The Flynn Effect and "g"

The Flynn Effect (FE) is a secular rise in IQ over time that has been occurring throughout the West for 80 years now. All ages and ethnic groups are effected. Preliminary evidence indicates that it is also occurring in the Caribbean (Dominica), South America (Brazil) and Africa (Kenya).

An overview of the FE itself goes beyond the scope of this post, but if you click on the Flynn Effect category at the end of the post, you can read up on what I have written about it.

The FE is quite complex, and many people do not seem to understand the concept properly, hence are not able to discuss it, much less debate it. However, most people of reasonable intelligence, if interested, seem to be able to grasp the basic implications of the FE.

Hereditarians, most of whom are White racists, are very upset by the FE (Talk about being opposed to human progress!) because they have a strong emotional investment in White intellectual superiority and the intellectual inferiority of Blacks, Hispanics and other groups. We know that the major hereditarian researchers on intelligence are racists because almost all of them support getting rid of all anti-discrimination laws.

The agenda is clear for both lab coat racists and White nationalists: if we can prove that Blacks, Hispanics and others are intellectually inferior to Whites, we can legalize discrimination, especially job discrimination, against them.

A particularly frightening lab coat racist endeavor is attempting to prove that Blacks are inferior employees to Whites on average. If they prove this scientifically, then they will have a logical reason to support discriminating against Blacks in employment.

Almost all of these folks are White, and most of them call themselves race realists. They spend a good deal of time screaming and yelling about why Blacks and Browns will not accept that they are intellectually inferior (Steve Sailer specializes in this). Why would anyone want to accept, or accept, such a thing?

Furthermore, given the nefarious agenda behind those promoting these theories that seeks to legalize discrimination against Blacks and Browns, any Black or Hispanic person who gets behind this would have to be out of their minds.

I have ritually added "Hispanic" after Black above, but in general, Hispanics are being left out of this debate. The real effort here is directed by racist Whites against Blacks, not Hispanics. It is against Blacks that these Whites seek to legalize the right to discriminate.

The Flynn Effect has been hard to argue against, but the hereditarians have tried hard. They have shown that the FE is not on g. G is a hypothesized common correlational factor that supposedly measures pure intelligence. Everything outside of g is "not real intelligence".

However, according to one paper, the very concept of g is tendentious to say the least, and possibly nonsensical. The paper is titled G, A Statistical Myth, by an admittedly brilliant mathematician named Cosma Shalizi. I read through the whole thing but I couldn't really make sense of it. Perhaps someone who knows math better than I do can have a go at it.

A schematic of the g, or general intelligence, factor. The ovals represent subtests on an intelligence test. G represents the totality of the areas where the purple subtests shade into the pink circle, and the degree to which they correlate (line up) with each other.

G is a correlation coefficient of various tests. It measures the tendency of superior test takers (and someone who has a brain that works a bit better), if they do well on one test, do also do well on all other tests. The FE is generally not on g because some tests have risen dramatically, others moderately, and still others little or not at all.

Therefore, intelligence has not risen in a general, across-the-board kind of way. However, certain aspects of intelligence have definitely risen, and those aspects have quantifiable benefits in modern society, occupationally, academically and in other ways.

The argument of whether or not the FE gains are on g or not is very complex, about as complex as the FE itself. First of all, the FE gains have not been across the board. In general, they have focused on verbal analysis, visual analysis, verbal intelligence, and problem-solving. Gains have been few to none in basic things like general knowledge, mathematics, mathematical analysis, spelling and reading comprehension.

G is a hypothesized and problematical construct that is a correlational factor all of the subtests on an intelligence test. It is thought to be highly heritable and physiologically based, and this is why the hereditarians have gone nuts over it.

It measures how someone with a somewhat more neurologically efficient brain will tend to score better across an entire range of subtests than someone who with a less efficient brain.

The reason the FE is not on g is because it is limited to a subset of intelligence subtests, and gains have been small to none across another subset. Therefore, there is no g gain.

