact with their environment can vary without attaching value judgements to people, institutionalising people, bringing down racist or misogynistic pronouncements, or treating IQ test scores as perfect reflections of people’s intellectual ability.

(originally posted in 2018)

First, let’s clear up some misconceptions about what intelligence is and isn’t. Intelligence is a collection of mental abilities—pattern recognition, abstract reasoning, learning capacity, general knowledge, and environmental adaptation—that mutually reinforce one another in most people. The mutually reinforcing characteristics of these abilities are the reason why researchers believe that a general factor of intelligence, or g, exists¹. For neurotypical people of average intelligence—roughly half the population—the idea of general intelligence usually works. This set of traits is traditionally measured using IQ tests, which include a number of tasks that are thought to be related to the construct of general intelligence. It is a descriptor of how people’s brains learn, adapt to the world around them, recognise patterns, and interpret the information they receive from their environment. Intelligence is not an indicator of human value. Everyone has the right to exist, regardless of their learning style.

This general description of intelligence holds true for the majority of the population. Of course, the reality isn’t so simple for some people. There are many whose mental abilities may not reinforce one another to the same degree as they would for most people; they’re more atomised skills rather than the positive feedback loops associated with the typical model of general intelligence. For example, somebody can score very high on the verbal portions on one of the Wechsler intelligence tests and fare far worse on a section that requires a strong working memory, excellent fine-motor skills or visual-spatial ability. These requirements seem to penalise some disabled people, as well as those who are simply more methodical than others. Some disabled people may score well enough on IQ tests but have difficulty generalising their abilities outside the testing environment. The existence of savant syndrome gives the lie to the idea that extreme mental capabilities exist consistently in people. Many people with savant syndrome may score low on IQ tests but have strong skills in one or two areas, like calendrical calculation, word decoding, musical ability, or drawing from life. Also, people who experience poverty, trauma, or other difficulties early in life may not be able to develop their abilities as well as people who grew up in well-off, intellectually nourishing environments².

Any thoughtful analysis of how intelligence works must be conscious of these exceptions. In a talk she gave a few years ago, Linda Silverman, a psychologist who specialises in advanced learning ability, emphasised that IQ tests are a diagnostic tool that should be combined with clinical judgement, not an absolute determiner of a person’s intellectual abilities that can be divorced from the context in which they live, grow and develop. The current incarnations of IQ tests are designed to be used as clinical tools to identify people’s relative strengths and weaknesses. They’re less accurate when they’re used to determine the cognitive skills of very quick or slow learners. Some quick-and-dirty tests designed for people with acquired cognitive conditions like Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injuries can’t even give people very high or low scores. Moreover, like other clinical tests, intelligence tests can produce false negatives or type II errors, especially in intelligent neurodivergent people whose abilities are more uneven and may have an overall score that appears average despite their intellectual, social, and emotional differences from typically developing people. The history of IQ testing and the value judgements people place on intelligence tend to cause a lot of anxiety around IQ scores, though. Far too often I see descriptions of high intelligence that rely solely on IQ scores and do not acknowledge the existence of false negatives in testing. While these exceptions may be statistically rare, rarity is not the same thing as nonexistence. People who describe the traits of highly intelligent people should be aware of these exceptions; since they are describing outliers, they should recognise that even these outliers have outliers. I fear that treating the most common representations as universal will cause people to feel as though their experiences cannot possibly be real. The late Mel Baggs wrote eloquently about the problems with IQ testing in neurodivergent people several years ago. I agree with hir to an extent; I think that IQ tests do not always capture the abilities or struggles of neurodivergent or disabled people. For some people, the tests are downright useless; some autistic people in particular have received “gifted,” “average,” and “intellectually disabled” scores in their lives depending on the testing conditions, their emotional state and their ability to access their skills.

More holistic analysis requiring understanding people’s practical skills is required to give a person a diagnosis of intellectual disability; clinicians should use the same principle when determining whether somebody qualifies for gifted education, too. Mechanistically interpreting scores and believing the numbers uncritically without considering people’s backgrounds, subtest discrepancies, interactions with the test administrator, and potential disabilities is not “intelligent testing.” I actually believe that systematic qualitative measures of people’s intellectual abilities, based on people’s developmental trajectory; abilities in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; interactions with the interviewer; and answers to abstract questions should be developed and tested to be used in the field. These measures would be especially useful for people whose traditional IQ scores don’t seem to match up with their abilities or presentation.

When talking about intelligence, it is important to avoid being prejudiced against marginalised people. Unfortunately, the history of intelligence testing is fraught with racism, disablism, classism, and misogyny. IQ tests like the Stanford-Binet scales, the British eleven-plus and the US Army intelligence tests were used to devalue the intelligence of women and racially marginalised people, consign poor and working-class people to subpar educations, institutionalise disabled people and people erroneously thought to be disabled, and create Great Chains of Being in which more intelligent people were superior to people of average or below-average intellectual ability. Some people cling to these abhorrent notions and use IQ scores as a means to rank people. In fact, some IQ tests, like the Wechsler intelligence tests, still use the category superior to refer to people of significantly above-average intelligence, a relic of the days in which IQ tests were used to rank people’s eugenic qualities. They may not be calling people imbeciles and idiots anymore, but the old prejudices still remain. Also, there are some researchers and journalists in the intelligence field who have expressed toxic views about people of colour and disabled people, including Richard Lynn, Satoshi Kanazawa, Tatu Vanhanen, Steve Sailer, Philippe Rushton, Arthur Jensen, Hans Eysenck and Charles Murray. Linda Gottfredson’s research often falls into this category too. Moreover, IQ tests should not be used to determine people’s “mental age.” Mental age is a pernicious construct that is demeaning to people with intellectual disabilities, and gifted advocates need to abandon it. The mental-age argument can be used to infantilise and devalue people with intellectual disabilities—or to take advantage of bright children and teenagers who are not emotionally prepared for things like sexual or romantic relationships. A five-year-old who can read Shakespeare is still a five-year-old. A fifty-year-old who struggles with reading and needs support to understand paperwork is still a fifty-year-old.

Intelligence, like other aspects of human cognition, is a complex and multilayered subject. It is disingenuous to say that it does not exist at all, but it is equally wrong to claim that it is easily quantifiable in all people or that it is a determiner of human worth.

Further reading

• James Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model is a good overview of how Nazi Germany drew inspiration from American policies promoting eugenics and racial segregation.
• Stuart Ritchie’s Intelligence: All That Matters is a brief introduction to concepts related to intelligence and the history of its assessment.
• ‘Intelligence: New Findings and Theoretical Developments’ (Nisbett, R. et al., 2012), an article from American Psychologist is a good academic overview of the current state of intelligence research.
• Linda Silverman’s Giftedness 101 is a good resource for psychologists and curious laypeople to find out about assessing, working with and teaching students who need more complexity and intellectual challenge than the traditional curriculum provides.
• Alan Kaufman’s IQ Testing 101 is a slightly more exhaustive introduction to IQ testing and its current uses, and emphasises an ‘intelligent testing’ approach that ultimately relies on clinical judgement rather than just spitting out a score and using that to determine a person’s intellectual ability.
• The last few chapters of The Myth of Race, by Robert Wald Sussman, describe historical and current uses of intelligence tests to marginalise black and Latino people in the United States.

1. Yes, I am familiar with the multiple-intelligence theory. Most Gardnerian ‘intelligences’ are better described as talents; see Stuart Ritchie, Intelligence: All That Matters. ↩
2. Nisbett, R. et al. (2012). Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments. American Psychologist, 67(2). ↩