Anglo middle class males should study to grow IQ

on
4 minute read

Up until what age does Iq increase? About 35. Also, any proven way to increase it slightly or temporarily? Argue yes. There are proven ways, intellectual stimulation. James Flynn has done a very interesting book on this, but we shouldn’t listen to him because he has a degree in political science. But he says, well, does your family make you smarter? And what he shows is that if you either you’re a doctor or something, you’re doing internet, you’re stimulating job, and then you retire and play golf, then, of course, well, there’s a, there’s an intellectual dimension to golf, but basically, your, your iq will go down. But if you retire and carry on and keep up with the literature and keep going, then your iq will be sustained, or perhaps even increase. And so the answer is yes.

I think, uh, we know for a fact that one of the very few environmental treatments which actually leads to sort of permanent increases in iq, which mirror the flynn effect, and visa gains, not on g but on specialized abilities. So I have to hedge by saying that this is not a gain in g this is, you know, gaining S or specialized abilities, is exposure to educational attainment. So for some some reason, the environment in which people are expert the environment which people are exposed in a normal educational context, is capable of stimulating the development of specialized abilities which persist outside of education. So this is stuff which carries over. It doesn’t fade out, like a lot of these interventions fade out. For example, the head Start Program, which was like a kind of very specialized educational intervention, but largely targeted, sort of inner city youths um that those, those games all faded out. Same with the abigail project, a similar sort of thing. Those games faded out. The games which you get through training, they fade out, but not games acquired due to education. So it’s possible that what education is doing is, it’s creating signals of environmental stability which are evolutionarily familiar, in the sense that the brain responds to be sigma as if they were, you know, an actual, real relevant signal of ecological stability and low harshness. And in doing so, it adaptively calibrates life history. And it is in adaptively calibrating life history, by making your life history a little bit slower to adapt you to this recurrent, stable niche which education is. It makes you better able to accumulate somatic capital and cultivate the development of specialized abilities. So all these other interventions fail because they don’t, they don’t when nature of the environments don’t map onto our, uh, our stochastic sampling mechanisms, these genetic systems we have for sampling the environment and, uh, and and for, uh, you know, for turning that, those environmental signals into an appropriate response and developmental time. So education apparently does raise specialized abilities.

Does it by virtue of having it formally at a young age? Is that what you mean?

Well, by starting very early on and having a dose effect, which is constant across 16 years of life. So that’s probably what’s happening. And if you think about what education is, you’re forced to be social with your peers. You’re forced to engage in specialization behaviors, because now you come to contact with peers, and you’re forced to try and individuate, right, to develop a unique sort of, uh, persona. You start developing interests. This is where the whole Buchar Johnson experience producing drive model kicks in. You have these feedbacks between environmentality and genotype, which lead to gene environment correlations being established, maybe even gene environment interactions, which can trigger patterns of specialization. And you also have an environment that’s very safe and stable, more or less. And this could be a major cause of the Anti-flynn effect, is when you have, uh, you know, when you have educational systems starting to deteriorate, and starting to break down and starting to become unpredictable, and where you have increasing violence in schools, maybe, or increasing disorder among the student body, or breakdowns and discipline, etc. This could be a major factor driving the flynn effect into reverse. Because what it’s doing is creating the opposite signals. It’s creating its signals of instability and harshness, and is making you lose, is making you lose interest in acquiring somatic capital, and instead you develop a more r-selected type type orientation, which which favors cognitive generalism, as opposed to specialism.

specialized-abilities, life-history, education, flynn-effect