Good article.

excellent read

interesting, especially the bit that reads:

'a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded.'

as it seems to outside observers not alot has changed.

this is asinine to think we are smarter then our grandparents i mean what the fuck, they learned Latin in school they read books for fun, they knew how to build things, hunt, camp,knew history . our fonding fathers knew many languages and all this without computers,they knew how trap skin, grow a garden not for fun but to live off of they were farmers, black smiths,knew how to pack their own ammo to reuse the shells they knew more then i could begin to put down and i'm expected to believe we are smarter what utter shit, hell they could fix their own cars the average collage graduate cant change his own fucking oil WHAT THE FUCK this is propaganda plain and simple.

What I got from this is: Some people are smart, and some are dumb, and we really don't have any really good objective way to differentiate between them.

And the SAT is racially biased...

this is asinine to think we are smarter then our grandparents i mean what the fuck, they learned Latin in school they read books for fun, they knew how to build things, hunt, camp,knew history . our fonding fathers knew many languages and all this without computers,they knew how trap skin, grow a garden not for fun but to live off of they were farmers, black smiths,knew how to pack their own ammo to reuse the shells they knew more then i could begin to put down and i'm expected to believe we are smarter what utter shit, hell they could fix their own cars the average collage graduate cant change his own fucking oil WHAT THE FUCK this is propaganda plain and simple.

propaganda...for what purpose?

Fuck I don't or care i can tell when I'm being delibrately lied to, why dose it matter what the agenda is? Are you perhaps trying to paint what i said as paranoid or have even considered what i have said?

Well, you're obviously not smarter than than a lot of people. So I can see how you might be offended when someone implies otherwise.

propaganda serves a purpose. what is the purpose of this link? is it trying to make us buy something, support a certain cause, etc? it seems to just be making an assertion that you disagree with. yet you seem to disagree with it pretty vehemently...leading me to believe...that YOUR POST IS PROPAGANDA and now i'm going to totally disregard it.

i mean some of us are clearly less intelligent than were our ancestors, but why don't you try to match their feats instead of pretending to be so in awe of them? it's not that tough to learn a little.

you sir are a troll it is clear that you will attack anything i say no matter what it is. just so we're clear, I DON'T care what you think of me i posted my thoughts on this that is all, and MY thoughts are clear we live in a nation of morons who watch American idol, elected bush twice, believe that if we disagree with the bush fucktard that we are with the terrorists, and some how I'm asked to believe that we are smarter i say bah that is utter bullshit now i will admit that some of us are smarter then SOME people in the past. but to say that over all I.Q. tests are up something is wrong with that, and buy the way I'm not in awe of the people of past i just know the facts , and the facts are that this assertion that we are smarter is utter shit.

YOU GET EM TIGER

you sir are a troll it is clear that you will attack anything i say no matter what it is. just so we're clear, I DON'T care what you think of me i posted my thoughts on this that is all, and MY thoughts are clear we live in a nation of morons who watch American idol, elected bush twice, believe that if we disagree with the bush fucktard that we are with the terrorists, and some how I'm asked to believe that we are smarter i say bah that is utter bullshit now i will admit that some of us are smarter then SOME people in the past. but to say that over all I.Q. tests are up something is wrong with that, and buy the way I'm not in awe of the people of past i just know the facts , and the facts are that this assertion that we are smarter is utter shit.

you dumbass. you know nothing of the average american of the past. there was a time when the majority of americans believed in slavery, that maggots were spontaneously generated out of decaying matter, that there was no such thing as germs, and on and on and on.

we know things now that americans three generations ago could not have imagined. we know all the history that led up to their generation...and then all the history that leads up to ours. we know all about other cultures that americans viewed as foreign and alien, we know about sociological studies that give us insight into the human condition.

beyond that, what are these FACTS that you know? i don't really think that you know any, but is it that, factually, IQ scores have risen? because that is a fact.

beyond that, you stupid, did you notice that it's not just ameicans, but every culture studied? the dutch, the japanese, european countries?

could it be, perhaps, that you are incorrect, and not the author of this longitudinal study?

but...but...AMERICAN IDOL

well apparently we are at an impasse we can go no further with this line of thought we will have to agree to disagree, i don't want this to degenerate to name calling as i can see that this is quickly happening. it is my hope that in the future that we can discuss these type of things as men and not as children.








p.s. you poopy head :P

you type like an infant but you know more than a researcher conducting a longitudinal study whose results were published in the illustrious new yorker?

honestly, if they can't convince you, then i don't know why i thought i could.

Ever since IQ tests were administered, Regulator liked the smell of onions.

This should clear things up, Regulator.

I can dig where Regulator is coming from. I think this link best explores his side of the issue.

There are other sides but this one is his and I respect that.

“If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents,” Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories.

Yes, they knew how to do everything you listed Regulator, including spelling correctly - something you seem to have not grasped. Having read the article, which I'm not feeling you did, you'd find the above quote seven paragraphs in. What it means is that if you were to apply our current I.Q. test retroactively to our ancestors they would appear less intelligent. The reverse is true also, by the standards of an earlier I.Q. test or even school test (have you seen the test from a late 1800s school book floating around?) and the 'correct' answers we would test lower.
Why would this be? If you read two paragraphs down you'll notice that the tribesmen give the 'wrong' answer at first, but when asked another way they give the 'correct' answer - i.e. the answer the I.Q. test deems as right. It means an I.Q. test only measures how in touch you are with the culture that has created it and the skills needed in that culture. In other words, yes it is inherently biased. towards the skills of the modern society that its meant to test - not towards race.

In regards to the list you had in your first post - personally I can do almost every one of those things, I don't know how to be a blacksmith but given time I could figure it out and I'm not talented in languages. There are many people that can and actually do the things on your list, sometimes even more than one on a daily basis.