
Flynn’s IQ - tortilla
http://www.bryanappleyard.com/flynns-iq/
======
Aloisius
Wait, people take IQ tests seriously? Really?

I was tested twice when I was in second grade, the first time by a
psychologist in a class setting and the second time one-on-one to verify the
first. I tested quite high, but even then I knew I wasn't noticeably smarter
than others; I just test particularly well.

Frankly, it cracks me up when someone refers to their IQ seriously or boasts
about being in Mensa. Other than testing for mid-to-high level mental
retardation, subjectively, IQ tests seem to be terrible at measuring actual
brilliance.

~~~
drpgq
Why does it have to be about brilliance. The US armed forces is one of the
bigger users of IQ tests and has plenty of data showing higher IQ scores leads
to better performance.

~~~
aik
I think it would be fascinating to view the outliers (low IQ when
measured=high performance) and investigate the reasons.

(My hypothesis:) Naturally what I would expect would be found is that IQ is
just one measure that sometimes correlates in certain types of people, and
that it completely fails and miscalculates actual intelligence and mis-
predicts future performance in other types of people. And that it fails in a
statistically significant number of cases. And that due to the behavior
confirmation effect (self-fulfilling prophecy) it ends up true in more cases
than it could.

Meaning IQ is an OK measure in many cases, but very flawed. I'm curious what
will eventually take it's place as more useful.

------
marquis
Am I the only one who refuses to take an IQ test? I hate being tested -
especially with a time limit, I rarely play games (chess and logic puzzles
being the exception) but above all I don't understand how anyone could not
have an emotional response being told 'your IQ is x'.

~~~
sp332
Did you have an emotional response when you learned that you could only hold
"7, plus or minus 2" things in your short-term working memory? Or when you
found out what your adult height was going to be for the rest of your life?

~~~
andrewflnr
The 7 plus or minus two thing is universal. Adult height non-universal, but
less emotionally sensitive. Even so, it's easy to be sensitive about one's
height.

IQ is a comparison between you and everyone else, on a topic which is close to
the core of our being, especially for the kind of people on this forum.

~~~
eru
I find height way more emotionally charged than IQ.

~~~
andrewflnr
I guess I shouldn't have assumed everyone thought like me. :) Is it more
sensitive than intelligence in general, or just IQ? Would you react more
strongly to being called "shrimp" than "stupid"?

~~~
eru
I don't care about names. But looking down instead of up makes quite a big
difference.

I don't really believe in IQ as anything more than a statistical artefact in
the first place. But of course, different people are going to perform
differently on different tasks.

------
ilaksh
So the vast majority of people misunderstand intelligence, at least as
measured by IQ tests, as being a limiting factor for performance and
potential, while it is actually just a measurement of current abilities.

> the penultimate chapter is a list of 14 examples in which science has failed
> because of social blindness.

This carries through more broadly and generally to the application of many
incorrect fundamental assumptions to the design of our institutions, which
consistently fail because of the resulting flawed structures.

~~~
bearmf
It is a limiting factor for many tasks, even such "simple" tasks as basic
algebra and calculus. A lot of people fail at math simply because they do not
have enough brainpower.

~~~
DiabloD3
No, they fail at math because they have never learned how to use their
brainpower effectively. The difference between geniuses and everyone else,
from my experiences, are not any fundamental difference in their brain wiring,
but that they learned how to better focus what brainpower they do have,

Its like the difference between a guy who gives 120% every day but his work,
taken individually, is mediocre vs a guy who gives his 1% but his 1% is the
Nobel prize winning work of his field... the guy who gives his 120% day in and
day out is a smarter man.

Ironically, an IQ test will not say much about either of them. The 120% guy
might score lower than the 1% man by 10 or 15 points, but the 120% guy, if he
were, say, a researcher or inventor, would be spending day in and day out
finding thousands of ways that don't work just so he can find one that does.
The 120% man learned how to focus the skills he does have and learned how to
apply them well; of the two, I'd hire him over the 1% man, Nobel or not.

The few super geniuses that history remembers (such as Tesla) had both: 120%
work ethic combined with a brilliant mind. These people are rare, but every
single person no matter their racial or religious background has the ability
to become that kind of person to.... they just never learn how to.

~~~
victorhn
"but every single person no matter their racial or religious background has
the ability to become that kind of person to..."

