What to do when everybody's becoming more intelligent

The Flynn effect is the name for the documented rise in average IQs from
generation to generation.

Since the Flynn effect means that everybody else is becoming more
intelligent, and hence bagging better jobs, incomes, wives, husbands, and
standards of living, the question is... how to keep up?

"The same genes are with me throughout my life while my luck for environment
tends to fluctuate, sometimes good sometimes bad. To rival genes, an
advantageous environment would have to match their persistence, which is to
say I would have to have good luck throughout my life. Let us imagine such
a case. A girl is born with average genes for cognitive ability in a
privileged home. She gets good private schooling with lots of individual
attention from preschool to high school, gets prepped for university
entrance exams, gets into a decent university. She has to work harder than
most but she is enveloped by the expectations of her parents that she will
get into law school. Her marks get her in without much to spare but once
there, she profits from the fact that no one with a reasonable education who
works hard fails to graduate. Her mother gets her into a good firm where
she has challenging work and she marries someone with intellectual
interests. Her whole life is conditioned by people and institutions that
sustain a cognitively stimulating environment.

However, there is one way an individual can walk a personal path to enhanced
cognitive skills. He or she must internalize the goal of seeking
challenging cognitive environments -- seeking intellectual challenges all
the way from choosing the right leisure activities to wanting to marry
someone who is intellectually stimulating. Better off still are those who
develop a certain kind of character formation -- a character such that I
carry about within myself a stimulating mental environment I myself create.
Then I would be relatively free of needing good luck to enjoy a cognitively
enriched environment throughout life. I would have instant access to a
portable gymnasium that exercises the mind. Books and ideas and
conversation are easier to transport than a basketball court. No one can
keep me from using mental arithmetic so habitually that my arithmetical
skills survive.

To conclude: You can rise above someone with better genes. If they are
born taller and quicker, you may have better luck -- you may not be drafted
and may always get jobs that give you more time to play. Or despite no
better luck, you may love basketball more and practice harder throughout
life. If they have a better brain, you will have to be very fortunate to be
handed better environments throughout life. Your best chance is to fall in
love with ideas, or intelligent books, or some intellectual pursuit, thereby
building a cognitive gymnasium within -- one that you visit daily. In a
sense, this is as it should be: those who value intelligence for its own
sake have the best chance to view the world through intelligent eyes."

http://search.bwh.harvard.edu/concourse/900/articles/FlynnEffectDraft.doc


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