Critique de Grit par Josh

Maybe I'll write a longer review eventually. For now, I'll just note that while I enjoyed Grit I was somewhat surprised that Duckworth dedicated a section (p. 74-78) to Catherine Cox's 1926 "Genetic Studies of Genius" a work I took to be thoroughly discredited.

In fairness, the lesson Cox draws and Duckworth cites (that prodigious early intelligence isn't a reliable signal of later eminence) is surely correct. But, as Stephen Jay Gould put it the book as a whole "must rank as a primary curiosity within a literature already studded with absurdity."

As Gould explains "the basic logic of the study was hopelessly flawed from the first. The differences in IQ that Cox recorded among her subjects do not measure their varying accomplishments, not to mention their native intelligence. Instead, the differences are a methodological artifact of the varying quality of information that Cox was able to compile about the childhood and early youth of her subjects. Cox began by assigning a base IQ of 100 to each individual; the raters then added to (or, rarely, subtracted from) this value according to the data provided. Cox’s dossiers are motley lists of childhood and youthful accomplishments, with an emphasis on examples of precocity. Since her method involved adding to the base figure of 100 for each notable item in the dossier, estimated IQ records little more than the volume of available information." The Mismeasure of Man, p. 214-215

While I think the general thrust of Duckworth's argument (hard work + persistence + focus lead to good performance) is correct I felt like Duckworth was making many of the same mistakes that intelligence researchers like Cox made a century ago, namely trying to reify a complex constellation of attributes that don't fit together as nicely as she would have us believe.