Seriously? I don't know, but even if i had a 120% work ethic, i consider that
i would never reach the level of genius of someone like Tesla, he is simply a
genetic freak. Also, almost all the traits of humans seem to be unevenly
undistributed in the population, not everyone has the capability to be a top
athlete or top dancer, or top X. Why intelligence could be the exception?,
when even common sense and observation tells us that some people are more
intelligent than others.

~~~
danielweber
I'm leaning against (but not convinced against) "intelligence genes" existing,
at least to the point where some people have them and some don't, because
evolution would likely have spread them to everyone.

But the science is much better for behaviors and temperaments being heritable.
Some people are more comfortable sitting around only reading; some people are
more likely to be comfortable fighting with abstract ideas; some people are
more likely to be stubborn when they don't understand something and go at it
until they figure it out. These things will affect what we measure as your IQ.
My suspicion is that this is the source of the data for genetic differences in
intelligence.

~~~
twoodfin
_I'm leaning against (but not convinced against) "intelligence genes"
existing, at least to the point where some people have them and some don't,
because evolution would likely have spread them to everyone._

Why? What survivability/reproduction benefits does intelligence provide beyond
a certain level, particularly in pre-modern society? If you were the daughter
of serfs a thousand years ago, what good would a 150 IQ do you? Especially if
there's some tradeoff involved, such as a correspondingly lower ability to
socialize with your peers.

~~~
danielweber
_Especially if there's some tradeoff involved, such as a correspondingly lower
ability to socialize with your peers_

If there's any reason for an "intelligence gene" not being completely wide-
spread, it would be this. Intelligence would have to have some very
significant drawbacks. Some people have theorized that autism is when you get
"overloaded" on those intelligence genes. It strikes me as unlikely this would
really provide significant pushback against the intelligence genes completely
dominating the gene pool, but I agree it's possible.

~~~
twoodfin
But why? Even if there's no tradeoff, what advantage would Albert Einstein
have had over an average intelligence competitor for mates had he lived even a
mere 200 years ago? Slim, I'd think. And who's to say he would have used that
narrow advantage to win a mate of above average intelligence, vs. some other
desirable characteristic?

Exceptional intelligence as a strong determinant of economic and social
success (and thus presumably reproductive success) seems to be a relatively
recent phenomenon in the human species.

------
Claudus
The Flynn effect tends to be used to support the feeling that intelligence
isn't something you're born with.

People who think that intelligence is innate will refer to the "g factor".
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29>

The racist (technically speaking) and controversial Jean Rushton believes that
"gains in IQ over time (the Lynn-Flynn effect) are unrelated to g".

What's really going on with discussions like this is that humanity seems to
have come to the conclusion that "smarter is better". Intelligence almost
certainly exists, but is quite difficult to quantify exactly, and is further
complicated by the fact that people resent others who are "better" than them.
Given that there is a genetic component to intelligence to a certain degree,
race becomes a factor and leads to a line of inductive reasoning that makes
people uncomfortable:

    
    
      1) Smarter is better
      2) Intelligence is genetic
      3) Race determines genetics
      4) One race is better than another
      5) Hitler was right (or other outrageous conclusion)
    

As far as I can tell when you see terms like "g factor", "Flynn effect",
"multiple intelligences", "crystallized intelligence", "fluid intelligence",
"cultural fair IQ tests", "The bell curve"... people are really secretly
arguing about one race or sex being smarter than the other, or not.

~~~
bearmf
Points 1-2 are valid, though intelligence is not entirely genetic.

Your points 3-5 are completely wrong. Genetics determines race, not the other
way around. Points 4 and 5 are just meaningless "racist" phrases, not
statements in a line of reasoning.

~~~
ajross
It may be semantics, but genetics certainly does not determine "race" alone.
If it did, "african american" and "hispanic" wouldn't exist as "races". The
idea of classifying people like that doesn't work genetically. First, people
have been interbreeding like rabbits throughout history; there are no "pure"
stocks anywhere. And more importantly, the amount of genetic variation between
any two individuals from the same "race" is much higher than it is,
statistically, between the aggregate genetic profiles of distinct "races".

