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Actually, reading James Flynn's book What Is Intelligence?, I got the impression that environment and culture plays a huge factor in IQ. Genetics is a factor, o

Actually, reading James Flynn's book What Is Intelligence?, I got the impression that environment and culture plays a huge factor in IQ. Genetics is a factor, obviously, too. But accepting IQ as a mostly function of race or sex, which some people are always itching to do whenever this is brought up, is reductivist. In his book, Flynn attributes part of the mysterious increase in IQ during the 20th century to the spread of general education and inculcation of scientific and logical modes of reasoning more broadly. He recounts a story from Soviet anthropologists who travelled through Russia studying peasants at the beginning of the 20th century. An anthropologist presented a villager with a simple syllogism: All swans are white. If I told you there was a swan in the next village over and sent you over to report its color for me. What color do you expect it to be? Peasant's response: I don't know. I'd have to go check. Which makes sense when you exist in a world in which you're operating mostly on the basis of personal relationships and trust is based on a person's word and status and not on abstract and institutionalized forms of knowledge. You'd be an idiot to trust the word of some stranger you just met. But this guy probably did not do so well on the IQ test he was given. In fact, check out this statement from Flynn's Wikipedia page: Women, he argued, caught up to men in these nations as a result of exposure to modernity by entering the professions and being allowed greater educational access. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Flynn_(academic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Flynn_(academic)

yasp 9y ago
>James Flynn, namesake of the secular increase, finally agrees that these IQ gains are not g factor gains [1], but believes that they still represent economically relevant skill gains. This is doubtful for two reasons: first, because measures of aca- demic ability over time do not reveal any concomitant Flynn-like gains [2, p. 8; 3]. Second, because we know from large-scale military re- search that almost all the predictive power of IQ tests in training contexts comes through g alone [4, p. 129]. [1] Flynn, JR. The Flynn Effect: Rethinking intelligence and what affects it [2] Flynn JR. Searching for justice: the discovery of IQ gains over time. Am Psychol 1999;54:5–20. [3] Flynn JR, Weiss LG. American IQ Gains From 1932 to 2002: The WISC Subtests and Educational Progress. Int J Test 2007;7:209–24. [4] Ree MJ, Earles JA. The ubiquitous productiveness of g. In: Rumsey MG, Walker CB, Harris JH, editors. Personnel selection and classification. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erl- baum; 1994. p. 127–36.

yasp 9y ago

>James Flynn, namesake of the secular increase, finally agrees that these IQ gains are not g factor gains [1], but believes that they still represent economically relevant skill gains. This is doubtful for two reasons: first, because measures of aca- demic ability over time do not reveal any concomitant Flynn-like gains [2, p. 8; 3]. Second, because we know from large-scale military re- search that almost all the predictive power of IQ tests in training contexts comes through g alone [4, p. 129]. [1] Flynn, JR. The Flynn Effect: Rethinking intelligence and what affects it [2] Flynn JR. Searching for justice: the discovery of IQ gains over time. Am Psychol 1999;54:5–20. [3] Flynn JR, Weiss LG. American IQ Gains From 1932 to 2002: The WISC Subtests and Educational Progress. Int J Test 2007;7:209–24. [4] Ree MJ, Earles JA. The ubiquitous productiveness of g. In: Rumsey MG, Walker CB, Harris JH, editors. Personnel selection and classification. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erl- baum; 1994. p. 127–36.