What are the implications of the Flynn effect for the relation between genetics and IQ? I've always understood that IQ is primarily genetic and difficult to change, but if the Flynn effect shows that environmental factors like improved nutrition and education can cause such a rapid increase over a relatively short period of time, then does this mean that IQ is to a large extent environmental? Doesn't this show that any group could rapidly raise its IQ in the matter of a few generations given an improved environment more conducive to intellectual growth? What am I missing here?
What are the implications of the Flynn effect for the relation between genetics and IQ...
Adrian Brooks
Ryan Morgan
I believe you're missing the Flynn effect.
Easton Nelson
1.50% of variance in intelligence is explainable by genes
2.flynn effect comes in - probably works on environmental factors
3.it shows A group can rapidly raise its IQ, not any group
some groups can, some can't
i'd say most can, most can't
african and australian max is somewhere in the 80's (maoris excluded)
most others are 90+
Ryder Gray
Nutrition affects IQ tests drastically, and I'm not talking nutrition in terms of how your brain developed based on the food you got as a child - I'm talking about what you ate for breakfast the morning of the IQ test, or how long after lunch it was when you had it administered. A 20 to 30+ point drift from such factors is considered the norm.
IQ tests only check for the ability to recognize patterns and memorize numbers. The more you practice those two things in daily life, the better your IQ scores are going to be. As time goes on, more and more people are in fields or in education where they rely on those tasks daily, and games involving puzzles involving such tasks are increasing in popularity as well as in their complexity. This is why, for instance, switchboard operators in the 70's tend to score the same as physicists, even when the switchboard operators came from lower class backgrounds.
Until we come up with an intelligence test that is either more comprehensive or more objective, such as a neural connectivity scan that doesn't involve you being dead in order to have it done, IQ is a pretty arbitrary thing, really only somewhat useful in grand statistical terms, and in identifying specific learning disabilities in individuals.
Blake King
How do you explain the predictive power of IQ then?
Justin Bailey
he lied to mike pence
Jaxson Butler
Hogwash and wishful thinking, mostly.
tandfonline.com
Hundreds of studies prior to the 1970s reported that correlations between IQ tests and job performance were low (approximately 0.2–0.3) and variable, sometimes even negative. Then some folks pushing for IQ based filtering "corrected" that data in rather arbitrary ways, and came up with their own numbers, magically doubling the correlations. Pretty much all the "predictive" IQ statements made since then are all based on a single, very flawed, study. Then you get into shit like the Fortune 500 claim, that simply ignore the fact that their IQ's are actually average for their demographic.
Which is all odd, as one would assume people who are better at pattern recognition and memory would do better at school and thus do better in the job market, but those two factors alone seem to be rather marginal in the grand scheme of things, probably because it's a narrow range of things to test for to begin with, and tested for in a very narrow fashion, even within that already narrow scope.
It's basically akin to stating that folks who can read the top E on the chart have 20x20 vision, do better in school as a result, while ignoring the fact that glasses exist.
Psychometry is a combination of social statistics and psychology - two things that, under any other circumstance, Veeky Forums will insist aren't science.
Brandon Rivera
The Flynn effect is reversing in developed nations. It's most likely the Flynn effect was just a recuperation of environmentally induced retardation of IQ (e.g. poor nutrition).
Michael Brown
Spot the brainwashed moron who doesn't have a clue about what he's talking about.
Adrian Jenkins
Almost everything you claim is provably false. Textbook SJW: lying through their teeth with impunity.
Thomas Fisher
The flynn effect is pretty mysterious and no one is really sure whats going on, so its too early to say environmental factors are making everyone smarter. In the Bell Curve, Charles Murray pins it on measurement error, and says that when you correct for that, people are getting dumber at a rate of 3 IQ points per century. Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending say the same thing.
Asher Martin
Nice arguments. You're talking to a guy above 3 sigma, in IQ.
Let non-brainlets have their serious discussion, okay?
Ethan Myers
This is the correct answer.
Lynn explains this in Dysgenics..
Josiah Green
Then post your sources then. Or does your 99th percentile IQ give you the privilege of dismissing contrary evidence with ad hominems?
Oliver Cruz
Correct.
EVEN taking the correlation of 0.5 AT FACE VALUE - it's still not very high.
