I always find Charles Murray’s stuff intellectually bracing, even when I’m not necessarily on the same page. In this case I have a small, but significant, nit to pick.

In yesterday’s Journal op-ed he wrote of a hypothetical below-average-intelligence kid:

It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

Me: Okay, bear with me. Charles is relatively — though not absolutely — dismissive of alternative or competing definitions of intelligence. For example, he writes:

While concepts such as “emotional intelligence” and “multiple intelligences” have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.

Well, okay. But if this is true then Charles’ self-deprecating joke undermines his larger argument. Charles Murray is very smart, something even his detractors have to concede. So, we are supposed to believe that according to raw g-power Charles isn’t as smart as your average professional mathematician because no amount of educational intervention will make Charles smart enough to read a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics.

Nobody who knows Charles Murray — either by his writing or in person — can really believe that. In other words, if g is raw and indivisible, then not only is Charles not as smart as the average mid-tier mathematician, but then almost nobody else is either because Charles is smarter than pretty much 99.8% of the people I’ve ever met in Washington, or anywhere else.* If Charles can’t be taught to read those proofs, then we need to look to the mathematicians as the wisemen of our civilization.

But, here’s the thing, I’ve met a few mathematicians and they don’t strike me as particularly brilliant in areas outside of mathematics. Moreover, they don’t strike me as people who would become brilliant at, say, marketing or rocket-design if they simply studied-up. I’m sure there are exceptions, but you know I’m right as a general proposition.

So, it seems to me that we have to allow for the possibility that there are different kinds of intelligence, or at least aptitudes. Mathematicians are great at math, but they might be bad at logistics, or mediocre at chemistry or even useless at surgery. And they aren’t as smart as Charles Murray when it comes to social policy.

Another possibility is that Charles was simply making a joke at his own expense and nothing more. But, while it might seem pedantic of me, I don’t think he should do that when writing pieces like this. So much of what he writes about intelligence in America strikes the average reader as either counter-intuitive or counter to our hopes about society. So the reader is going to look for reasons to find Charles wrong either to defend the reader’s own intellectual vanity or to defend his aspirations for social improvement. But, what the hell do I know?

* I don’t say this to suck up to Charles, though the compliments probably make the criticism go down easier.