Sadly it’s now being confirmed by many media outlets that James Flynn did indeed die this month. Flynn was a New Zealand IQ researcher (a cognitive archeologist really) best known for discovering the Flynn effect (the phenomenon by which IQ scores become inflated at a rate of about 3 IQ points a decade). Some have quibbled over the effect being named for him since others had noted it in the past, but these previous discoveries were largely local or one-time events that were quickly forgotten. Flynn established it as a consistent, predictable worldwide phenomenon that was so important, IQ scores had to be adjusted for it and tests required frequent re-norming. Had he not pushed the issue, most measured IQs would probably still be many points too high, thus distorting not only individual diagnosis, but the results of massive studies, and many prison inmates would be wrongly sentenced to death because their IQs were above 70 (making them criminally responsible).
Most of Flynn’s research focused on successive standardizations of the Wechsler intelligence scales where a sample of people would be tested twice on both the newly normed version and the previous version to make sure there was a high correlation. It was consistently noted that IQs would always be a little higher on the newer version. For example scores on the 1954 WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale) were about 3 points higher than on the 1937 Wechsler. It was later found that scores on the 1978 WAIS were about 7 points higher than on the 1954 WAIS. Scores on the 1995 WAIS were about 3 points higher than on the 1978 WAIS. Finally, scores on the 2006 WAIS were about 3 points higher than on the 1995 WAIS.
Before Flynn’s discovery in the 1980s, such gains were just dismissed as tests becoming outdated and requiring new items and were generally too small to be considered significant. But Flynn’s genius was to add the gains of successive test normings to argue that a massive increase had occurred. For example, if you add up all the Wechsler adult gains from 1937 to 2006, you get 16 points (the same as the infamous black-white IQ gap within the United States). Since no one believed the IQ gains are genetic, Flynn used them to argue we shouldn’t believe racial IQ gaps are either.
For years I suspected that Flynn’s method of adding up gains from successive test normings was overestimating the Flynn effect and in 2008 I decided to prove it. I asked for the original 1937 Wechsler for Christmas (known as the ancient WBI) and gathered random strangers to take it. Of course this was a very time consuming project and I soon got distracted. In 2019 I became obsessed with completing the project and truth be told, one of the reasons I got obsessive was that being in his mid 80s, I worried Flynn would die before I could tell him about the research (one of my biggest regrets was Arthur Jensen dying before I could ask him my biggest questions). I did not know Flynn, but he was always kind enough to reply the few times I had sent him an email. By December 2019 I had a sample size of 17 people and as usual, Flynn was kind enough to reply to my emails.
Of course 17 people was not enough and I had really hoped to share with him the results of a much larger data-set but sadly the coronavirus made it too dangerous to get data in 2020, and now Flynn is gone.
May he rest in peace.
One question I would have is, does the Flynn effect show any sign of decreasing? It seems to be a linear gain over time. If people were increasing their brain performance like a muscle, as many people like to explain the Flynn effect, it would seem there should be some diminishing returns or approach to some maximum, as surely our capacities must not be infinite. Our gains should plateau at some point, wouldn’t you think? This line of reason leads me to suspect the Flynn effect may be artefactual somehow.
On another thread someone said the Flynn effect is not observed in mathematical tests. Is this so and what is the hypothesized reason for that?
“I asked for the original 1937 Wechsler for Christmas”
Heh, that’s a new sentence right there. You actually still have to buy those old tests, they’re not just floating around? Are they still really expensive?
OT: https://twitter.com/Q_StatGen/status/1314245887305166848
Is the Flynn Effect associated with gains in real-word functioning? or is it mainly confined to test items? Swank seemed to think that people were getting smarter, but I’m skeptical.
Verbal scores have gone up on the WAIS, albeit by less than performance scores, but people definitely don’t seem verbally smarter than they were 50 years ago. It’s hard to imagine people like Einstein and Feynman (let alone Newton) existing if the huge gains in performance IQ actually meant something.
einstein & feynman were jewish so they were probably strongest on math IQ not performance IQ.
