I think much of my difficulty has to do with working memory –in relation to math I don’t have much, but I have more in relation to other tasks.

So my question is,

are there studies showing the amount of working memory available to be dependent upon the task at hand and not as a general fixed amount?

(you might say my blank slate shrinks when I aim it at math, expands when I aim it somewhere else).

Race isn’t required. They don’t believe in innate IQ differences between individuals and they attempt to prove it by creating 100% pass rates to the great detriment of everyone concerned.

As good. Voting.

In a school large enough to have multiple classes of students about the same age (physical maturity, etc.), should the classes be sorted by intelligence?

When I grew up, the answer in the U.S. was generally “yes”. There were varying motivations for this – in some schools, the class with the least intelligent students was smaller, or the teacher had an assistant, so that those kids could be given additional help to master the material; there was also often a desire to challenge the smartest students to achieve more. Another motive was to keep the smart students from getting bored and disruptive.

These days, now that it’s my daughter in school, the answer is generally “no”. The motivations for that answer appear to me to be either levelling egalitarianism, or a desire to avoid having racial imbalances between the classes. The latter motive can be again a form of egalitarianism, or it can be fear of lawsuits – since the time I was in school, many school districts have been successfully sued for having “too many” black kids (or hispanic kids) in “speical education” or remedial classes.

How would your typical Finnish leftist answer? How about an Italian (where environmental factors may play a greater role)?

Depends what you mean by “innate”. Definitely, they don’t measure genetic potential, at least where the negative environmental factors have had a chance to operate. (Are there many positive environmental factors?) But do they measure someone’s realized intelligence, as opposed to their education or some other factor? From what I’ve read, with a number of caveats, the answer is “mostly yes”. Caveats – there’s some random element in any single test; a person’s motivation or level of immediate environmental stress at the time of the test may cause variation (again, mostly downward); some tests are badly designed; most tests won’t capture every possible way someone’s cognitive abilities can be expressed. But those are generally minor considerations when the test results are used intelligently.

They’re not entirely minor all the time – Murray and Herrnstein noted that American blacks tended to have somewhat higher incomes (on average) than they would be predicted to have based on their IQ results, possibly by as much as 5 IQ points. One can argue if this is due to cultural bias in the tests greater than that in American society at large, or if there is some characteristic at which blacks are (on average) better than whites which isn’t measured by IQ tests, but that the market values.

perhaps. this tends to be true of east asians. but it is not true of my readers. the left-wing readers from europe regularly argue that i have a misperception of left attitudes toward heredity because of my american background. i still remain skeptical.

Razib:
The reality is that attitudes toward intelligence and I.Q. are rather flexible and situation dependent. People who deny the reality of I.Q. don’t believe that someone who has a low I.Q. should be executed (and conversely, those who accept I.Q. may still demand the execution of those with low enough I.Q.’s to be classified as mentally retarded!). I.Q. is just a social construct for some when it comes to the black-white difference, but they become more open to it when it is shown that conservatives have lower I.Q.’s.

True, I remember watching the comments section on Reddit explode into a heated debate over this exact study. Many liberals were all too happy to take this evidence as fact. Others were more cautious, warning that I.Q more accurately measures cognitive levels than anything immutable. I thought the article was a masterwork troll at first, or that the researchers conducted it partially out of jest.

IMHO, there are too many environmental factors that affect I.Q scores for me to interpret them as a measure of innate intelligence. It seems like nearly every month there is a new study coming out citing something new that must be taken into consideration that’s negatively impacting I.Q (most recent ones I can think of being Fluoride and Smoking weed during childhood )

Of course, this isn’t to say that all groups will produce the same amount of cognitively gifted individuals. I mean, even with every possible “bonus” you can give with corrections, certain groups would likely still only be in the high 70s low 80s right? Certain groups with lower I.Q (Indians, Vietnamese, Filipinos etc.) do however, reach similar or even higher levels of educational attainment and economic success compared to those with high I.Q in similar environments. Before anyone says that these groups are not representative of the general population, I’d like to point out that according to Flynn’s book: Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ
, initial Filipino immigrants actually scored slightly lower than those in the Philippines. Maybe the US isn’t a good representative of India, but more likely the UK is(?). Indians outperform the general population there and I’m willing to bet their I.Q scores have risen too.