Since that means it explains 25% of the variance in job performance.
Mason Edwards
From what I've gathered, IQ can be largely improved through education, though temporarily. My theory is that, for the general population, which has no contact with academia (either because they have never studied at all or because they have already got their degrees), IQ is a good measure of intelligence. In students and professors, however, it is inflated.
By educating oneself, a person is indirectly praticing for IQ tests, specially in STEM. I've seen people report a dramatic increase in their IQ after a few years in college. And I think that once they are done and not studying anymore, their IQ will decrease (not as down as before though. Education can actually make us more intelligent), but not because they became dumber, but because they aren't training anymore. They are still very much able to use logic to solve real life problems, but since they aren't used to use the symbolic and spatial reasoning that IQ evaluates, their score will get lower as time goes by.
You can see that with physics students: they have the highest average IQ, because their major trains them to solve IQ tests better than any other. It's either that or it magically attracts only very above average people.
>inb4 the non-geniuses flunk halfway in
That is true for a lot of people, but I don't think that's the case for the majority of physics undergraduates. I mean, it's physics, not mechanical engineering. It is a very niche course, that only the passionate will even regard as an option. Most physics undergrads start with average IQs, have their score increased throughout the years, and maintained, as most choose the academic path.
TL;DR I don't think people in academia are truly way above the rest of the population in raw intelligence, it's just that for them IQ is meaningless, as they are indirectly training for it all the time
Logan Perez
>From what I've gathered, IQ can be largely improved through education
You've gathered wrong.
/thread
Jonathan Perry
I don't care what your IQ is. You're spreading misinformation.
Oliver Gray
Reversing or flattening out?
Noah Murphy
>I don't know what IQ is
Eli Cook
There is a difference between fluid and crystalized intelligence. Fluid is basically tied to biological factors and sets the upper limit on intellectual ability. Crystalized is affected by education, routine, and practice. One tangentially related example is language. If a human does not learn a language in their first few years it becomes exceedingly difficult for them to ever learn a language.
Camden Myers
Reversing.
Luke Hill
i find that to be bs since 50% of variance in fluid is explained by genes and 40% in crystalized
not that it matters too much, since 'the predictive power' of IQ is apparently only to explain 25% of variance in job performance AT MOST and it's most likely lower
Matthew Wood
>Lynn explains
:^)
Oliver Hill
If you have found a reliable way to actually increase IQ, bare in mind that you are eligible for the Nobel Prize.
Because we've accounted for the possibility of 'training' your IQ many times before.
Dylan Mitchell
>From what I've gathered, IQ can be largely improved through education
>You've gathered wrong.
He's gathered right. Education has a radical effect on IQ tests, pretty much more radical than any other factor, as has been demonstrated over and over again in twin studies, where it's often a 50+pt difference.
Education involves pretty much nothing but repetitious memorisation and pattern recognition. Like anything else, the more time your brain spends repeating a task at rote, the more specialized it becomes towards said task and tasks like it. IQ tests are no exception.
Just about the only thing that has a more drastic effect on IQ, is repeatedly taking IQ tests, which is why you require a year between tests for them to be considered valid.
Whether it has an effect on actual potential intelligence, that's another question, but as there is currently no other real test for that, it's a philosophical question, rather than a scientific one. But for IQ, education correlates stronger than nearly anything.
Evan Anderson
>He's gathered right. Education has a radical effect on IQ tests, pretty much more radical than any other factor, as has been demonstrated over and over again in twin studies, where it's often a 50+pt difference.
sauce
i've read about 15 points difference, but 50?
Lucas Turner
Don't be surprised if he/she/it cites some obscure postmodernist journal article.
John Gray
says the guy who probably gets all his info from bloggers
Luis Walker
The most profound educational effect on IQ is simply literacy. Obviously a higher illiteracy rate is going to result in lower test scores when the test subject can't even answer the questions.
Also, single nutritional deficiencies (like iodine deficiency) are known to cause a decrease in IQ scores by about a standard deviation in affected areas.
I would really like to see a study that analyses the impact of each deficiency (nutritional or educational) individually and together. I suspect its possible to have quite a massive effect size.