Basically, "race" is a cultural distinction. It's a label we apply as a proxy
for other stuff (usually cultural). Scientists (well, except anthropologists
studying that cultural stuff) don't use it, and for good reason.

~~~
danielweber
You might fight about what name it's given, but someone's ancestry is
definitely measurable and quite usable by whatever normal scientific tests you
would normally come up with.

Just off the top of my head, there are over 93000 references in PubMed to
"ancestry." They vary whether they call it "race" or "ethnicity" or "region of
ancestral origin" but plenty of adults are quite happy talking about it.

~~~
ajross
You're strawmaning. I didn't say ancestry had no meaning. I said it wasn't
determined genetically, which is 100% true. There's no blood test for "black",
and I encourage you to cite one if you're aware of it. If you have a big
population, you can do things like look at frequencies of specific gene
variants and come up with a guess at where that population came from. But for
one person there's just no way to do it. So: can a person, in isolation, be
part of a genetic "race"? No.

~~~
danielweber
_There's no blood test for "black", and I encourage you to cite one if you're
aware of it._

Now who is strawmanning? (BTW, there is no blood test for autism, yet
scientists are pretty darn sure it's mostly genetic.)

I'm sure you can come up with a definition of "Polynesian" such that genetic
tests would be useless. That more shows that people can some up with useless
definitions. However, someone else can could up with a definition of
"Polynesian" that is useful: people whose ancestors inhabited Polynesia (say)
1000 years ago. And genetic tests for any individual in isolation would be
very very very highly correlated with the actual answer of their ancestors
coming from Polynesia. (There are, of course, people of mixed ancestry, but
this doesn't mean that ancestral measures don't exist no more than
hermaphrodites mean sex doesn't exist.) "Black" would need serious
subdivision, but nothing that makes a person on the street drop their jaw and
say "I never thought of 'Black' that way."

I suspect this is as far as constructive discussion has gone, so I'm going to
stop here if that's okay.

~~~
ajross
Arrgh. I still think you're fundamentally missing my point. You can't treat
"black" via subdivision. The problem is mixing (i.e. most "blacks" are "half
white", etc...), not imprecision. Basically you can't treat "black" at all.
The term _will never_ be useful to scientific study. The fact that there exist
some identifiable ancestral groups will never (!) tell you anything useful
about a typical "black" woman in america.

The same is true of "polynesian" -- sure, they might have been isolated at one
point but by now almost every "polynesian" you meet in Hawaii has a ton of
white and japanese ancestry too (substitute appropriate mixing for Maori or
Samoan and Fijian, etc...), so what use is it to talk about the potential IQ
effects his great-great-grandparents might have had?

