Re: What to do when everybody's becoming more intelligent


"DVH" <dvh@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:3SkTh.726$IZ2.354@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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


"Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and
virtue than education without natural ability" Cicero.

Very true.

http://theamazingtoad.blogspot.com/


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