Garett Jones: evaluation

Transcript context

…In the 1970s, Irish IQ measured as lower than British IQ, and people worried about this as a problem. These days, Irish IQ measures as higher. What should we learn or infer from this development? Yeah, something similar happened in East Germany after the end of communism, where there was this 10-ish point IQ gain within about a decade, decade and a half of the collapse of communism. I think it’s a sign that substantial amounts of national or regional intelligence, cognitive skills, are really shaped by the culture that we’re marinating in. This is part of my hive mind ideas. I take the Flynn effect very seriously. What Flynn and Dickens pointed out in their famous paper, and what Flynn has emphasized in his own work — the IQ researcher who’s a philosopher by training — is that when our environment changes . . . Most of us get to choose our own environment as adults. But some of us have our environments as adults forced upon us through, basically, the culture, society we’re living in, and that has a huge effect on how we use our minds. I think that really does show up in substantive intelligence, not just some sort of nominal intelligence. But what’s the key environmental lever? Whatever Ireland did, it’s not that people were starving, right? That we understand.…

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