Yet the argument at hand (that, as far as I can tell, you are in support of)
is that somehow the "race" of real people can, because it is "genetically
determined", be correlated with something like IQ, which it just can't. It's
far too polluted a data set.

~~~
nostrademons
You're falling into the fallacy of the excluded middle. Just because "black"
doesn't tell you _everything_ about a person doesn't mean it can't tell you
_something_ useful.

That typical (now _there's_ an overgeneral term!) black woman will have a
darker skin color than a typical white woman. She will be less susceptible to
sunburn. She is more likely to suffer from certain genetic diseases like
sickle cell anemia.

Now, none of these are absolute statements. They are all probabilities. That
does not make them _useless_. If someone comes into the ER with severe pain in
their extremities, it is very useful to know that they're black. They may or
may not have sickle cell anemia - that can be determined conclusively through
a blood test and thorough medical examination. But knowing whether they're
_likely_ to is very useful information, because it lets you determine whether
it's worth putting in the extra effort to diagnose it conclusively.
(Similarly, even if they carry the genetic marker, they might not be having a
sickle-cell crisis, and it could be a blood clot or some other medical
condition. But it's pretty damn likely.)

It's a fallacy to believe that just because the data you're working with can't
tell you _everything_ , it tells you _nothing_. Rather, you should recognize
the limitations of what you know, and use them to determine what else you need
to know. Race tells you something. It doesn't tell you a whole lot, because
there's a lot of individual variation within a race. But that doesn't mean it
tells you nothing, either.

------
pmb
Two wonderful companions to this article are "Thinking Intelligence is Innate
Makes You Stupid" [http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2007/12/03/thinking-
intellige...](http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2007/12/03/thinking-intelligence-
is-innate-makes-you-stupid/) and (especially) Cosma Shalizi's article on the
malleability and heritability of IQ
<http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html>

------
tokenadult
Links to information about the book under review, Are We Getting Smarter?:
Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century by James R. Flynn:

[http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item6835805/?site...](http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item6835805/?site_locale=en_GB)

[http://www.amazon.com/Are-We-Getting-Smarter-Twenty-
First/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Are-We-Getting-Smarter-Twenty-
First/dp/1107609178)

(The three expert reviewers shown on Amazon are all very impressive
researchers on human intelligence in their own right, so their joint
endorsement of Flynn's book carries a lot of weight for people like me who
follow the research.)

Here is what Arthur Jensen said about Flynn back in the 1980s: "Now and then I
am asked . . . who, in my opinion, are the most respectable critics of my
position on the race-IQ issue? The name James R. Flynn is by far the first
that comes to mind." Modgil, Sohan & Modgil, Celia (Eds.) (1987) Arthur
Jensen: Concensus and Controversy New York: Falmer.

AFTER EDIT: Replying to another top-level comment:

 _I don't understand how anyone could not have an emotional response being
told 'your IQ is x'._

People have emotional responses to most statements about themselves that they
think are overall evaluations. Some of those emotional responses are more
warranted than others. Devote some reading time to the best literature on IQ
testing (besides the book under review in this thread, that would include
Mackintosh's second edition textbook IQ and Human Intelligence

[http://www.amazon.com/IQ-Human-Intelligence-Nicholas-
Mackint...](http://www.amazon.com/IQ-Human-Intelligence-Nicholas-
Mackintosh/dp/0199585598/)

and the Sternberg-Kaufman Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence,

[http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Handbook-Intelligence-
Handbo...](http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Handbook-Intelligence-Handbooks-
Psychology/dp/052173911X/)

both recently published). Any of these books will help readers understand that
IQ tests are samples of learned behavior and are not exhaustive reports on an
individual's profile of developed abilities.

AFTER ANOTHER EDIT:

Discussion of heritability of IQ, a reliable indicator of how much discussants
read the current scientific literature on the subject, has ensued in some
other subthreads here. Heritability of IQ has nothing whatever to do with
malleability (or, if you prefer this terminology, controllability) of human
intelligence. That point has been made by the leading researchers on human
behaviorial genetics in their recent articles that I frequently post in
comments here on HN. It is a very common conceptual blunder, which should be
corrected in any well edited genetics textbook, to confuse broad heritability
estimates with statements about how malleable human traits are. The two
concepts actually have no relationship at all. Highly heritable traits can be
very malleable, and the other way around.

Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas
(2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20\(2009\).pdf)

is an interesting paper that includes the statement "Moreover, even highly
heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so
heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example,
height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come
from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full
6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."

Another interesting paper,

Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental
research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20\(2008\).pdf)

admits the disappointment of behavioral genetics researchers.

"But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who
has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about
it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how
genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of
heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. Once the twin
registries have been assembled, it’s easy and fun, like having a genoscope you
can point at one trait after another to take a reading of how genetic things
are. Height? Very genetic. Intelligence? Pretty genetic. Schizophrenia? That
looks pretty genetic too. Personality? Yep, that too. And over multiple
studies and traits the heritabilities go up and down, providing the basis for
nearly infinite Talmudic revisions of the grand theories of the heritability
of things, perfect grist for the wheels of social science.

"Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn’t an
index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the
effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that
somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There
are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of
them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An
effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of
the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held
constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the
variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical.
With a moment’s thought you can see that the answer to the question of how
much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends
crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place."

The review article "The neuroscience of human intelligence differences" by
Deary and Johnson and Penke (2010) relates specifically to human intelligence:

[http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neur...](http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neuroscience_of_intelligence_review.pdf)

"At this point, it seems unlikely that single genetic loci have major effects
on normal-range intelligence. For example, a modestly sized genome-wide study
of the general intelligence factor derived from ten separate test scores in
the cAnTAB cognitive test battery did not find any important genome-wide
single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate
genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive
ability[note 48]."

The review article Johnson, W. (2010). Understanding the Genetics of
Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 19(3), 177-182

[http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/...](http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/Johnson%20Current%20Directions%20Psych%20Science%202010%20\(G%20and%20E%20in%20IQ\).pdf)

looks at some famous genetic experiments to show how little is explained by
gene frequencies even in thoroughly studied populations defined by artificial
selection.

"Together, however, the developmental natures of GCA and height, the likely
influences of gene–environment correlations and interactions on their
developmental processes, and the potential for genetic background and
environmental circumstances to release previously unexpressed genetic
variation suggest that very different combinations of genes may produce
identical IQs or heights or levels of any other psychological trait. And the
same genes may produce very different IQs and heights against different
genetic backgrounds and in different environmental circumstances."