However, Raven's Progressive Matrices has shown larger gains than any other test. Raven's was designed to measure pure g and nothing else. Raven's scores are not thought to be effected by environmental factors outside of pregnancy and the first few months of life, and are thought to be purely neurologically, physiologically or genetically based.

Given the pure g basis for Raven's, the wild secular gains on it on the FE are most puzzling.

However, recently James Flynn has shown that the FE does show a .5 correlation on a factor analyzing fluid g.

There is fluid g and crystallized g.

Fluid g is thought to peak early in life. This is why things that require raw brain processing power tend to peak in young people. Creative persons - artists, musicians, poets, novelists, filmmakers, mathematicians, physicists - often do their best work as young people (usually as young men). Fluid g is really a measure of how well, fast or efficient your brain works.

Crystallized g is another matter altogether. Crystallized g may be seen as "what you know" as opposed to "how fast of a brain you have." While fluid g peaks early, crystallized g often goes up throughout life, and people can still score high on crystallized g in their 50's, 60's, 70's and even 80's.

This is what we might call "accumulated knowledge" or "wisdom." The old person's brain does not work as fast, but the accumulated knowledge makes up for that in that they can see connections between things easier.

The young person's brain works very fast, but with the lack of accumulated knowledge and life experience they are not able to put things together as well to arrive at the correct conclusion. This is why no society has ever put the 18-23 year old's in power, no matter how zippy their brains are.

Instead, the old men have always been put in power. The accumulation of a life of learning is thought to lead to a wisdom that will manifest itself as the ability to make "wise," correct and proper decisions.

The concepts of crystallized and fluid g are complicated, but hopefully that explanation helped you understand it.

The FE is on fluid g, not crystallized g. Visual intelligence and analysis, problem solving, verbal analysis and analytical thinking in general, on intelligence tests, is in the realm of fluid g. Those are those little puzzles that ask you to decide which figure goes next in the series.

On intelligence tests, crystallized g measures accumulated knowledge and the degree to which one has learned basic tasks of modern life. The gains on mathematics, math analysis, reading comprehension, vocabulary and general knowledge are small to nil, and all of these tests measure crystallized g. To sum, these are the sorts of things you learn in school.

This is why, despite skyrocketing IQ's, we cannot read a book, add and subtract, or calculus any faster than our grandparents. We also do not know any more than they did, and we know no more words than they did.

This is obvious in the many reports on "idiocratic" state of high school seniors, college students or college grads. And this is how a puzzle is solved - how IQ's are surely rising at the same time as idiocracy is.

From Flynn's chapter summary:

IQ gains over time were calculated for each WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) subtest and the subtests ranked by size of gain. Verbal Similarities led at 20 points per generation - larger than gains on Raven's Progressive Matrices. Similarities measures on-the-spot problem-solving (something akin to fluid g ); verbal subtests that do not measure this show low rate of gain.

WISC subtests were also ranked by their correlations with Raven's, the latter being used as a marker for fluid g. The r between the two hierarchies was calculated to approximate a correlation between IQ gains and fluid g.

The result of 0.50 contrasts with the negative correlation between IQ gains and the g generated by factor analyzing the WISC battery itself, which is generally viewed as predominately a crystallized g.

In sum, it appears that human groups can make massive fluid g gains in a period too short to accommodate radical change in the speed and efficiency of neural processes. Moreover, once gains in intelligent behavior over historical time are seen to be independent of brain physiology, does g really provide a criterion for assessing their significance?

Finally, not only a measure of fluid g (which is highly heritable) but also inbreeding depression are shown to be correlated with IQ gains - gains overwhelmingly environmental in origin. Therefore, correlations between such genetically influenced factors and the size of the black/white IQ gap do not show that the gap has a genetic component.

The Similarities test has risen faster than any other test. It measures analytical thinking and is thought to be a good measure of raw fluid g. The final paragraph is interesting. The Black-White IQ gap is correlated with something called inbreeding depression score, a purely heritable measure. Hereditarians use this to say that the B-W IQ gap is genetic.