The flynn effect seems driven by just 2 abilities: 1) abstract reasoning (both verbal and visual) and spatial ability
It’s likely caused by nutrition. Whatever is making us taller & bigger brained is making us smarter, but only when it comes to spatial and abstract reasoning but not when it comes to the SAT.
It could be that SAT skills are too important to be sensitive to nutrition and thus evolved to get the nutrients first
It would be hard to describe Einstein’s reasoning towards relativity without the important performance/spatial aspect. Probably not as performance biased as Sir Roger Penrose, but it was definitely not a shortcoming.
well block design has increased by 1 SD since the 1930s. It’s unclear if the increase started earlier than that.
And how much have the other sub-test scores improve since then for some comparison?
So what were the results of people taking the 1937 Wais?
I’m reading Devil’s Chessboard now. I haven’t gotten to the parts about Eisenhower and Kennedy yet, but Talbot seems to really care about [redacted by pp, dec 14, 2020]
It’s a very interesting read though. Phil is right that Allen Dulles deserves to be talked about a lot more.
I saved it to my Amazon book list when Phil started mentioning it all the time a few years back. I still haven’t read it yet though.
A lot of…simple people are conservative by default. They don’t question much and they’re happy not over-exerting their noggin. They slam down some Buds and burp out, “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”
That’s the first mountain.
Then you’ve got slightly smarter people who start questioning things and say stuff like, “why should I listen to a three-thousand-year-old book,” or whatever. “Gay? Fine by me.”
They go into the valley.
And then if they’re smart and truth-oriented enough, they start realizing why those truths were written in the first place. “Adam and Eve is the building block of a stable civilization.”
They climb up the second mountain.
So you basically have a lot of smart people who end up espousing very conservative viewpoints. Like Chris above.
I agree with this but think conservatives/autists are objectively wrong about economics.
This dipshit thinks gay people ruined civilization.
Athens was full of faggots.
Genius need a touch of madness OR intensity, umbalancing to be produced. The “weird” and not Stacy & Kev is the human type responsible for so called civilzation that also needs a high proportion of stabilizers.
But what make humanity unique and fragile at the same time is exactly its or our impetus to fight rather than obey nature
Religion is only the building block of a stable civilization if the other materials are too weak to provide a firm foundation themselves. In other words, when the average level of important human traits, mainly IQ, is too low for the masses to have an inherent moral compass which is well enough attuned that they don’t need to be told not to murder, not to rape, not to torture, and so on. In a hypothetical successor race, species, genus, etc., where most people can tell right from wrong like that, religion will be neither necessary nor generally perceived as a desirable social institution. It would belong in the museum of ancient history with other obsolete mechanisms of maintaining control over the hoi polloi, like the caste system, public execution, and slavery.
At our current level of evolution, people do usually need to be conditioned into socially acceptable behavior in order to keep them from harming others, hence self-defeating notions as, “You can’t be moral without God!” Such an atrocity betrays that its perpetrator is a retrograde evolutionary mistake.
Religion is a mental disorder which have cause so many harm to humanity and this planet. Must go someday. Almost civilizations has been constituted as a human social parasitism system and religion (belief in santa klaus) a significant tool to alienate the populace. What really advanced society must have is a majority of psychologically stable people to maintain it but also and always will need people who have philosophical, artistic and scientific approaches, people who are not “normies”. A society dominated by stupid superstitions and beliefs are categorically idiocratic.
I’m not very cynical by nature, but few people operate on much more than self interest. The number one deterrent to murder is that it really sucks to get charged with murder. Bright people can probably more greatly appreciate the concept of reciprocity, but they’re also more adept at rationalizing hypocritical, self-serving misbehavior. Morality largely comes from security: sincere security in oneself (humility and asceticism) and security in the traditional sense (comfort or absence of danger). Both forms can be bolstered by true faith in a higher power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shelter_(The_Twilight_Zone)
Episode 68 of the greatest show of all time illustrates the second form. As discomfort increases, altruism and civility generally decrease. We have become more moral as a species because we’re cozy enough to afford the luxury of entertaining certain ethics that were all but peripheral in more literal tooth and nail competition of the past.
