David Sklansky, well-known poker theorist, is challenging Christian fundamentalists to a battle of standardized-test-taking skills! (Via Unscrewing the Incrutable and Cynical-C.)
This is an open challenge to any American citizen who passes a lie detector test that I will specify in a moment.
We will both take the math SAT or GRE (aptidude test). Your choice. We will both have only half the normally allotted time to lessen the chances of a perfect score. Lower score pays higher score $50,000.
To qualify you must take a reputable polygraph that proclaims you are truthful when you state that:
1. You are at least 95% sure that Jesus Christ came back from the dead.
AND
2. You are at least 95% sure that adults who die with the specific belief that Jesus probably wasn’t ressurected will not go to heaven.
If you pass the polygraph you can bet me on the SAT or GRE. Again this is open to ANY one of the 300 million Americans.
Also, for those who think I am being disengenuous because I would make the offer to anyone at all, you are wrong. I am now so rusty that at least one in 5000 Americans are favored over me and I would pass on a bet with them. That’s 60,000 people. If the number of people who would pass that polygraph is between 10 and 30 million, which I think it is, that means that at least 2000 of these types of Christians are smart enough to be favored over me. Given such Christian’s intelligence is distributed like other American’s are.
But I’m betting fifty grand they are not. Their beliefs make them relatively stupid (or uninterested in learning). Or only relatively stupid people can come to such beliefs. One or the other. That is my contention. And this challenge might help demonstrate that.
(I’d feel better about Sklansky’s chances if he knew how to spell “resurrected” — good thing he’s sticking to the math test.)
This sounds like an interesting way to get publicity, but the theory behind it is kind of … dumb. It relies on the idea that there is some unitary thing called “intelligence” that correlates in some simple way with both test-taking skills and religious beliefs. If only it were anywhere near that simple.
Assume for the moment that belief in the literal resurrection of Jesus really does indicate a certain amount of credulity, lack of critical thinking, etc. (Obviously not an unproblematic assumption, but let’s grant that it’s true for the sake of argument.) Why in the world would that be inconsistent with being a math prodigy? The human mind is a funny, complicated thing. There are extraordinarily basic mathematical calculations — taking the square root of a fifty-digit number comes to mind — at which a pocket calculator will always do much better than any human being. Yet if you asked the calculator to invent a theory of gravity based on special relativity and the Principle of Equivalence, it wouldn’t get very far.
Some people (and physicists are among the most guilty, for obvious reasons) seem to think that the ability to do math is the quintessential expression of “intelligence,” from which all other reasoning skills flow. If that were true, scientists and mathematicians would make the best poets, statesmen, artists, and conversationalists. And faculty meetings at top-ranked physics departments would be paradigms of reasonable discussion undistorted by petty jealousies and irrational commitments. Suffice it to say, the evidence is running strongly against. (It’s true that physicists are incredibly fashionable and make the best lovers, but that’s a different matter.)
There really are different ways to be smart. Which is not some misguided hyper-egalitarian claim that everyone is equally smart; some people are very smart in lots of ways, while others aren’t especially smart in any. But it’s very common for people to be intelligent in one way and not in others. David Sklansky, for example, is a great poker player and quite mathematically talented. But his understanding of human psychology falls a bit short.
(I should add that Sklansky may in fact know exactly what he is doing, judging that hubris will be enough to lead more people he can beat to accept the challenge than people he will lose to. But from the discussion, it seems as if he really doesn’t think that anyone fitting his criteria will be able to beat him.)
Sean,
I think you missed David’s point. He is a guy smart enough to know what intelligence means and I do agree with your argument on it (and I think David would agree too).
I think David’s bet is just a message to all those idiots religious fanatics (not only the christian ones) and a way to make fun of them (b/c they deserve).
I went to an Engineering College. There are some very intelligent people who wholeheartedly believe premise 1 and 2. My (Qualitative) observations are that the smarter they are, the deeper they believe.
It is a loaded bet anyhow. He is “so rusty” that he is in the top 99.9998% of the country?
He does a lot of math in his head as part of his chosen profession (when was the last time you saw a calculator at a poker table?). He will be faster at math then an engineer of the same (or greater) intelligence because they depend on a computer to do error free calculations. Assuming he knows how to take a “standardized” test, he will fly through the test, answering the easy questions first, go back, answer the not so easy ones, and skip the hard ones. He will maximize his score this way.
I also think that engineers tend to become pretty conservative as part of their daily routine (they aren’t likely to ‘bet’ that a building won’t fall down, they would ‘ensure’ that it wouldn’t). Betting many months of salary would be trained out of them.
Hrmm… An Entrepreneurial Born Again Engineer with money to burn…
I am very glad society is smart in a diversity of ways. It keeps it so we can all diversify. I can worry about physics and let others worry about the other important things which they do better than me anyways.