But Flynn shows here that the FE (a purely environmental gain) also correlates with inbreeding depression, a purely hereditarian score. Flynn uses this to say that the B-W IQ gap is not necessarily genetic.

Flynn notes above that the FE cannot possibly be caused by brains that actually work better physiologically than the brains of our grandparents. Genetics doesn't work that fast.

Therefore, what does the FE measure? Flynn says it measures "intelligent behavior". So our brains don't work any better than our grandparents' brains, but we show improved "intelligent behavior" over them.

Therefore, another mystery is solved, how massive IQ gains can occur without concomitant improvement in the physiology of our brains.

Since hereditarians use g as a measure of physiological efficiency of our brains, Flynn calls this into question by noting that g gains can occur too fast to be accommodated for by physiologically improved brains. Therefore, Flynn suggests chucking g as a measure of pure brain physiological efficiency.

Therefore, the White nationalist and hereditarian argument that the FE is not on g has been proven wrong.

References

Flynn, James R. 2000. IQ Gains, WISC Subtests and Fluid g: g Theory and the Relevance of Spearman's Hypothesis to Race, Chapter 12 in Bock, Gregory R., Goode, Jamie A., Webb, Kate. Novartis Foundation Symposium 233 - The Nature of Intelligence, pp. 202-227. Novartis Foundation. Published online.

The Litmus Test For Academic Racism

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Updated December 2:

You wonder why I call these people names. Ok. There is a very good reason for that, and it is not just what they write. I really don't give a damn what they write, although in most cases, there's a problem of tone.

The main problem is their position on civil rights and anti-discrimination laws (and I am not including affirmative action as one of these laws). If you're against civil rights and anti-discrimination laws, you're a racist. It's really that simple.

There's just no way around it. Although this makes all libertarians and anarchists de facto racists, people who always write about disparagingly about certain non-White races, and then want to get rid of civil rights and anti-discrimination laws, well, they're just racists in both intent and praxis, period.

When you oppose civil rights and anti-discrimination laws for whatever reason, you are promoting racism. Whether you are consciously racist or not, you are engaging in racist behavior and promoting a racist project and agenda. It’s as simple as that.

How many Blacks oppose civil rights laws and anti-discrimination laws? Almost zero. How many Whites do? Wow! All sorts of Whites do, but they’re not really racists, they’re just “libertarians”. Holy Moses! Almost no Blacks take this Black-hostile stand, but tons of Whites do, but they’re not racists . Hmmm.

Let's look at these folks:

Charles Murray: Mr. Murray, famous author of The Bell Curve. I have read it many times; it is excellent, and it really makes a mockery of his later life as he moved much to the right of that book. He has not yet made his position known on civil rights and anti-discrimination laws. However, he has taken a negative, hopeless, very hereditarian point of view on race and intelligence that is extremely controversial to say the least.

Recently, he also admitted that he is a libertarian. That's strange for a long-time and high-profile Republican public figure like him. It seems clear that Murray's libertarianism is based mostly or solely on his desire to end civil rights and anti-discrimination laws. Going out on a limb here, I am going to argue that Murray is a racist, against Blacks and Hispanics anyway (he married a Thai woman and has two biracial Thai-White kids).


Arthur Jensen: It has been very difficult to pin down Jensen as a racist, since he tends to keep his mouth shut and does excellent scholarly work. James Flynn has praised him and says he's not a racist. Nevertheless, early on, in 1969, he took an extremely hardline hereditarian stand on race and IQ, and he has not budged even one millimeter since then.

Mr. Jensen, obviously a brilliant man and a giant in intelligence research. He's been able to escape the racist charge for all these years by watching his tongue, but as he's recently come out for getting rid of civil rights laws, into the dump he goes. His writings also have a hopeless, hard-edged and nasty tone to them, but maybe all rightwingers do? Despite Reagan, conservatism isn't exactly land of the optimists.

