The Bluestocking 377: No-Go Kyoto

a halo of mythos

Happy Friday!

Here’s something that sparked joy this week: a quiz based on all the cultural phenomena that wannabe Vogue staff in the 1990s were supposed to know. (Hope you know your Annie Leibovitz from your Fran Lebowitz.) I got 30 out of 32 after cocking up on some film directors.

Helen

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Photo: Pongmanat Tasiri/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Zero Zen (NY Mag, $)

Everyone is searching for something in Kyoto: the “real Japan,” a moment of Zen, the perfect shot. What they find amid the rising tide of tourists is something else — a modern conundrum with no obvious solutions. Tokyo and Osaka are big enough to soak up tourists in the same way New York and London can, but Kyoto is hemmed in by mountains, which keeps the city from expanding. (There are 1.4 million people living in Kyoto today, as many as there were in 1975.) It also makes the glut impossible to ignore. Including domestic travelers, roughly 150,000 people visit Kyoto every day, many of them disembarking from the Shinkansen bullet train, which cuts through the mountains at 200 mph. Last year, more tourists visited Kyoto than Barcelona, Amsterdam, or even Paris.

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This account of overtourism in Kyoto is so sad. We went to the city in 2011, and it was initially underwhelming—generic concrete blocks—but then we found Golden Temple, and the Fushimi Inari shrine, and Gion, which were beautiful. We had the shrine path to ourselves for most of the way up the mountain. Now, if you visit Fushimi Inari, you’re trapped in a snaking queue of selfie hounds.

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Photo by Olivia Bauso on Unsplash

The IQ Discourse Is Increasingly Unhinged (Substack)

Due to being highly variable and also studiable IQ tests and their cousins like the SATs are mostly good for sorting large populations we have no other way to sort: they, like democracy, are the best of a bunch of bad options.

Plenty of academic researchers in the field acknowledge these issues (although disagree on how important they are). But places like The New Yorker treating IQ research as inherently dangerous has had the predictable effect. Such criticisms have given rise to a countering force, a growing overly-confident pop-understanding of the IQ literature, one that believes the underlying research is as solid as granite. For whenever I briefly wade into the IQ discourse, like when I pointed out that there’s actually no good evidence that historical geniuses like Einstein or Feynman had bank-breaking IQs (in fact, that the difference between merely high IQ vs. super-high IQ doesn’t seem to have real-world consequences at all), I am deluged by comments along the lines of “Just look at the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth!” or “Just look at the Terman Study of the Gifted!” or “What about Anne Roes’ work on Nobel Prize winners?”

While there is plenty of more modern IQ research being done with better methodologies, these famous older studies and their results form a halo of mythos; not coincidentally, they are usually what those using IQ research for political purposes regularly cite. They are also, as a rule, rife with problems.

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Very much appreciated this Erik Hoel post on the poor quality of the IQ discourse, where neither side is particularly honest about the limitations of the data we have. People keep leaving comments on my interviews about the book, saying that they think I’m denying that some people have super-high IQs. I’m not. I’m just saying that IQ measurement doesn’t really correlate with who gets celebrated as a “genius”.

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Quick Links

1. Scott Alexander won his bet about improvements in AI image generation, and this post serves as a good reminder of how far the models have come in just a few years (Substack).

2. “Search engines now deliver answers instead of links, while social platforms aim to keep users within their walled gardens.” A piece about the fact that basically everyone in media thinks that search and social traffic will be dead in six months, eaten by link-hating algorithms and AI summaries. Will the result be less churn, as it’s harder to get eyeballs—or more churn, as content mills chase ever-thinner margins, relying on AI themselves? Google Zero, the “traffic apocalypse” . . . these do not feel like happy phrases (NYMag).

3. ‘“While no formal sanctions have been imposed,” NHS Fife said in a statement, “the panel concluded that a facilitated reflective practice discussion would be appropriate.” It is not easy translating this guff into plain English but I think this means “We deeply regret your innocence but think you should think long and hard about the behaviour which caused us to persecute you”.’ Alex Massie is very funny on the Sandie Peggie case (Times, gift link).

4. “In the dock, Marten had the charismatic presence of someone used to claiming an audience’s attention. Her volatility was addictive to watch, as if you had to keep checking to see what mood she might be in now.” Sophie Elmhirst’s account of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon’s trial is extremely compelling. What emerges is a portrait of two narcissists, utterly wrapped up in their Great Love Story, to the detriment of everyone else, including their children—four of whom were taken away previously by social services, in what we must acknowledge was a great call by social services (Guardian).

See you next time! Click below to buy The Genius Myth, which Ben Goldacre described as “marvellous”. Next week I’m in Buxton to speak at the festival and Birmingham for Hay Lates.