~~~
nostrademons
"did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or
copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had
previously been associated with cognitive ability"

It's worth making another point here - just because there is no single gene
for a trait does not make in unheritable, and just because a trait is genetic
does not mean there is a single gene for it.

Eye color, for example, is clearly a genetic trait, but may be controlled by
as many as 16 different genes. Race is also genetic, but really is shorthand
for variation in _hundreds_ , maybe thousands of genes.

It's well-established that intelligence is polygenic. That doesn't mean it's
not genetic - if everybody had the same genes, ~80% of the variation in
intelligence would be eliminated. It also doesn't mean that there's a single
genetic switch we can throw to design a master race of human geniuses. It
means exactly what it says: that there are some combination of genes that
interact together to produce ~70-90% of the variance in the measured quantity
that we label "intelligence".

~~~
eevilspock
_"Race is also genetic, but really is shorthand for variation in hundreds,
maybe thousands of genes."_

There's a subtlety in your statement that I think will be lost on too many
people, even more so given the juxtaposition with the statement about eye
color. So at the risk of sounding pedantic...

Race is _not_ a trait like eye color. Variations in the human gene pool are
not evenly distributed geographically or across ethnic groups for a number of
historical reasons. Many of these genes manifest in our physical appearance.
But there is no countable number of races. Dividing humanity into 3, 4, 5 or
even a hundred races is totally artificial. All you have to do is walk from
Europe to SE Asia, or Europe to Africa via the middle east and you will see a
gradual change, a gradient for each of the observed physical differences.

So description of "race" as a "shorthand" is spot on. Sadly it is a poor
shorthand because most everyone conceive of race as discrete types of humans.

Sigh.

~~~
nostrademons
If you have a broad enough cultural background, eye color is not a simple
discrete trait either.

I was eavesdropping on the conversation behind me on the bus today:

"What color would you describe your eyes as?" a guy asks.

"Green-ish. Something like that," a girl answers.

"Good, you didn't say hazel. A bunch of people would've called them that."

And then followed a whole long discussion about how you can basically perform
hierarchical agglomerative clustering on humanity's words for colors, if you
follow the words linguistically back through a few thousand years. Apparently
the first split happened between light & dark, and then broad colors like
"blue/green" (as a single color) split off, and then modern languages broke
blue & green into separate colors.

Some folks break them down even further, into "cerulean" and "turquoise" and
"aquamarine" and "royal blue". I've heard (from sources other than the bus
conversation) that women actually have significantly more color words in their
vocabulary than men do; they make distinctions where men don't.

So eye color is a shorthand too. Some people just say "light" or "dark".
Others say "brown" or "blue". Still others will break it down into "black",
"brown", "blue", "green", and "hazel". Once in a while you'll get a poetic
type who'll say "Eyes the color of a roiling sea, as you catch the last
glimpse of sunlight before a storm rolls in."

Bringing it back on topic, _intelligence_ is a shorthand as well. It stands
for a bunch of directly observable characteristics, but _which_
characteristics vary depending on who you ask. Some people think an
intelligent person is one with a high IQ who always does well on standardized
tests. Others think it's someone who accomplishes great things in the
intellectual realm, another Tesla or Einstein. Still others define it as a
talent, and claim there're multiple intelligences, each in one desirable
realm.

Perhaps the meta-lesson isn't about race or eye color or heritability at all,
it's to drill down and ask what we actually mean by such broad
characteristics. When you make a statement such as "IQ has a heritability of
0.8", you're making a very specific statistical assertion (though even that's
not ironclad: _which_ IQ test?). But whether that lines up with the statement
of "Intelligence is largely genetic" depends on what you mean by
"intelligence" and "genetic", both of which are very broad concepts that hide
a lot of subtlety.

~~~
bad_user
On intelligence being a shorthand, I would add that some people define it as
having an extremely good memory.

There are many people with an extreme capacity for memorizing facts and
images. It is said that one of our national poets, Eminescu, wasn't able to
forget anything.

By this classification, many people are and were smarter than Einstein, who
apparently couldn't remember his son's or wife's birthday, or know how many
feet are in a mile (although this may be just folklore). Einstein also started
to speak a lot later than normal kids, at 3 years old by his own testimony and
performed badly in his first years of elementary school, with his parents
being warned that he had a mental disability.

And yet he was able to come up with the relativity theory, which goes to show
that intelligence is indeed relative.

