[ExI] Gifted children

[Stefano Vaj]

On 6 November 2012 20:32, PJ Manney <pjmanney at gmail.com> wrote:

> There are many programs that track and monitor gifted children
> nationwide, both civilian and government operated.
>

That's interesting, because to the best of my knowledge such programmes
still exist only in the US and in Israel, perhaps Japan.

OTOH, there remains the issue of what "gifted" may mean. I suppose that
musical geniuses, or idiots savant able to perform extreme arithmetics in
their mind, may not of much interest to, say, the armed forces or to large
corporations.

Moreover, the validation of IQ tests as a way to measure some
relevantly-defined kind of "intelligence" has always depended in my
understanding on the statistically predictive power of the tests as to
future or current  social success of the tested individuals, of course all
other things being equal.

If we assume that after all very high IQ scores need not be really
correlated with that, because for instance as suggested by James a high IQ
individual may in average lack the motivation to perform in the social
arena, this begs the question of what IQ tests really measure, and in
whether one's performance in those tests may tell us something about
anything else than the one's performance in those tests.

For instance, it is commonly believed that, while average IQ obviously
remains 100 by definition, the average absolute performance in the tests is
improving with each subsequent generation.

Now, if we take for instance a given society's ability to produce
technoscientific and cultural breakthroughs, as recently discussed it is
very debatable that our supposedly higher performance in IQ tests is
translating into overall increased innovation and creativity in comparison
with, say, the Europe of our grand-fathers...

I developed a little more in depth my views on the subject, touching by the
way the Watson scandal, here <http://www.biopolitix.com>.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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