A possible test to that theory could be to see if european left-wingers (where there is not – or it was not until very recently – a racial subtext in discussions about equality/unequality) are less prone than american “liberals” to deny the value and/or the “geneticity” of IQ.

My impression is that kind of discussion is rare in Europe but, when it occurs, the european left-wingers tend to overwhelming support the “environmental theory of intelligence”.

I would not bet your house on the IQ motivation connection. You have to look at Angela Duckworth’s work closely. I personally think she is a hack but you can decide for yourself. See

https://menghusblog.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/angela-l-duckworths-iq-motivation-study-another-bad-apple/

to start.

It’s only the American liberal’s prior commitment to racial equality which causes liberals to have conniptions about IQ. The mere hint of the idea that blacks may, on average, be less intelligent than whites is the vilest crimethink, because the logical conclusion of that idea, for the liberal, is that blacks are therefore not deserving of equality.

I suspect that if blacks actually did have an intelligence distribution about equal to that of whites, that liberals would be much more willing to discuss innate differences in intelligence, and support things like tracking in schools.

Everyone is neurotic and self conscious to a certain extent–I’m not immune. And it is human nature to want to surround yourself with people who think and feel the same way as you. But my point is that when that energy is channeled outward to separate us vs them, we tend to miss out on the 99% of the population who have a great deal to offer other than their stellar IQ scores.

From my own experience (yes anecdotal evidence?!) kids who reach maturity early tend to reach their peak Intelligence early too. So you may have a kid who is in the top 5% at 12 yo, and by 16 yo is in only in the top 50%. I’ve known many people like this.

I think girls experience this as after a certain point – say 16 yo – they don’t get any better at doing Math (for instance), yet boys on average improve till 18 yo.

I know I was average or above average height till about 10 yo, then was very sick till about 13 yo, and was one of the shortest in my class in High school on entering. I was a Top 10% student, but as of about 16/17 yo I started to both grow tall and find Math increasing easy, and by college was getting easy A’s in Math – by then I was 6′ 1″. Yet my sister was an A student all the way in High school, yet dropped to a lower Math test (Pass/Fail) by end of High school.

This effect could be magnified in a female who is Black and matures early.

there are many ways to lower your intelligence a great deal chemically which are probably painless, and will mostly leave other functions intact

The elitist comments coming from the author seem to show little more than his desire to express what a gifted person he is as compared to the rest of society; the same is true for many of the people who posted comments here. Arrogance is typically reflective of underlying unhappiness and the need to overcompensate for self-perceived inadequacies. I would much rather be “stupid” and blissful than a neurotic rocket scientist.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/01/when-genes-matter-for-intelligence/

Unfortunately, the American education system has never realized this and gifted programs are pretty screwed up because of it.

Or maybe I’m just being unfair, and these folks would be more than willing to accept the studies on IQ, race, and gender; or, on the other hand, perhaps they’d also be willing to express more skepticism toward the IQ/conservatism study once they discovered the larger debates about g . . .

Or perhaps not.

This comment was particularly telling: “I always thought conservatives seemed less able to deal with facts that conflicted with their childhood programming; this study seems to say why. Put these 2 studies together, and you have a picture of people with lower IQs who adopt conservative philosophies and have smaller ability to understand the complexities of our world. Interesting, yes? A different breed of human? Feels like it to me.”

I would bet, say, fifty dollars that this commenter has written many an essay about evil whites that have “Othered” the world’s indigenous populations with pseudo-scientific racialism, or that this commentator would at least nod rapturously in agreement to such an essay.

The linked article makes it clear if you give M&Ms to dumb children, it boosts their score. I think this shows pretty conclusively that IQ doesn’t equal g, even if IQ does come pretty close to approximating the ability that your intelligence gives you to succeed in life.

I do wonder, however, if this is part of the reason why some kids score very high when children, but as adults are only slightly above average. Their IQ develops early because they have an unusually high desire to please adults at a point where most kids are still too distracted by life to properly concentrate on an IQ test.

#16 — Absolutely right. The average difference in IQ between siblings is 12 points on a scale with a mean of 100 and a SD of 15. That 12 point difference is more than half of the average difference between randomly paired strangers — 18 points. This either implies that IQs differences come about due to an enormous amount of chance in development, or there’s a substantial genetic effect. The correlation between genomic relatedness and IQ shows that it’s the latter.

(note: the ‘least related’ of my siblings according to 23andme is also the phenotypic outlier)