What is intelligence?

What Hacker News says

1. klenwellSep 2017
   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)

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2. MaysonLJun 2010
   I'd recommend a couple of books:

   Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol Dweck,

   What Is Intelligence?, by James Flynn.

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3. tokenadultDec 2009
   While the movie sends a powerful image, now matter how hard you try, you will not change a person's general intelligence (which is innate).

   What is the evidence for this? Most human behavorial genetics researchers talk about a "reaction surface" set for each individual by that individual's genes, but I'm not aware of any researcher who claims to have a proof for an upper limit in how much "general intelligence" (that would be IQ) can change in the case of individuals or in the case of populations. In fact, the existing OBSERVED degree of IQ increases all around the world

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

   has been described by N. J. Mackintosh in these terms: "the data are surprising, demolish some long-cherished beliefs, and raise a number of other interesting issues along the way." (Mackintosh 1998, p. 104). You write, "no matter how hard you try," but it's not clear anyone is trying very hard or very systematically to raise anyone's general intellilgence, but it is happening anyway.

   I meet weekly with human behavioral genetics researchers

   http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall09/mcguem/psy8935/defau...

   and have learned from them that the whole field of human behavorial genetics is becoming much more conservative and cautious in its claims about genetic limits on human potential than it was ten years ago. That's what is said explicitly by Tom Bouchard, one of the most cited researchers in the field.

   REFERENCE

   Mackintosh, N. J. (1998). IQ and Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

   P.S. Other good, recent reading on this subject is

   Neisser, Ulric (Ed.) (1998). The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

   Flynn, James R. (2009). What Is Intelligence: Beyond the Flynn Effect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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4. tokenadultMar 2009
   The test that measures this the best is Raven's progressive matrices which is culture and language negative.

   I've attended a lecture by John Raven, the publisher of that test, and he doesn't make that claim.

   The long, careful examination of what the Raven tests show, in conjunction with other evidence, can be found in James R. Flynn's excellent book What Is Intelligence?, which is about to come out in a new, expanded edition.

   http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Expanded-PB-Beyond/d...

   Also very good for reconsidering the importance of IQ tests is Keith Stanovich's What Intelligence Tests Miss.

   http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

   http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...

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5. DaniFongFeb 2009
   I suggest you read the book "What is Intelligence?" by James Flynn himself. It's a cautious and erudite work, and the theory they float does seem to resolve quite a few of the mysteries. Perhaps most importantly, the data do not bear out universal and generic intellectual ascension.

   They contend that the rise in IQ has been spurred on by a change in cognitive environment over the past century, and I think the existence of a shift in cognitive demands of a massive scale is something tough to deny.

   Here's a paper where they discuss the theory, if you can't get the book. http://www.apa.org/journals/features/rev1082346.pdf

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6. tokenadultDec 2008
   "Noting that raw I.Q. scores have been climbing by three points a decade since World War II across racial, income and regional boundaries"

   I hope he has the decency to cite James R. Flynn's book What Is Intelligence

   http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Beyond-Flynn-Effect/...

   which is by far the best scholarly discussion of that phenomenon.

   In most of these sorts of social trends, there are usually trade-offs. If I were hiring an editor of books or magazine articles, I might look for candidates from a different generation from the candidates I'd look for if hiring a video game designer.

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