PP I remember posited that the biological driver behind the Flynn effect has rendered our brains more able to poignantly empathize with others, thus increasing morality. That’s plausible to me also.
Teffec, if you could commit murder with no risk of being sentenced or otherwise having negative consequences forced on you for it, would you? I hope not, and I don’t think so. Anyway, religion and other social institutions don’t enforce morality only by threatening people with punishment (jail, hell, etc.), but also by inculcating specific notions of right and wrong. Nobody should need to be taught right and wrong like that. The fact that anyone does show just how dull the masses are.
Religion don’t teach people to be or try to be good. It’s a cultural — psychological confounding. If it was really true we no had a majority of selfish hypocritical religious people and lots of pure breed evils… there are a correlation between tameness and kiindness but what religion really teach is to be obedient, acritical and servil worker.
Religions don’t teach people to be nice though. Humanity has had many warrior religions like Islam and the Aztec ones which encourage violence. Of course, its my belief that violence is sometimes moral.
Slavery to most people today seems outrageous on its face, but I’m sure there were a lot of secular, high-IQ, and otherwise virtuous people in the past who owned slaves. Adherence to the Golden Rule isn’t some inevitability of the high-minded genius, although to him its desirability is more perceptible. Even Lincoln held opinions on black worth that are horribly offensive by today’s standards, and eating meat might be a repulsive consideration in a few hundred years. Our moral frameworks obviously are to a large extent shaped by imperfect lawmakers and their navel-gazing mentors. Religious doctrine is just an older attempt at codification that is validated by the alleged will of God, which is no more metaphysical than the concept of pure righteousness.
Obvious there were…
Any source??
Anyway if all people are killing each other by fun it’s not right..
I’ve started having hallucinations lately – auditory and visual.
Hahahaha!
What kinds of stuff do you see and hear when you’re high on weed? Is the high a lot stronger?
Its not weed. I’m surprised im getting them because Im already on tons of medications.
With jews and gays?
flynn also said he expected differences between races in innate “cognitive ability” however one might interpret/operationalize that was very small. did he ever say that it would be weird if all races were exactly equal?
but this trio would be capa at his prime first, as primus inter pares, and tigran to advise capa and karpov to resolve any dispute between boss and consigliere.
computers TOTALLY SUCK at the endgame (unless the endgame has so few pieces tablebases can be used).
capa’s whole shtick was to simplify the game (aka bring the game to the endgame) and then win the endgame.
why is mugabe’s observation apparently original?
1. because mugabe doesn’t actually follow chess and has never been a serious chess player. chess is just a video game for him he plays whilst drunk.
OR
2. because mugabe’s observation really is ORIGINAL.
the nuanced POV is that capa wasn’t actually so great at the endgame, he was just great at FORCING an endgame which was winning.
tony the chinaman set himself on fire because…
there are things money can’t buy.
peepee thinks money can buy everything…everything that’s possible…
peepee is wrong.
money can’t make people like you or love you…
BUT it can make people pretend they like you or love you…
money can’t make oprah beautiful…
can’t make oprah INGRID.
[redacted by pp, dec 14, 2020]
money did make Oprah beautiful.
Oprah at 22:
Oprah at 49:
I’m in no way attracted to Oprah but I have to admit she does look pretty good for 49 there. Was airbrushing to blame?
no it’s a screen shot from her show
Looking good for one’s age doesn’t mean that one is an attractive person, I think. I can say that one looks great for age X or looks younger than their age, but that doesn’t mean that they are attractive.
You mean post 80’s made Oprah and the rest of humanity less 80’s
Why Oprah don’t tried to pursue academic achievements like i see other “celebrities” getting ??
cmon pumpkin that is a blurry crt shot of her that looks unflattering. Give me a real HD picture of oprahs ass so i can fap
Lmao that’s because she’s black not because she’s rich.