~~~
lutusp
> On intelligence being a shorthand, I would add that some people define it as
> having an extremely good memory.

That's the old popular definition of intelligence, the "walking encyclopedia"
model. But books, and more recently computers, have greatly reduced the value
of that kind of intelligence, by being better at it than any person.

Now that we have more facts at our fingertips than we can possibly absorb, a
different kind of intelligence is (a) more valuable, and (b) more likely to
arise from the interaction between a human and an inexhaustible source of
facts (like a computer) -- the ability to synthesize new ideas out of old
ones.

In olden times, simply being able to recite facts was prized, but books and
computers can now do that more efficiently -- consider that a computer
recently prevailed in "Jeopardy" against a selection of very good human
contestants.

The new indicator of intelligence is the ability to come to an original
conclusion based on a mass of accumulated facts. Because fact collecting is
more easily done by a computer, and because of the value of the ability to
create new ideas out of old ones, this new meaning for intelligence may well
become dominant by way of natural selection.

Here's an example I heard recently while reading about planetary science:

1\. Jupiter's moon Io has volcanoes, but it's too small for those volcanoes to
have the same cause as those here (Io has long since lost the heat arising
from its original formation). This means that many people were able to
_describe_ Io's volcanoes, but no one could _explain_ them.

2\. Io also has an elliptical orbit around Jupiter -- which means it moves
closer to, then farther from, Jupiter, during each orbit.

Someone put facts (1) and (2) together and realized that it was Io's
elliptical orbit, and the consequent huge flexure of tidal force within Io's
solid mass, that's heating the moon and providing the energy source for the
volcanoes.

It is this kind of intelligence that is recognized -- prized -- in the present
and future: the ability to synthesize.

------
kevinpet
I have no idea what is the author of the articles opinion, and what is from
the book being reviewed. I'm not even sure what the title of the book being
reviewed is.

~~~
agscala
I'm glad I wasn't the only one completely confused. I have no idea what he was
trying to say, I can't imagine what his book is like.

------
mistercow
>For this to happen, evolution would have had to have accelerated to light
speed.

What? No... no. There are plenty of ways that intelligence could have
dramatically increased since the '30s without any evolutionary effects.

------
bearmf
And still IQ is very good at predicting various life outcomes: probabliity of
being arrested, income, number of children.

Group differences in IQ do exist, and Flynn effect does not make them go away.
Flynn effect increases scores across the board, it does not equalize different
groups.

Black people in US have lower average IQ than white people do, Asian people
have higher average IQ. The reasons for this are many, but genetics certainly
comes into play: IQ is heritable.

Trying to explain away group differences by "culture" is mostly bad science -
trying to make the facts fir your desired conclusions.

~~~
Steko
Key takeaway from the article:

 _Flynn’s interpretation overturns one of the most ­dangerous myths of IQ
research — that blacks have been shown to be fundamentally less intelligent
than whites. With what seems to me to be a series of cast-iron statistical
analyses, he shows that this has, in fact, never been proved ... What the
evidence actually shows is that racial differences, once all external factors
are removed (primarily the social and cultural context of the testees), seem
to be almost undetectably small._

~~~
Daniel_Newby
The twin adoption studies disprove this. Adult twins resemble each other more
than anyone else, and resemble their adoptive families no more than they
resemble families selected at random.

I have not read Flynn's book yet, but he will have to do something amazing to
explain away the twin adoption studies.

~~~
tokenadult
_I have not read Flynn's book yet, but he will have to do something amazing to
explain away the twin adoption studies._

Do read his book. You will surely learn something. The references to recent
publications on heritability that I posted as a second edit to my comment at
the highest comment level in this thread (currently the top comment in the
thread) include several publications by researchers who have worked on the
Minnesota Twin Study and other twin studies. I join a weekly journal club
during the school year with most of the researchers on the Minnesota Twin
Study (one of whom, coincidentally, is my fifth cousin) and I rely on them to
keep me up to date with what the latest research shows.

