Good on you for admitting it, but this popular way of being intentionally wrong just because some baddies have stuck their flag in the hill of truth is anti-scientific. Everyone's trying to protect their personal image at the expense of honesty. I'm constantly encountering people who have wrong beliefs about this stuff because the scientific conclusions are so well hidden from mainstream writing on the topic. Even the person replying to you seems shocked to hear that intelligence is innate. Blank-slatism and everybody's-a-winner has infected popular understanding of intelligence.

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zozbot234 3 days ago | parent [-]

Except that raw unadjusted IQ scores for even the "hardest" and supposedly most culturally unbiased test (Raven's Progressive Matrices) have consistently shown a secular gain of about one standard deviation over 30-to-40 years, due to the so-called Flynn Effect; with much of it concentrated at the low end. The whole notion that these tests simply measure some kind of purely "innate" ability is highly implausible to say the least; even more so when you compare across different cultural subgroups and even totally different countries.

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raddan 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not to mention that any test of “innate” ability should not be affected by training or practice, but all known tests of supposed innate ability are. Even Binet (yes, the guy who intended the IQ test) found substantial practice effects; these effects were replicated by Gibson (1969).

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foxglacier 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's obviously both genetic and environmental. You can limit people with a detrimental environment (extreme example - inflicting brain damage) but cant improve them beyond their their natural ceiling. And yes, tests don't purely measure that innate ceiling.

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littlestymaar 2 days ago | parent [-]

> It's obviously both genetic and environmental. You can limit people with a detrimental environment (extreme example - inflicting brain damage) but cant improve them beyond their their natural ceiling.

The question besides the obvious is how close to their ceiling the average human is (or even the 90th percentile). Because the entire discourse about “ceiling” implies that people are somewhat limited by their ceiling. But if 90% of the people are plateauing at 30% of their ceiling because of environmental factors, it makes little sense to talk about the ceiling at all.

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Izkata 2 days ago | parent [-]

Given the Flynn effect ended in the 90s in several countries, I'd say the western world is close to it.

	▲	littlestymaar 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		We can't say if we're plateauing because of biological limits or environmental ones…