Those studies are useless my friend. Money is better spent on something else. Intelligence? What is that? Everyone is intellligent. The trouble with 95% of men is that they lack that ‘calling.’ Once they discover their ‘calling,’ you will see how intelligent they are. The problem is that most men will never find it.
Yes, but I already found my calling, and now am analyzing macro-historic patterns in human intelligence, and fiddeling with forecasting…because it is fun and interesting to me.
Why, if the rate of decline in IQ is supposed to be a function of population, is this a linear forecast and not an exponential or logarithmic one?
Both of your explanations are reasons why men would have IQ>135, but you’re not explaining all the facts. Men have more outliers in both groups: IQ>135 and IQ<65. Men have increased genetic variation. Evolution effects might account for that, maybe, but I don’t think cranial capacity can.
Can we really use tool use, meat consumption and cranial capacity as proxies for intelligence? If we are using tool use as a proxy for intelligence, it would seem to me that we are using more and more advanced tools today than we were 30k years ago. Further, I’d say that our too use is accelerating and did not peak 30k years ago. The first airplane flight was only about 100 years ago. This is not to say that people are moving towards higher IQ or lower IQ, but only to point out that using tool use as a proxy for IQ doesn’t seem to prove that people had higher IQs 30k years ago. Additionally, wouldn’t it be extremely hard to determine long term trends in intelligence simply because long term data (going ot 30k years ago) is nonexistent?
purealpha said that we analyze using the evidence which exists, not the evidence which does not exist. And when we don’t have evidence, we just assert that it must exist, because cranial capacity explains everything about how intelligent we would be if we have schools and books and writing and videos and tools and everything else that is actually required to become intelligent about stuff.
By calling it “genetic intelligence” one succesfully makes the argument immune to any reasonable measure of acutal intelligence, since how smart an educated person is today is completely irrelevant to the discussion, because the claim is that a similarly educated paleolithic man or woman would be smarter - something that we will never be able to observe or measure. So the claim is pretty much immune to experiment or observation, except the claim that ancient skulls had more room in them than modern ones.
As a result, whales and elephants are obviously far more genetically intelligent in meaningful ways than we are.
I have nothing meaningful to add to this thread, but it seems to be a decent thread with good intentions, so I’m bumping it up the page.
Certainly purealpha’s wheel house. He seems to have actually studied the topic. Everyone else sounds like geo chiming in on aviation related topics.
“classes will dull your mind. destroy any potential for any real creativity” john nash.
I just felt like saying that.
pretty decent smackdown. pa says he’s studied/worked on the subject but has yet to provide anything that is concrete and/or convincing in any way as per bchad’s smackdown.
as for the 8:1 male to female ratio of high IQ people, is most of this due to lack of stimulation and IQ measurement for a large part of the female popluation vs. the numerous opportunities available for high IQ men? also, if part of this is due to men being better at math at the tail end, this anomaly only exists in 1/2 of OECD countries so again, there could be an issue with the conclusion here as education, not cranial capacity may be the #1 indicator of this ratio and a society’s intelligence at any given time.
i side with bchad and think that making grand conclusions about intelligence between two distant points in time is a fruitless exercise. isn’t the “best of your society” all that matters anyway? does anybody care about the 1.9B+ people who lived alongside Einstein? does average intelligence matter? the bottom line is that the average person is far too intelligent for the average job available to them. i think that tells you that as a society, we can’t deal with people being smarter anyway. maybe this is how we get dumber. when there aren’t enough stimulating jobs, we just opt to be dumb. that said, there has always been a glut of intelligence relative to the number of jobs avaialble to serve that intelligence.
^The whole women don’t have opportunities is a bit weak as an explanation for the significant gap in IQs.
There has been a significant decline in gender discrimination over the past 100 years. I could get convinced by the argument that discrimination prevents high IQ women from taking a path that leads them to hard science fields, but we’re not talking about jobs, we’re talking about abstract reasoning. In my experience, high IQ women are encouraged plenty in school, far more so than at any time in the past. If discrimination were the cause of the wide ratio than the decline in discrimination should have reduced the gender gap. That it hasn’t suggests your theory does not fit the facts.
In addition, they test kids IQs at early ages and look for sex differences. The differences are there regardless of the age (above like 2). If discrimination is the explanation, then you would expect it to not be there much when young, but then to expand as they get older.
When you’re 2, 3, and 4 give you a bunch of guns and balls and targets and baskets to make and tell you you’re an awesome guy when you’re good at them. Then I give you a spatial reasoning test and discover that you’re better at abstract spatial reasoning than the kid I have a bunch of dolls and faux cooking implements to and who I praise for looking cute in a pink dress.
My conclusion, boys are genetically wired to have higher IQs.
My coworkers with different gender kids say the girls and boys choose different toys themselves. Maybe these parents are just self deluded, but it is also possible that kids’ preference do depend on gender and that parents just respond to their kids’ desires.
^Not sure if that’s directed at my response or not, but your hypothetical conclusion is that the average boy would have a higher IQ than the average girl. I don’t recall anyone taking that view here. I certainly don’t believe there is much difference in average male/female IQ. However, there are differences in the distributions due to the higher variability in male IQ. I don’t see differences in toys as explaining variability, even at a young age.
Regardless, the male/female IQ thing is tangential to the original point of the thread, so I’m not inclined to spend much more time thinking about it.
This is why I like investing. Us low IQ people invest in companies run by high IQ people, and benefit from their labor alongside them.
No, there are multipe drivers.
The correlation is around .4, not 1, not -1. I think we all passed level 1, yes?
No, see brain to body ratio, and encephalization quotient.
Yes, we already know that, wider standard deviation.
No, cranial capacity is part of the puzzle, the correlation in humans is around .4. The correlation is there in all animals, nobody smart disputes this…start with a review of EQ.
See population increase driving massive increase in count of geniuses. There are multiple drivers and you have to see all in your mind at once, not individually. All this is included in my earier post, reread.
Also tech is a stair case, you go up each stair one at a time (you must invent metal and internal combustion before you invent a tank). Time + count of geniuses + ability to record/share knoweldge, etc.
No, this is just what political types say to explain away the data. It is genetic, and no amount of “increased opportunity” is going to change genetics. If you look at the world’s top IQ people, they are almost all men. If you work in a “high iq field” where geniuses are the natural resource (invention), it’s almost all men. These outliers dominate nearly every field (art, business, science, etc).
When analyzing a topic, becoming emotional about it, or identified with a “side”, is counterproductive to reaching the correct answer.