| | | I think his mea culpa lecture was mostly a political response to all the shit he got for saying what he said about rising IQ's e.g. his now saying IQ is only half of it.
He needed to assuage the feelings of people with low IQ's :)>.
And he still ends his mea culpa with this:
Flynn:" Last words: "The 20th century has been the century of rising IQ, the spread of the language and categories of science,
the liberation of reason from the concrete, and the enhancement of on-the-spot problem solving.
The 21st century will be the battleground of armies for and against the SHAs. It just might culminate in the triumph of critical thinking if universities hold fast to what they are supposed to be all about. Whether we can hope for anything more, I cannot predict. It would be ironic if the industrial revolution, the factory that made IQ gains inevitable, has manufactured an appetite that wisdom cannot tame. But elderly men should be aware of their limitations. Perhaps those more attuned than I am to the present see the future more clearly."
koan :And I am sure we have lost some abilities due to how much our environments have changed e.g. smaller families, and computer games versus weaving baskets, or the different types of 70 IQ's based on when people lived..
But reading American Scientist, one can see where Flynn is only willing to back down so much.
Anyone who thinks education, of any sort e.g. self education, does not make people able to think in a more sophisticated manner really doesn't understand the difference between concrete versus abstract or "higher order" thinking.
And going back to the concept of :"knowledge directed perception" i.e. one cannot see what one does not understand"
I know most people do not understand existentialism.
Here is American Scientist on FlyL
Flynn himself is much less gloomy about what appears to be happening. For one, he points out that the situation varies quite a bit from country to country. "All the evidence is that the IQ gains in America are still robust, " he says. And he notes that at the very time that scores were declining in the UK on the Piagetian tests that Shayer examined, British kids were making gains on a test called the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children or WISC. Flynn points out that results gathered with two versions of this test (WISC-III, introduced in 1991, and WISC-IV, in 2003) show the usual effect, a rise in raw scores over time. But he also notes that one subtest—on arithmetic reasoning—did show a decline.
Although Flynn cautions against generalizing the recent Danish and Norwegian experiences, he anticipates similar results will crop up elsewhere in the world. But he's not glum about it. Flynn is convinced that the cause of his eponymous effect has to do with changes in the environment that allow children more opportunity to exercise the kinds of skills probed in today's intelligence tests—changes like a shift to smaller family sizes, which allow parents more time to interact with each child, for example, or devotion of an ever-greater portion of kids' leisure time to abstract, mentally demanding games. He points out that in industrialized, middle-class countries (like those of Scandinavia), such influences must be reaching a point of saturation: "You can't really get the family much smaller than one or two kids." And the current craze for Sudoku puzzles not withstanding, as Flynn says, "eventually, people do want to relax."
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