On "Studies" and Their Significance – Part Two (Column 24)

With God's help

This part was written following an exchange about Dutton's study that appears in the comments on the first part.

Emotional intelligence

The example of emotional intelligence always makes me think of studies in the service of political correctness. A few years ago someone decided to study the subject of intelligence. He tried to distill several characteristics of this concept, and after arriving at a list of them he was surprised to discover that several different abilities satisfy all those criteria. So he defined several kinds of intelligence: emotional, motor, and more.

But in my opinion there is a fundamental methodological problem here. After all, when beginning such a study, we must assume what intelligence is. That is, we begin with a list of people who are agreed to be intelligent, and try to distill from them the list of traits that define intelligence. In other words, there is an initial assumption here about what intelligence is. Up to this point I have no problem, because definitions always begin with some intuition. Their task is to conceptualize and formalize that intuition. Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that at the outset, if you asked people whether Einstein is intelligent, you would get a positive answer from everyone. But if you asked about Maradona, most of them would answer negatively. Now you conduct your study and try to distill from Einstein the traits that define intelligence. You arrive at a list of seven traits, and lo and behold—Maradona satisfies them too. Conclusion: Maradona is intelligent as well.

But your point of departure was that he is not. Therefore the conclusion is that if you tried to conceptualize and formalize the original intuition according to which Einstein is intelligent, you simply did not succeed. The fact is that your conceptualization yields results different from your original intuition. If so, you did not succeed in the process of distillation and conceptualization. Note carefully: the conclusion is not that Maradona is intelligent, but that the list of traits we arrived at is not equivalent to the original intuition. The process failed.

Why does no one think this way? Because it is very convenient for us to present many kinds of intelligence. That way we all come out equal, and none are more equal than others. There is no difference between Einstein and Maradona, or the cobbler in my neighborhood. Everyone is intelligent and everyone is a genius, just in different fields. The most humanistic thing imaginable.

I would have no problem if they said this openly: I want to propose a definition under which we all come out as Einstein, and here is the proposed definition. But in the process I described, this is not done honestly; instead it is presented in scientific garb. The study showed that we are all Einstein. Now anyone who disagrees is treated as though he were disputing the Divine Presence itself, since this is a scientific result. That is what irritates me: taking the name of science in vain in the service of political correctness.

Back to psychopathology

What happened in Dutton's case? He did something very similar to what I described above, as is customary in the world of hokum. Except that in his case the situation was doubly amusing: at the end of the process he got that Churchill is more of a psychopath than Nero Caesar. That is, the result not only expands the concept under study (psychopath), but turns it upside down.

What exactly happened here? Dutton apparently took people regarded as psychopaths, distilled from them the list of traits that define a psychopath, and then found—to his astonishment—that Churchill and Trump fit the bill, and even more so than Hitler and Nero Caesar. But all that means is that the list of traits (or the questionnaire he presents) does not capture the intuition from which he started out. He merely obtained a resounding failure in his study. Nothing more. What does he do instead? He announces surprising and fascinating results, ones we would not have thought of intuitively: Churchill is more of a psychopath than Nero Caesar, and Trump more than Hitler. What is that if not a way of saying: folks, the list of questions I distilled is worth nothing. It has no correlation whatsoever with psychopathy.

The methodological significance

Essentially, what Dutton did was to propose a definition for a new concept, which for some reason he calls psychopathy—the same name as the familiar concept. This new concept—let us call it, say, yekum purkan—is found in greater measure in Churchill than in Nero Caesar, and in Trump more than in Hitler. Fine, Trump and Churchill also have more centimeters than Hitler and Nero. That is not especially surprising, is it? But why call a person's height psychopathy? On the psychopathy axis Nero is higher than Churchill, and on the height axis he is lower than him. The same is true of the concept Dutton defines. It is only a pity that he chose to call it psychopathy, because that is very confusing. Someone has to tell him that this term is already taken. He can call it yekum purkan, a far more charming and attractive name, and it has the advantage that at least in the psychopathological context it is still available.

