[ExI] The Anti-Flynn

[William Flynn Wallace]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 6:53 PM, Tara Maya <tara at taramayastales.com> wrote:

> Nah, I don’t buy it. Too many holes in this methodology.
>
> One tests measures household vocabulary of American families from 1974.
> How does this test take into account immigrant families and people for whom
> English is not a first language? I saw nothing about that, and it seems to
> me that the immigration issue alone makes any measure of genetic evolution
> in America problematic… if not, in fact, worthless.
>
> Another test uses text vocabulary words from 1500 to now. The number of
> people producing those vocabulary-rich texts was an incredibly smaller
> percentage of the overall population. So it’s like comparing texts produced
> by only the top 1% to texts produced by the top 80% of the bell curve and
> then noting that IQ seems to have gone down. In fact, as education expands
> and the literate population expands as well, the lowering of text
> difficulty is what we would expect to see.
>
> (There’s another fallacy here, and that is that difficult words prove the
> writer is more intelligent. Having been forced to endure a post-modernist
> education, whose proponents believe in the same theory, I can assure you
> that often multisyllabic gobbdygook exhibits far less intelligence than
> clear, direct writing using simple and direct sentences with concrete nouns
> and verbs.)
>
> In addition, I’ve read Murray’s works on the supposed distribution of
> genius, invention and works of art and I don’t agree with him at all that
> his standards are “objective.” On the contrary, any modern inventions and
> modern forms of art are discounted and degenerated. So if Mozart counts as
> a musical genius but a rap star doesn’t and the printing press counts as an
> invention but a new app for the iPad doesn’t, then OF COURSE it appears
> there were more “works of genius” in the past than among these
> good-for-nothing hooligan youngsters.
>
> But the biggest problem with the Dysgenic crowd, in my opinion, is that
> they misunderstand the Demographic Revolution. They think that because the
> most educated, prosperous and (presumably) intelligent men and women
> entered the Demographic Revolution first, this meant they were suddenly
> losing the evolutionary race, when just the opposite was true. It would be
> like contemporary social scientists of the Agricultural Revolution wringing
> their hands because all  the most educated, prosperous and intelligent men
> and women of their time were no longer spending as much time hunting and
> gathering as the dullards… completely missing the fact that the reason is
> because the smartest members of society are the first of the bell curve to
> have taken up sowing and reaping instead.
>
> Tara Maya
>

​A rap artist as a genius.  Now there's a concept.​


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>
>
> On Apr 28, 2015, at 4:05 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> So it looks like the Flynn effect might be just a trivial language trend,
> while true intelligence steadily decreases:
>
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZN1g0NjF0WmtUeHc/view?pli=1
>
> A pity.
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