This link has been bookmarked by 43 people . It was first bookmarked on 11 Dec 2007, by someone privately.
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31 Oct 11
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Flynn brings a similar precision to the question of whether Asians have a genetic advantage in I.Q., a possibility that has led to great excitement among I.Q. fundamentalists in recent years. Data showing that the Japanese had higher I.Q.s than people of European descent, for example, prompted the British psychometrician and eugenicist Richard Lynn to concoct an elaborate evolutionary explanation involving the Himalayas, really cold weather, premodern hunting practices, brain size, and specialized vowel sounds. The fact that the I.Q.s of Chinese-Americans also seemed to be elevated has led I.Q. fundamentalists to posit the existence of an international I.Q. pyramid, with Asians at the top, European whites next, and Hispanics and blacks at the bottom.
Here was a question tailor-made for James Flynn’s accounting skills. He looked first at Lynn’s data, and realized that the comparison was skewed. Lynn was comparing American I.Q. estimates based on a representative sample of schoolchildren with Japanese estimates based on an upper-income, heavily urban sample. Recalculated, the Japanese average came in not at 106.6 but at 99.2. Then Flynn turned his attention to the Chinese-American estimates. They turned out to be based on a 1975 study in San Francisco’s Chinatown using something called the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Test. But the Lorge-Thorndike test was normed in the nineteen-fifties. For children in the nineteen-seventies, it would have been a piece of cake. When the Chinese-American scores were reassessed using up-to-date intelligence metrics, Flynn found, they came in at 97 verbal and 100 nonverbal. Chinese-Americans had slightly lower I.Q.s than white Americans.
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Flynn took a different approach. The black-white gap, he pointed out, differs dramatically by age. He noted that the tests we have for measuring the cognitive functioning of infants, though admittedly crude, show the races to be almost the same. By age four, the average black I.Q. is 95.4—only four and a half points behind the average white I.Q. Then the real gap emerges: from age four through twenty-four, blacks lose six-tenths of a point a year, until their scores settle at 83.4.
That steady decline, Flynn said, did not resemble the usual pattern of genetic influence. Instead, it was exactly what you would expect, given the disparate cognitive environments that whites and blacks encounter as they grow older. Black children are more likely to be raised in single-parent homes than are white children—and single-parent homes are less cognitively complex than two-parent homes. The average I.Q
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20 Feb 11
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25 Dec 08
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13 Jan 08
J. DunnOur great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on IQ tests because they did not participate in the 20th century's great cognitive revolution. An IQ measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.
culture ideas ideas.counterintuition ideas.education ideas.intelligence ideas.modernism ideas.objectivity ideas.naturenurture issues issues.class issues.race
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09 Jan 08
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28 Dec 07
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19 Dec 07
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The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories.
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Matthew Elliot"To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952."
books children culture education DNA evolution genetics history parenting politics psychology race racism research science society statistics studies sociology immigration for:godammitkitty for:sassywho iq for:racialicious for:sylviasrevenge for:skdadl fo
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14 Dec 07
dustdaughterIf what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate, what explains the Flynn effect—the steady rise in scores across generations?
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13 Dec 07
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This is a critical distinction. When the children of Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. “Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?” the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. “Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?”
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11 Dec 07
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Tom ButlerIQ tests are culturally bound--they measure what a culture is "supposed" to know if one is of that culture and "smart."
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Ari RGladwell on the Flynn effect: "I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as the tests had been administered...What remains uncertain is how to make sense of the Flynn effect. If an Ame
society race racism psychology history science education genetics iq intelligence malcolmgladwell jamesflynn flynneffect jameswatson
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10 Dec 07
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ken .Gladwell on the Flynn effect, and Flynn's debate with Charles Murray - IQ reflecting more than intelligence, also, in-part, world we're raised in (both nature, nurture and peers?) - gaps hint at different social spheres - mind as muscle, needs exercise
culture education history intelligence powerpoint presentation psychology social statistics
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