Melo there is some interesting research on differences in skin between blacks and whites (I describe it here https://notpoliticallycorrect.me/2019/05/12/black-and-white-skin/).
Here’s a quote from Campiche et al (I need to take a Saturday and change all my Sci Hub links):
“This is also in line with the fact that photoaging in African Americans does not appear until the late fifth or sixth decade of life.22 This may explain why aging in our Black African cohort from Mauritius is less pronounced than in the Caucasian cohort although the Black African cohort is older.
[…]
The difference in age between our Caucasian and Black African cohorts (median age 46 years vs 56 years) could bring into question the comparisons of the two cohorts. Nevertheless, we mostly found that Caucasians displayed more severe signs of aging than Black Africans which is in line with the common understanding that the onset of aging in fair skin starts earlier than in darkly pigmented skin and that there were differences in the appearance of lip lines and facial pores.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7379553/
In a nutshell, whites age faster than blacks. Dark skin is due to more melanocytes which produce more melanin. The only reason I can think of that causes these differences in the cohort in question is that black skin has an obvious protective effect from the sun’s rays. The cited study shows that whites do indeed age faster than blacks. (I should say, French and Mauritians.)
their skin ages faster. “black don’t crack.” rr needed a citation on mauritians because severe autism.
RR denies any type of racial difference unless if they shows racial superiority of blacks about other races specially white. He finds it satisfactory.
^^^
Imagine actually believing this.
It’s not about making people change their values it is about finding people whose values align with yours. If you want to be less lonely find people like you. Of course like follows like and true opposites attract. All that matters is attraction vs. repulsion. People just go well together. Others are volatile. So how do you find people like that or not. Someone who won’t get bored with you. Some people just can’t find that. It is because they are isolated. They are not good at socializing. They just cannot find their type. They need to meet people. Money can help meet more people. Help socialize.
The is a detail thought and that is that the difference betweeen shallow and deep relationships. Psychological complexity matters. Usally the same complexity is compatible.
Many people who are not good to socialize even try to socialize and they also tend to repel each other because they want a different people than they. I think it’s a big big mistake associal or littlesocial people tend to commit.
karpov vs anand: karpov won 5-3.
sad.
https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=55521
rip james flynn I was cognizant of the flynn effect before his death like many others here. A true visionary.
I had to quit figure weights because I was about to faint from exhaustion. Originally I got 130 but if I was not exhausted could have gotten 140. I feel exhausted almost all the time so I lose potential in my scores.
I understand figure weights intuitively and I read it was good for algebra. I was wondering if it was good for other things as well. How do figure weights integrate into general intelligence?
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn/2011/123173/
In contrast, the Figure Weights task appears to critically involve the right temporoparietal junction involved in numerical magnitude estimation.
Recent psychometric studies showed that Figure Weights is the highest loading fluid intelligence subtest in the WAIS-IV battery and that it can be best described as a combination of quantitative reasoning and fluid intelligence
In his review, Carroll notes that Piagetian reasoning tasks correlate most highly with the general intelligence factor and then with fluid intelligence factor and subsequently with crystallized intelligence
Are people like the new Los Angeles district atty true believers? Or are they just pandering to minorities and liberals but know better? he’s apparently not gonna prosecute carjackings, thefts below a certain threshold, and vagrancy, among other things.
The solution to the so-called homelessness crisis that shitlibs cry about is really simple. Put the homeless in insane asylums and pump them full of haldol. The vast majority of them are hardcore schizos, at least in california.
That’s why people like you never could be president or governor in the perfect world.
