October 30, 2007

An interview with Dr. Effect

The LA Times runs an interview with James Flynn, of the Flynn Effect.

And here's my VDARE.com review of his new new book.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

By Steve Sailer on 10/30/2007 Labels:

3 comments:

James said...

He seems to have pretty much figured his effect out (his prediction at the end). I thought it was still a mystery?

10/30/07, 6:24 PM
Anonymous said...

I bet a lot of lay-people are going to read this and say, "You see? I told you that IQ tests were biased!"

10/30/07, 6:57 PM
Anonymous said...

I spent about 10 hours of my waking day today thinking about the racial differences in intelligence (including when I walked to the grocery store), and finally I had a breakthrough, specifically, in regards to how to conceptualize the enigmatic Flynn Effect.

Go with my analogy for a bit on this. The brain can be thought of as a “muscle,” and the environment can be thought of as a “gym.” When I use the words muscle or gym, or variants of it, that is what I’m referring to. Let us suppose that this muscle is inherited genetically and yet strengthened at the gym, which we can all agree on & is mainstream science.

Let us go further with this. Suppose you have one man, representing race “A,” and another man representing race “B.” Man A is more muscular than Man B, before hey even started going to the gym.

In 1948, they decide to go to the gym to workout. Even though they spend the same time in the same gym and exercise in the same identical fashion, Man B cannot lift more than 70 pounds, whereas Man A’s muscle cannot lift more than 85 pounds. They try and try but this is their peak. Man A tends to win more prize money in bodybuilding competitions because his muscle tends to be more developed than Man B’s.

Man A and Man B find a machine that is able to take them into the future, but the two men can only time travel together. They hop aboard and decide to go to the year 2008. They go back to the gym and it’s changed. It has new exercise equipment which they use to develop their muscularity. It’s far more complex inside and the gym’s advancements tend to yield better results. Man A and Man B begin using the new gym, and see new results. Because of the new and effective equipment, Man B is now able to lift 85 pounds. Man A is also able to increase his muscle’s strength, and is now able to lift 100 pounds. Man A again tends to win more prize money than Man B, and this angers Man B.

“Man A was able to be so successful back in 1948,” Man B notes, even though “he was only able to lift 85 pounds with his muscle.” Now, Man B wonders, “why can’t I be successful since I am now able to lift that same amount?” Man B contemplates further by thinking that even if he were to go back to 1948, he would need the 2008 gym to complete with Man A, yet at the same time, Man A would need to be limited to the 1948 gym. Man B extrapolates some, and also gets depressed thinking that if he were to stay in the year 2008, and compete with Man A, he would “need a futuristic gym, say from 2058, somehow sent back to 2008, in order for him to catch up to Man A’s muscularity, while Man A is simultaneously only able to use 2008’s gym.” Man B realizes that this is also an impossibility, since they are only able to time travel together. His animosity and anger grows as he acknowledges his comparative disadvantage, realizing that he will always be stuck in the same gym as Man A.

4/27/08, 6:59 PM

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