The rest of his career has been mostly spent fighting off attacks on his early claims and expanding on them. It doesn't seem that he's the kind of guy who will admit he's wrong. Jensen has come out in the last couple of years and stated that he wants to get rid of all civil rights and anti-discrimination laws. Therefore, Arthur Jensen is a racist.


Philippe Rushton: As if his exasperating books were not enough (although Race, Evolution and Behavior is definitely a good and thought-provoking read at the very least), and they have been widely challenged, he has made some disparaging remarks about Blacks.

For instance, he said that Canada is starting to go downhill because more Blacks are moving there. We'll let him slide on this for now, and on his problematic books.

Rushton has also taken a very hardline hereditarian stance on race and IQ, though recently, he and Murray admitted that Blacks have closed the B-W IQ gap by 3 points. However, Rushton has recently come out as opposing all civil rights and anti-discrimination laws. Therefore, Philippe Rushton is a racist, at least against Blacks, who are the source of most of his authorial attacks (he's married to a Korean woman).


Robert Gordon of Johns Hopkins University: He works in sociology and is the former husband of Linda Gottfredson. This is the little-known fellow behind the Le Griffe Du Lion website.

An old photo of sociologist Dr. Robert Gordon, who is not only a racist like all of these folks here, but is also a White Supremacist based on his writings on "The Claw of the Lion", or the Le Griffe Du Lion website. Photos of this character are hard to come by, but you can see the characteristic short-trimmed beard combined with glasses and balding head. He's a very intelligent fellow, but he's put his mind in a bad place.

He is not only a White racist like the rest, but unlike many of them, this guy is actually a White Supremacist. A good portion of his site is given over to studies showing how Whites are actually superior to Northeast Asians.

His work is exceedingly problematic and should well earn him the racist tag right there. For instance, he claims that Black criminals "deliberately prey with a hunter's mindset for White victims to the exclusion of other victims". Wow. But let us give him a break on his most unpleasant work and website for now.

Mr. Gordon, in the form of The Lion's Claw, has definitely come out for getting rid of all civil rights and anti-discrimination laws, or at least that is my reading of Le Griffe's blog. If I am wrong, let me know in the comments or in e-mail. Therefore, tentatively, Robert Gordon is a racist.

Sociologist Dr. Robert A. Gordon in a 1999 photo. You can see the trademark trimmed beard, balding hair and glasses, except now his hair is White. He's kind of funny-looking in this photo, but a lot of these eggheads are kind of quirky folks. I'm quite certain the Dr. Gordon is in fact Le Griffe Du Lion, but it's not proven conclusively. How could it be when he won't admit it?

Richard Lynn: Mr. Lynn is a professor in anthropology at the University of Ulster. His writings are pretty unpleasant like a lot of this stuff, but he's also engaged in some academic or scientific fraud in my opinion, or nearly so, or at least some funny theorizing.

Mr. Lynn is usually a fine scholar, like all of these folks, and a lot of his work is interesting. He runs around the globe administering IQ tests and collecting IQ data. I don't mind such an enterprise, but it seems like the only folks doing this stuff are racist assholes like Lynn, which is too bad. Further, his enterprise is rendered somewhat dubious by his crystal-clear biases, which he finds it hard to bury.

He's has unfairly downgraded the Vietnamese IQ from 99.5 (based on tests) to 95 (based on taking a fake-low 100 figure for "rural China" and combining it with 90 for Thailand and averaging the two). He did this in order to make a wacky Ice Age Theory of his work whereby it takes 10,000's of years to evolve smarts, and you have to go through Ice Ages to do it.

Vietnam and South China messes that up, so he plays games with figures. In this review, Lynn says he agrees with 99% of Richard Feurle's racist (but worth a read) book, Erectus Walks Among Us, Lynn has also said, charmingly, that we need to think about "phasing out" low-IQ races. Phew.

I notice an awful lot of these "race realist", "racialist", "racially aware" or "White nationalist" folks, almost all of whom are White by the way, really take umbrage to being called racists. Though I'm not so obtuse or grotesque as to call anyone who adopts a name like the above a racist, I think one thing is clear.