It’s very important separate case by case, group by group. Many if not majority of this people are heavily traumatized by some very bad life event. Empathy skill is a very important and evolved skill to be used when you have one. It’s just hypocritical you cry for people to care about yourself but don’t try to be reciprocal. Thanks for mentally retarded on empathy we are drowned on this conservie $hitshow which has been mostly responsible to make covid-19 pandemics out of control. It’s obvious that humanity have a conservie problem or question. You are the biggest problem of humanity.
you have to have empathy for the people forced to live with them, too. the right of some feces splattered lunatic to scream at pedestrians and turn the neighborhood into a complete shit pile don’t outweigh the rights of working class people to live in a decent community.
and getting bums off crack/heroin and giving the crazy ones antipsychotics is for their own good. unlike lolbertarians, i’m completely in favor of spending more money on mental health and addiction services.
Libertarians are the woke version of the economic right. The money is not theirs or elites, in fact the money produced by a nation should be the nation’s and properly distributed, but we live in a world of parasites, mostly white and jewish.
I do not disagree that people with chronic mental disorders who live on the streets should be professionally cared for even those who act the way you said. The problem is the level of care in mental asylums that have historically not had a good reputation.
There creepiesillies can be more retarded than RR
RR (double tard) is retarded, i know, but with style.
Thanks!
You have talent.
the GOP shouldn’t even be invested in Trump. He did jack shit when he was in office.
He turned his presidential term into a personal crusade for his brand.
Puppy has it ever entered your mind that people with very high IQs are racist?
I doubt it.
Racism is stupid
But its not stupid. Everybody has it for a reason. Even your precious blacks are racist.
Racism isn’t natural. Tribalism is. It’s not suitable for modern society.
What is natural =!= what is good or what is smart.
Which definition? There are quite a few.
https://notpoliticallycorrect.me/2020/08/02/racism-stress-and-physiology/
High IQ =/= ABSOLUTELY smart.
Natural
=/=
eternal
given the current use of the term “racist” every person with a very high IQ is racist.
to figure out george floyd wasn’t killed and that james fields didn’t deserve a 400 year prison sentence means you’re “racist”. and if you didn’t figure this out it means you’re a moron.
Why
cons
must
be…
Shes decent looking for a senator. Most pols are ugly.
Fake.
Pill how much for you to perform fellatio on me? I want you to give me some head for Christmas.
Sadly perverts like him would do it for free
Hahahah. I agree that was why I would buy him maybe half a gram of crack (Pill’s favorite drug) and we’d call it even.
Merry Christmas Pill! Now lemme put that mistletoe a little below my waist where it belongs.
Why the homphobic comment, pp? Is it a perversion to want to to gay oral sex?
@loaded, “give me head” is not an insult, it’s just cliche homophobia, or just submission shaming.
The gays know I’m just kidding. This blog has a YUGE gay following.
PP wanted to say that make oral sex in ANYone is a perversion but i still think believe Oprah is a superior human being is way more perverted. Oprah has done nothingly relevant even for afroamericans.. she is just another useless celeb.
”This blog has a YUGE gay following.”
How do you know
peepee thinks all men are gay and black.
today’s forecast is full blown AIDS. 33 degree rain.
the girl i was gonna go out with might cancel.
Apparently lion is forecast to get a foot of snow tonight. He thinks it’ll be a bust though.
Mug where is that Christmas blowjob you owe me? I know you gave me one last year but you forgot to let the semen run down your throat that time. I need you to make it up to me by doing the same thing this year except make it ten times sloppier this time. I wanna see the saliva all over your face, Mug. Please….
Poor boy
He wants lost his virginity.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ6eWd0KsXlkpEfX1Zz0wkXnMIQxGCBRO5dyw&usqp=CAU
Indecency
But you don’t care
If I was commenting that…
redacted
What’s funny about this is that Mugabe is factually a homo he just thinks no one knows.
you’re an expert because too short to get women. sad.
Think about a loser people…
there should be a pumpkinperson irc chat room
pumpkinsarepeople , I enjoyed this article, I wonder if you will ever attempt an estimate of Flynns IQ, having to adjust for his own effect would make it nice and self referential as well. I would understand if you prefer not to because you predict that his IQ as estimated by the methodologies you employ would either be very tenuous seeing as there is a lack of telling information about him or rather close to mean.
In any case, would love to hear your thoughts on this.