On second thought, the headline 'Trump has more yekum purkan than Hitler' does not sound especially sexy. Too bad, but sometimes the truth hurts…

On polmakhags and shamplemen

What Dutton did was define a new concept, and apparently not a very interesting one either. After all, any collection of characteristics can define a concept. For example, let us fill out the following questionnaire:

1. What is the first letter of your name? (Score according to the gematria of the letter).
2. What is the house number on the street where you live? (The score is the cube root of the house number times 4).
3. How tall was your third-grade teacher? (Score: her height divided by twice your height squared, an expanded BMI).
4. How many times have you opened fire on innocent people? (Score according to the number of fatalities to the power of pi)
5. An adjustment factor for those who did not reach 50.

The weighted score you received represents your degree of shamplemanity. Can we already add shamplemanity to the DSM?

How did I arrive at this concept? Not really important. But let us assume that in the past I encountered a set of mass murderers, all of whom had shamplemanity levels between 50 and 70. So here is a questionnaire distilled from an intuition about mass murderers. It now has an empirical basis.

You are surely asking yourselves whether Hitler is more of a shampleman than Churchill or less. Some of you are surely muttering to yourselves under your breath that this is actually not the most interesting thing in the world. Why not? Presumably because, for some reason, you have an aversion to empty definitions. Fine, I have an idea for you. Let us define types like you as polmakhags. And look, I already have a questionnaire that characterizes you. Well, let us stop here before you fall asleep on me.

On definitions in the service of science

A definition has scientific value where it gives us a tool for predicting interesting and non-trivial future results. Thus it is important to define mass because it gives us a tool for dealing with the motion of bodies according to Newton's laws of mechanics. We define acceleration because it is related to force. Would there be any point in defining the concept of acceleration if it had no use beyond calculating the accelerations of various bodies?

The definition of shamplemanity will give us an exact scientific prediction of the shamplemanity level of whoever answers the questionnaire, but who cares? Polmakhags will give us the very same prediction (the degree of polmakhagness). But there is no non-trivial prediction here, and therefore these concepts are worthless. If shamplemanity gave me a prediction as to whether that person will commit mass murder in the coming year, or—at the opposite end of the scale—divorce his wife, or even merely feel unwell, that would already be much more interesting. In such situations, defining this concept would be scientifically justified. It becomes interesting because it gives me a tool for non-trivial understanding and prediction of reality. But as long as this is a definition of a concept that continues to hang in the air without any connection to any other phenomenon in our real world, there is nothing here beyond the addition of one more term to the dictionary.

By the way, Dutton did not even do that. He used an existing concept, and only confused us about it by adding to it another meaning altogether, unrelated to anything. After all, he did not even do what he was supposed to predict. Here, Churchill came out more of a psychopath than Nero Caesar, and Trump more than Hitler. So what interesting and non-trivial predictions are we supposed to get from this shamplemanity?

If he had validated his questionnaire—that is, given it to people defined as psychopaths and to other people, and found some significant correlation—it would have had some value (although in this case, in my view, nothing beyond the trivial. The questionnaire 'How many times in the past did you want to murder?' would have given no worse an answer). If it really had validity, it could be used to predict people's psychopathy: give it to different people and try to predict psychopathic behavior. But when Dutton tries before our eyes to validate his questionnaire, he gets opposite results: Hitler less than Trump. So here we have it: the questionnaire is not valid.

Back to Dutton

When one looks at Dutton's site one sees, in the introduction to the questionnaire, that he himself understands that his questionnaire is worth nothing and says nothing. He himself writes that the questionnaire predicts nothing (apart from some vague correlation devoid of real significance). So in effect he is amusing himself with definitions at our expense.

No wonder Paulina responds there in the comments with the following words:

Paulina July 17, 2016
Where in london can I get professional, tests-based sociopath diagnosis ?

The question is why Walla reporters are reporting on the meaningless amusements of some fellow at Oxford. And whether the time has not come to impose some minimum intelligence requirement on them.