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Sometimes I overstate things. In an argument I might say “You never” or “I always have to”. It’s a really childish habit because it doesn’t leave any room for discussion and what’s probably worse, it’s never accurate. The words “never” and “always” don’t convey meaning - they are absolutes. Black and White.

I’ve been working hard over the past several years to correct this, I seldom catch myself doing it anymore, but when I slip and make some over reaching statement like “you never” or “I always”; I cringe. Luckily, I don’t stay sad long because someone I thought was really brilliant will invariably make an even more ridiculous overstatement that makes me feel human again.

For example, take the following recent statements from Nobel Prize winner’s Doris Lessing and James Watson.

Doris Lessing used her acceptance speech to tell the world that computers make us dumber

“We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers”
- Doris Lessing

At a speech Dr. Watson, one of the most brilliant genetics researchers, was mildly racist in his assertion that blacks are inherently less intelligent than whites.

I am “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” … “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”
- James Watson

These are two brilliant people, in my view, making horribly wrong and over reaching statements similar to what I am guilty of.

Malcolm Gladwell’s new article “None of the Above - What IQ doesn’t tell us about race” in the December 17th issue of New Yorker, discusses how researcher James R. Flynn’s radically changed the way we see IQ scores. His research, now coined the Flynn Effect, showed that the average IQ of a population has a tendency to increase over time. “The average rate of rise seems to be around three IQ points per decade.”

After more research, it is now known that environment and use of cognition in daily life plays a much greater role in the rise of IQ scores than genetics alone. This flies in the face of Dr. Watson and much conventional thinking about IQ scores. Many people believed there to be a causation between some other inherited trait such as race, parents, nationality or another arbitrary factor. Mr. Watson error was taking a small sample of data showing a correlation between low IQ and race and making a terrible over reaching statement about the prospects for an entire race of people.

I find it is important to remember that we bring to every opinion, limited information and inescapable prejudices. We must always try to be accurate and dispassionately state the facts. Emotion can lead to terrible overstatements.

Even brilliant people like Mr. Watson are capable of making really horrible overstatements.