By the way, I do not think standardized tests are the best indication of how smart you are. I’ve met very smart people who bombed it and also met people who I almost felt sorry for who I come to learn did incredibly well. I think usually smart people do better then those who don’t know what they are doing, but often it is not the case.
Actually, I personally knew a kid last year who probably could yes to both #1 and #2 and scored a 960 on the physics GRE. He scored in the 900’s on all four released practice physics GRE’s too. I should call him up at Cornell and tell him to take this challenge and we can split the money. 🙂
Sklansky should know better. It is not too difficult to deceive a polygraph examiner.
My guess is that Sklansky is moderately confident that he can score perfectly on the GRE even in half the time. Given that expectation, the wager becomes a freeroll. Most likely outcome – two perfect scores and a draw. The challenge would be more interesting if the offer were to take a more difficult exam. However then Sklansky would be revealing a real failing in the psycology of understanding differing intelligences. My guess is that that is not one of his failings. I also suspect that this was not so much a mean spirited taunt as it is a means of maximizing his return on a rather spectacular prop bet.
Let me use an analogy to his test:
1) Do you believe only those who apply to go to Harvard have a chance of getting into Harvard – Answer YES
-) Do you believe only those who play the lottery have a chance of winning the lottery – Answer YES
2) Do you believe only the sons of rich white republicans can secure a place at Harvard – Answer, I HOPE NOT, but humans have tried other means of selectivity – ie ability to pay or make donations, ability to speak ‘english’ and ability to secure the grades (how you obtain the grades would seem irrelevant)
-) Do you believe only the sons & daughters of the rich can get into Ivy League Universities – Answer, I HOPE NOT, but I’d be denying the obvious were I to say it is not true, of course some bursaries are offered to truly ‘gifted’ people.
–
Perhaps David Slansky should ask:
1) Do you believe in heaven on Earth
2) Do you believe Harvard & Ivy League students are the only ones ‘guaranteed’ to enjoy heaven on Earth
–
Both questions require a belief in ‘heaven’ – but the first question does not require the second question to be true. And a negative reply to the second question does not make the first one ‘false’
–
I think David Sklansky should read Michael Shermer’s book Why People Believe Weird Things. Look specifically at the chapter titled, “why smart people believe weird things”. His argument is that while smarter people might have more tools of reasoning at their disposal those tools can be used to rationalize weird beliefs just as easily as they can be used to debunk them.
So all the great scientists of the past were never proficient at math … like Sir Isaac Newton?
Also if the common Christians were rational about their Bible, there’s no talk about going to heaven in it. Resurrection yes. Heaven no. So he has already excluded the rational Christians.
Unfortunately, I cannot participate because 1. applies to me, but not 2.
“Assume for the moment that belief in the literal resurrection of Jesus really does indicate a certain amount of credulity, lack of critical thinking, etc.”
Bad assumption. Also, everyone has some amount of credulity. Many important experiments that have been done in the past cannot really be done by us due to how complicated they are. So we need an amount of readiness or willingness to believe others in order to do our work.
“Some people (and physicists are among the most guilty, for obvious reasons) seem to think that the ability to do math is the quintessential expression of “intelligence,” from which all other reasoning skills flow. If that were true, scientists and mathematicians would make the best poets, statesmen, artists, and conversationalists.”
You forgot theologians and philosophers. They are smart too.
“Actually, I personally knew a kid last year who probably could yes to both #1 and #2 and scored a 960 on the physics GRE. ..”
Is that supposed to be high? The test goes all the way up to 990. In my day, any physics major who couldn’t max out the score would be ashamed to show his face.
How does one measure “95% sure” of anyting in my mind?
Kuas wrote: “In my day, any physics major who couldn’t max out the score would be ashamed to show his face.”
Oh, how we all miss the glorious days when everyone was at the 99th percentile!
One of the aspects of this that i find more interesting is the sum of $50,000. Certainly for most of us, and presumably to those that would be interested in taking the bet, the amount is considerable and meaningful. This is not so true for Sklansky, in that $50K would represent fairly typical raises in a single hand in one of the later rounds of poker tournaments. These guys play with $25,000 chips, tossing them around as if they were $25 ones. The backroom, high stakes games that run through many of the large casino cities, where Sklansky most often plays, are run with seven figure outcomes. The stakes in this bet are a relatively trifle 1%, or less, in their world.
This sounds like an interesting way to get publicity, but the theory behind it is kind of … dumb. It relies on the idea that there is some unitary thing called “intelligence” that correlates in some simple way with both test-taking skills and religious beliefs. If only it were anywhere near that simple.
Spot-on.
Never mind the religious stuff. The test/intelligence thing is scary.
