Salomé
meh
- Joined
- Sep 25, 2008
- Messages
- 10,527
- MBTI Type
- INTP
- Enneagram
- 5w4
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
All irrelevant. We're not talking about the book, we're not talking about Flynn, we're not talking about race. We're talking about IQ trends over time. Being able to discern the difference between a person, book, organization and idea, is pretty crucial to critical thinking.It's not only partially based on statistical data obtained by IQ tests, with some of the input of it being questionable like Equatorial guinea. But there are also very arbitrary factors, like economical statuses of countries included which influences the "Flynn factors" effect on diverse population's.
The bell-curve authors only demonstrate that economically lesser nations perform worse then 1st world countries on standardized Intelligence quotient tests. It doesn't really prove anything about the cognitive ability of denizens of the world.
Lots of criticism by qualified scholars has already been directed towards the book, so i don't see the point in trying to take up it's deficiencies. But the least i can do is tell you that the hypothesizes and explanations are jack shit for credibility.
Are IQs rising over the period in question or not? All the evidence I've looked at suggests that they are.
So does the fact that our heads have shrunk say anything about us becoming more stupid? No. There's no evidence to support that idea.