Dylan Gonzalez
>50%
No
80%
Charles Bailey
Shut the fuck up
Standardized IQ tests have a reliability of .9-.99. that's higher than the reliability of your kitchen scale. That means the expected variance between two seperate tests on the same person is smaller than the expected variance between weight measurements on a standard scale. So definitely not 20-30 IQ points.
Has it happened? Probably.
Is it the norm? Fuck no.
Evan Stewart
This thread is a clusterfuck and i hope this isn't the general view of IQ.
"The discovery of general intelligence is regarded as one of the highest achievements of modern psychology" -Richard Haier, the neuroscience of intelligence
The only reason people disagree with IQ is because it's trendy, contrarian and a good virtue signal. IQ is 80% heritable. IQ predicts not only social outcomes like job performance, educational achievement and economic success with great accuracy, it even correlates very strongly with brain glucose metabolism (negatively i might add, that is, more efficiently) and brain signal processing in MEGs.
There is NO way to significantly influence your IQ in the long term. IQ can be manipulated, especially in children (since heritibility goes up with age, from 40 to 80%) but evens out in the long run, as shown in many many twin studies (transracial adoption studies come to mind. Read the bell curve or bias in mental testing). Batteries of mental tests are more reliable for testing IQ than weights scales are for weight, and even more reliable than conventional blood pressure tests (see research by kanazawa).
To deny the value of IQ, or more importantly (but almost equivalently, as they correlate strongly) the g-factor, is ignorant and unscientific.
Don't cherrypick studies that make you feel good. Read a significant portion of the literature, THEN make up your mind.
See the intelligence paradox by kanazawa for a good beginner's book on IQ
Parker Cook
>predictive power of IQ is hogwash
Bullshit.
Cameron Smith
So what exactly should I eat in the morning to boost my IQ during an exam?
Luis Anderson
Isn't it to be expected that education increases IQ simple because you learn how to handle tests properly? Time management, save difficult questions for last, etc. Seems trivial, but someone that is not used to that kind of situations might be struggling.
Easton Russell
Not him, but as someone who gives IQ tests as part of his work (to separate SED students from the learning disabled) - no, just no. IQ tests vary wildly. They are expected to vary by an average of 30 points if taken less than a week apart - there's a reason you can only have a valid test once per year, and even between years, IQ tests are expected to be +/-30. I suppose your bathroom scale might vary that much on an annual basis, but not a weekly one, barring shark attacks.
They are a good tool for detecting specific learning disabilities. They are an alright tool for social statistics when it comes to folks under similar education and circumstances. They are, however, in no way objective nor reliable as a consistent measure of intelligence. Anything can skew it to hell, from what the individual ate that morning, to who gives the test. Just within the statistics gathered by my own office, which does maybe a hundred tests a week, we recently had notice that part of our own studies indicate that the younger women who give tests have their subjects return scores on average 1.45 times higher, on average, than those administered by the older gentlemen, despite the fact we're all testing students from all over a fairly uniform school district.
I've had three IQ tests over three decades myself, none of the results were within 20 points of each other. I've rarely encountered anyone who has had more than one properly administered IQ test within 10 points of his or her last.
Lucas Parker
What IQ test or tests do you use?
Please be specific.
Bentley Young
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
nature.com
twin heritability is not necessarily the same as heritability since you can have uterus effects, socially people who look the same will have similar outcomes + in twin studies you can't control for environment completely
+heritability depends on the environment since heritability is just a number for how much of the variance is explainable by genes
but i agree, twin heritability is 0.75 (according to the APA)
notice the second one finds a very strong correlation between childhood and adult intelligence despite what psychologists have claimed for a long time
anyways, iq isn't more reliable than weight scales - makes you sound absurd when you say that
Austin Evans
Another interesting thing here:
>The American Psychological Association's 1995 report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns stated that the correlation between IQ and crime was −0.2. It was −0.19 between IQ scores and number of juvenile offenses in a large Danish sample; with social class controlled, the correlation dropped to −0.17. A correlation of 0.20 means that the explained variance is 4%. The causal links between psychometric ability and social outcomes may be indirect. Children with poor scholastic performance may feel alienated. Consequently, they may be more likely to engage in delinquent behavior, compared to other children who do well.
hmmm, some 'predictive power'