I believe (but have nothing to cite at the moment) it has been shown that high test scores correlates with performance in college, grad school, or whatever it is you are being tested for. However, that doesn’t imply that the test has predictive power for any given individual. If a test has decent predictive power for only 50% of the people who take it, you’re still going to get a pretty clear correlation if you look at a lot of statistics. Howveer, in this hypothetical case, if you used that test as part of the reason to grant or deny an individual admission to college or graduate school, you’re using a very suspect method.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way around it. On the GPC at Vanderbilt, myself I pay a lot more attention to letters of recommendation and the students’ records (especially research records). However, the graduate school likes the GRE’s, and all these awful US News and World Report places use average GRE scores as a measure of student body quality… putting pressure on Universities to overvalue them so that they will look better in the rankings.
There are lots of reasons why you might do well or why you might do poorly on a standardized test. If you choose a lot of people who are in graduate school, they will on average tend to do better than many other bits of popluation that you can select. Because they’re smarter? Well, no. Because doing well on standardized tests was part of the selection criteria that allowed those people to go through the various steps that got them into graduate school in the first place…. They’re trained for that kind of thing.
I agree with Sean. This is a stupid challenge. It will show nothing.
-Rob
Suppose that 2000 Christians are smarter than this guy. How many of them are going to have and be interested in betting that kind of money? Of course he says nothing about this.
I’m not sure that all of you have fully understood David’s intention with his challenge.
His intention is NOT what he says it is (i.e. that he thinks that by proving that he can beat all Christians he will have proved that Christians are all dumbasses.)
His intention is to:
1) Say outloud that Chrisitians are idiots (which is true, look at Christians voting for Bush for “moral reasons”)
Anything else that comes out of this challenge will only provide David with more arguments for why Christians are idiots.
It’s also possible that this challenge was proposed by one of David’s buddys for a bet. Therefore David would already have money on the line for doing well on this challenge or for betting whether less than x people would even show up qualifying to take the bet.
I agree more with Schrodinger (#1) on this.
I don’t think belief in God(s) would be inconsistent with being a math prodigy either. Newton, for example, called absolute space “God’s sensory organ”. I sincerely wonder however how Newton’s (or anyone’s of any religion in a similar situation) religious beliefs would change now that most agree that the concept absolute space has to be abolished. Just saying, I don’t know how religious people deal with this sort of thing.
Kaus,
Yes, a 960 is high, especially for an american student. (Foreigners seem to do better on average). I guess the test is different today. I sure wish I could have taken a Physics GRE where the average student got the highest score possible.
Um, maybe this is a little off topic, but wouldn’t an out-and-out atheist answer “yes” to question #2, as written? 🙂
Alex R notes that atheist will answer yes to question #2. It further occured to me that the requirement was for a “a reputable polygraph that proclaims you are truthful when you state . . .”. It doesn’t require you to BE truthful when you state those things.
So an alternate look at the challenge for an atheist perspective is you need to beat him on the GRE and be able to fool a polygraph. Since the bet doesn’t state the person must be a Christian, there is no ethical problem.
Further if I read the bet correctly you don’t have to pass his polygraph just a reputable one. It also sounds like you can take the polygraph BEFORE the bet and just submit the findings as proof of eligibility. So assuming you are a math guru (and I’m sure there are lots here) the only risk is the cost of the polygraph test. All you need to do is learn how to beat a polygraph test. I think you will find some suggestions online at sites like this:
http://antipolygraph.org/
> wouldn’t an out-and-out atheist answer “yes” to question #2, as written
Certainly. And if one assumes that Jesus went to a funeral at least once in his life, one could also answer #1 with a yes 😎
“1) Say outloud that Chrisitians are idiots (which is true, look at Christians voting for Bush for “moral reasons”)”
What does that make of people – a voting majority – that voted for Bush for other reasons?
“His intention is to:
1) Say outloud that Chrisitians are idiots (which is true, look at Christians voting for Bush for “moral reasons”)
Anything else that comes out of this challenge will only provide David with more arguments for why Christians are idiots.”
Not all Christians live in the US, voted for Bush, or are even eligible to vote. Also, to vote for someone for “moral reasons” is a good thing, in general. For example, if you vote for a candidate because he/she promises more housing to the homeless and better wages so that poor people can make a living wage, then that’s voting for moral reasons since it’s morally good to care about the poor. Contrast this with voting for someone because he/she promises tax breaks for the very rich, which is not voting for moral reasons.
Also, “Christians are idiots” is totally false. There are plenty of smart Christians. Like Pope Benedict, or Thomas Aquinas, as two examples. Also, my fellow physics graduate student just happens to be Christian (wow!!!) and he’s smart yo.
I found this by vnr1995 on another forum interesting to contemplate:
“Religion is founded in itself, and, if looked at as human product, appears circular. Religion has many empirical constraints (having founder, having bible, a set of beliefs about the nature of the world), when it exists among human communities: in this sense, Christianity is an empirical religion.”