There I was, in the middle of half-assedly collecting data for an infographic post. Intent on making this huge point about college enrollment and IQ, I was scrolling through images, looking for the most visually effective depiction of the IQ bell curve. After seeing two nearly identical graphs labeled both 1930 and 1990, I thought to myself “Wait, what are you doing?”

There’s nothing quite like a data binge, is there? (Hah.)

Rewind 8 hours, and I was reading about the history of universities in America. Did you know that just 2% of the population went to college in the 1700s? Given the size of the population, that was not a lot of people.

I had been ruminating on this point, as I’ve been trying to identify what precisely has gone wrong with the university system. (Spoiler: it’s probably a lot of things.)

One of those things is, I believe, a shift away from a university/college education being a boutique thing for a very small proportion of people into something that is expected and necessary for a very large proportion of people.

Something that could impact this is IQ, and how IQ differences over time would impact the preferences and aptitudes of the student and faculty bodies of colleges.

Another thing that could impact this is probably going to be addressed in Taleb’s Skin in the Game, but I haven’t gotten to that chapter yet. Something about how things can’t scale up as easily as we’d like them to.

The point is, I don’t know much about either of those points yet. If I don’t know, how could I possibly expect to apply them to new knowledge and get something useful out of it?

IQ is one of those measures that is heavily based on statistics, and I am not fluent in statistics at this time.

And obviously I can’t apply lessons that I haven’t even read yet.

So I stopped looking for infographics.

I could have forged ahead and written a post anyway. In the past, in one of my old defunct blogs, I would have done that very thing. It would have been ok, probably. I’m sure someone, somewhere, would have agreed with it.

But would it have been good? Would it have been true?

No.

One of the things that I’ve been challenging myself to do on this blog is to tell the truth as I see it. I can’t claim to have the whole truth, but I am doing my best to look for it. Part of living out this ideal is identifying when I don’t, in fact, have the whole truth – like right now.

Chill out. There’s plenty of time to get the facts and the rhetoric straight before you go charging into anything rash.

There are plenty of times that you’ll make yourself look like a fool without doing it on purpose.

So let it go.