And what the latest research shows, after we look at all the twin study
findings, is fully consistent with HN user Steko's quotation from the review
of James R. Flynn's new book, the parent comment to your comment.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4461603>

------
Dylan16807
_These people aren’t any less intelligent than the researcher — their minds
just work differently. They focus on the practicalities they know rather than
hypothetical possibilities._

That's going to need some explanation. First off, I can see how the question
itself is abstract, about a place they have never been, but "no camels" sounds
extremely concrete to me. Second, how is ignoring information anything other
than a lapse in intelligent thought?

~~~
azakai
>> These people aren’t any less intelligent than the researcher — their minds
just work differently. They focus on the practicalities they know rather than
hypothetical possibilities.

> That's going to need some explanation. First off, I can see how the question
> itself is abstract, about a place they have never been, but "no camels"
> sounds extremely concrete to me. Second, how is ignoring information
> anything other than a lapse in intelligent thought?

The underlying point is valid, but it was not explained well in the article.

The point is that "extremely concrete" is always relative to language. For
example, in the bible, "40 years" meant something like "a long long time", not
40 literal years. Likewise, a "foot" today does not mean a concrete human foot
(although it originated as a particular one). A more annoying example today is
that "literally" no longer means "literally" ("I literally died when ...").

To be specific about this example, it is possible that saying "There are no
camels in Germany; how many camels are there in city X?" is interpreted in
different ways in different languages and cultures. Perhaps "there are no
camels" means "camels do not naturally live in that area", but there could be
camels brought there artificially, say to be in a zoo. And especially when
asking "how many camels are there in city X?", the implication is that
specific details about city X matter, for example if it has a zoo or not. The
person being asked might try to guess if it has a zoo based on the city size
etc.

Also worth noting that the question is of the form of a classic logic puzzle.
That sort of thing is part of the Western cultural tradition since ancient
Greece. But other cultures have other traditions.

See also the philosopher Wittgenstein on "following a rule". No sentence in
any language is ever so concrete that it cannot be interpreted in many ways.

~~~
Dylan16807
Ah, I hadn't even thought of it being a phrasing that is hard to translate.
Interesting idea.

------
avatarlite
Anyone interested in this topic should read the primary research papers.

The pattern of differences in IQ test answers between generations is not
congruent with the pattern of differences between individual who do better and
worse on average within generations -- at least according to the few studies
which have looked at this question. For this reason, we can infer that the
generational changes in IQ test scores are not changes in the same underlying
factor that causes differences in performance within a generation. If we call
the factor that causes within-generation differences in IQ test scores
intelligence, then what differs between generations isn't intelligence. In
other words, the Flynn effect is something other than what it might appear at
first glance. It's still something of a mystery.

Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis can be used to demonstrate this, or
you can just look at the correlation matrices.

------
pixelcort
OT: Just me, or does browser zoom not seem to increase font size for this page
in Safari and Chrome?

~~~
peregrine
Super annoying, I had to read it in Instapaper just to cope.

------
pud
Unrelated to the content, when I use Command-plus to increase the font size on
this blog (in Chrome, at least), the font doesn't grow.

Which means I can't read it, because my eyes suck.

------
Alex3917
"contrary to widespread assumptions, no clear link between nutrition and IQ
has been found."

Someone call up Paul Krugman and tell him that iodine deficiency doesn't
actually cause mental retardation.

------
aaron695
To not know the answer to "there are no camels in Germany so how many camels
do they think there are in B, a specific German city? " is not a cultural
difference, to think that other cultures are seriously that dumb is more a
statement on ones self than anything else.

This is similar to statements engineers sometimes make that the Chinese are
good copiers but can't innovate.

No, cultures are the same as everyone else. They have humour, art and like to
tinker and have in jokes. If they don't publicly innovate it's more likely
it's not economical in that environment yet.

The fact 'camels' was used has strong undertones to me, if this was an
actually a study I'd be interested to know.

~~~
eru
> No, cultures are the same as everyone else. They have humour, art and like
> to tinker and have in jokes.

Oh, cultures share lots of features. But I've been in a few. Even countries as
geographically close as Britain and Germany have quite a few differences.

