Chris Bertram has two good posts up on the arguments in favour of attacking Iraq. Bertram is no hawk, but the arguments he discusses are much more nuanced, and much more credible, than you are ever likely to hear from the people in the White House. I havent ever really taken the administrations proposals seriously because, as far as I can tell, anyone who mentions Iraq and Al Qaeda in the same sentence has no authority on either, so none of the White Houses arguments even get to first base. Such a view is certainly convenient, it frees up more time for thinking about things on which I can make a difference, but it isnt obviously a position that is particularly stable in the long-term.
Matthew Yglesias has a post up quite reasonably zinging Andrew Sullivan for some intemperate comments about how brain scanning will soon take over from performance testing as a way of evaluating intellectual capacity. Im no expert on these things, but Jerry Fodor tells me that the philosophical challenges to doing this are still quite staggering. Fodor says that when it comes to general-purpose reasoning, we have made more or less no progress whatsoever in figuring out how the mind works, which is possibly a slight overstatement, but possibly not.
The research Sullivan is reporting doesnt exactly inspire confidence in this regard. It is perfectly consistent (indeed seems to somewhat suggest) the idea that brain activity in one area is correlated with some particular skills. Which could all well be true, and tell you nothing at all about how humans ever come up with things like insightful philosophical analyses of intelligence.
Draw from this what conclusions you will, but in baseball the story of the last five years has been the relative success of teams that try and predict performance on the basis of performance, rather than on a physiological assessment of performative capacity. Since we know a wee bit more about what, physiologicaly speaking, makes for a good hitter than what makes for a good novelist, I suspect performance based analysis will be around for a while yet in fields other than baseball.
The main thing I dont understand is Sullivans loathing of blank slaters. He says, Blank slaters, be afraid. Your time is running out. My scanty reading of history suggested that the US Founding Fathers, a group who I thought Sullivan admired, were influenced as much as anyone by John Locke, who, if memory serves, was the most famous Blank Slater in history. Thats a small caricature of Lockes views, to be sure, but its not to hard to read a Lockean influence on some of the truths that the founders took to be self-evident. Im a card-carrying Chomksyite nativist, but I dont feel at all like addressing this kind of gunslinging rhetoric towards those who are not. Chomsky has been known to be wrong before you know.
UPDATE: On second thoughts, I have no idea what Sullivan was thinking with the Blank Slaters quip, unless it was just a gratuitous decision to slap people he didnt like. The Blank Slate theory is that people dont come into the world with fixed beliefs, or perhaps even with fixed character. The theory wasnt one about abilities at all. One can believe everything in Locke and think that people have different abilities to learn from experience. Or one can believe with Chomsky that we come endowed with a rich stock of beliefs and dispositions, but we are all equally so endowed. As far as I can tell, the messy/blank slate question doesnt even have evidential relevance to the question of how much people vary in their intellectual abilities, especially since the best arguments for messy slates normally posit that all of us (or at least 99.something% of us) are wired the same way. And the larger point that Matthew was making, and that I second, that performance based testing is going to be the last word for as far into the future as the eye can see, remains. Possibly Im misrepresenting Sullivan, so heres the full quote.
THE FUTURE OF I.Q.: Fascinating new research from some Washington University researchers into the nature of general intelligence. We’re beginning to be able to measure such intelligence not simply from the results of written or practical tests but from live imaging of actual brain activity. Egalitarian ideologues have long resisted the notion that there is such a thing as general intelligence and that it is at least partly hard-wired and inherited. But as science advances, and our understanding of working memory and intelligence deepens, the evidence for such intelligence could become irrefutable. Imagine at some distant date going into an exam room and getting hooked up to brain monitors. No need for grad students grading papers. No need for SAT results. Just a brain scan to check how smart you are. Fantasy now. But you can already see the implications of current research. Blank slaters, be afraid. Your time is running out.
Reporting and deciding are now appropriately allocated.
FURTHER UPDATE: I edited the first paragraph slightly to make it clear I wasnt attributing the pro-war arguments to Bertram, just noting that he was doing a better job of saying what the hawks should be saying than the hawks themselves are.