If you oppose civil rights and anti-discrimination laws (other than affirmative action), that's the litmus test for racism. You oppose them, you're a racist. It's really that simple. If you folks want people to quit calling you racist, maybe you should reconsider your position on these laws. Just a thought.

If you oppose civil rights and anti-discrimination law, don't BS around. Just come right out and admit you're a racist. It's not the worst thing on Earth to be, and there are hundreds of millions of humans just like you. Hey, some of my friends are even racists. What the heck? Say it loud and say it proud!

References

Herrnstein, R. & Murray, C. 1994. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Free Press.

Rushton, J.P. 1995. Race, Evolution and Behavior. New Brunswick, NJ.: Transaction Publishers.

Suzuki, L. and Aronson, J. 2005. The Cultural Malleability Of Intelligence And Its Impact On The Racial/Ethnic Hierarchy. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law.

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R-K Scale or Introversion-Extroverion Scale?

There are clearly some differences between the races, at least between Northeast Asians, European Caucasians and Blacks. Those differences are obvious to me and to many others, and show up in many statistics on a variety of societal variables.

Whether or not there are global personality differences between the races is very controversial, but it seems obvious to many folks just looking around at the world, and as a former US schoolteacher who taught classes full of Anglo-Americans, Japanese Americans and Afro-Americans for years all over Los Angeles, after a while you have to really lie to yourself to believe that such a thing does not exist.

At Gardena High School, there were many Blacks and many Japanese-Americans, and the contrast simply belts you in the face with a knockout punch. Even those experts who agree that there are differences go on and on about whether they are genetic or cultural, when it's clear that they are both.

Some recent studies have come out (by Jewish psychologists, of course) claiming that there are no significant personality differences between Blacks and Whites. I don't even care to read such a study, as it flies in the face of common sense observation.

Philippe Rushton is a racist who dislikes Blacks and his books are very controversial. He has suggested r-strategy versus k-strategy for the differences between Blacks, Whites and Asians. R-k selection theory is a theory in biology relating different modes of adaptation that animals use to survive in the environment.

I'm going to stay agnostic on the r/k thing and I don't wish to align myself with the oily Mr. Rushton, who, by the way, wishes to do away with all civil rights and anti-discrimination laws, but one thing I think Rushton makes clear is that there is an extroversion-introversion scale that closely mirrors that r/k scale.

As introverts have a vastly lower crime rate and extroverts tend to make up the vast majority of criminals (even among Whites) that makes good sense to me.

Also, extroverts are much more likely to be bored with school, tend to use and manipulate others more, have a "strong prey on the weak and that's ok" mindset, are vastly less moral and mannered, less inclined to repay debts, have much more regard for self than others, are more promiscuous, gamble, drink and take drugs more, take worse care of their health, are less cautious, have more accidents, take way more risks, are much more aggressive, impulsive prone to wild and excessive mood swings (wild emotionality) and are financially irresponsible and have a lowered life expectancy.

It's clear to me that all of these are true even within a race, say, with Whites (that's the race I'm most familiar with).

It's obvious to me that Blacks are the most extroverted race, NE Asians the least, and Whites in between.

Honestly, I have no idea what to do with most of the other races. SE Asians psychologically resemble NE Asians, though I think they are somewhat more extroverted. I haven't the faintest idea what to do with Amerindians, Hispanics, Polynesians, Micronesians and Papuans. I suspect that Papuans and Aborigines may be more like Blacks in extroversion.

Polynesians are very odd. They're obviously part-Asian and can be pretty quiet and introverted, yet at the same time, they are collectivist, love parties and are surrounded by people all the time. Filipinos are much the same. East Indians, Arabs, North Africans and South Asians are pretty much like Whites, cultural baggage aside.

Culture seems to intervene a lot here, as with everything else, and it gets real hard to disentangle everything. Sure, there are introverted Blacks (I've known a few of them!) and there are extroverted NE Asians, but we are looking at these groups globally here.