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I certainly believe there is correlation between IQ and education attainment. Smart people tend to go to school longer. What I doubt is that increased education as an adult increases IQ. I know of no evidence for that, and I wish you would be bothered to find the study you are referencing.
You are confusing learning capacity with intelligence. People learn things all throughout their lives. IQ is mostly stable throughout life, though. And no, performance on IQ tests cannot reliably be improved with greater education. It can be improved by studying the specific types of questions that are found on most intelligence tests, but that simply means the test is no longer an accurate measure of intelligence.
You are making a correct point, but you are incorrect in thinking it is in contrast to what I am saying. No one is arguing that students can't get better at standardized tests. I am in the business of helping students get better, so I would be out of a job if it didn't work. However, simply because Johnny studies and gets better at the SAT, and the SAT is reasonably well-correlated with IQ, that doesn't mean Johnny's IQ went up. It just means the SAT correlates less well with IQ for Johnny than it used to.
I'm clearly using "dumb" in a relative, somewhat facetious sense. The minority kids I'm referring to are specifically those kids who get in with lower test scores, primarily because they are minorities. I think it is safe to say that kids who get admitted despite lower test scores likely are less intelligent than kids who have higher test scores, at least when speaking about aggregates.
There is no doubt that our society is average IQ-centric, though. That shouldn't be a surprise. 68% of the population has an IQ within 85-115. Here is an interesting read on how this phenomenon plays out in our democracy (warning: It is called "Scientists say America is too dumb for democracy to thrive"): https://www.yahoo.com/news/people-ar...185601411.html
But what is intelligence then? Isn’t it the capacity to learn AND use the information learned to solve problems? If a person acquires more information and improves their ability to process and utilize that information throughout their lives with no effect on their IQ score, what good is an IQ score then? Outside of bragging at dinner conversations or joining clubs that is.
Search Pubmed for studies done on this, there are several studies that have investigated this; I’m not the first person that ever questioned that connection. Many have concluded that there is an INCREASE in IQ test scores from simply having an education. Others have gone further to try and hone in on whether cognitive skills improve or just how education affects scores. It is something that is still being actively studied as we speak. This should not be a surprise to anyone really but if you want the information, its out there and isnt hard to find.
For the record I believe all democracies by their very nature are temporary. Maybe due to the phenomenon explained in the article you posted though that phonomenon isn’t limited to low IQ people. No-one is very smart about everything. And one would have to be very smart about everything to know everything about how every political decision made they affects them. Hence the representatives.( Whom unfortunately don't always know any better either... sigh) politics is just a whole different animal.
But what is intelligence then? Isn’t it the capacity to learn AND use the information learned to solve problems? If a person acquires more information and improves their ability to process and utilize that information throughout their lives with no effect on their IQ score, what good is an IQ score then? Outside of bragging at dinner conversations or joining clubs that is.
Search Pubmed for studies done on this, there are several studies that have investigated this; I’m not the first person that ever questioned that connection. Many have concluded that there is an INCREASE in IQ test scores from simply having an education. Others have gone further to try and hone in on whether cognitive skills improve or just how education affects scores. It is something that is still being actively studied as we speak. This should not be a surprise to anyone really but if you want the information, its out there and isnt hard to find.
For the record I believe all democracies by their very nature are temporary. Maybe due to the phenomenon explained in the article you posted though that phonomenon isn’t limited to low IQ people. No-one is very smart about everything. And one would have to be very smart about everything to know everything about how every political decision made they affects them. Hence the representatives.( Whom unfortunately don't always know any better either... sigh) politics is just a whole different animal.
I think a good analogy for intelligence is athleticism. Plenty of people with mild natural athleticism have had some success as athletes. They have overcome their lack of natural athletic ability through hard work. But a person who is more athletic in general is going to have an advantage over a less athletic one. Imagine you have two people who have never played basketball before. One is very athletic and can run fast, jump high and has good coordination. The other is of average athleticism. If they both work equally hard and all other factors are equal, who will become the better player? Probably the more athletic one. If the less athletic one works harder, however, it is possible that the hard work will outweigh the athleticism. I think that's a good analogy for intelligence. Hard work doesn't make a person smarter (just as practice doesn't increase natural athleticism), but it can make them better at cognitive functions (just as practice can make one better at basketball). It is by no means a guarantee of success, but it does make cognitive functions easier.
Just as the NBA has very few nonathletic people, fields that require high cognitive functioning likely have few people with low IQs. Certainly, there are cases of people who have relatively modest IQs who have had great success in such fields, but they are the exception. IQ makes functioning at a high cognitive level easier, and therein lies the advantage. That advantage can be pissed away of course, but it is an advantage nonetheless.
An anecdote: Saul Kripke is one of the greatest philosophers of the last century. He is also one of the only renowned philosophers I know of (maybe the only) who doesn't even have a graduate degree. He has a bachelors degree, and that's it. He had read all of Shakespeare by nine and finished his first modal logic theorem by 17. He was born to think the way Lebron was born to play basketball. I'm sure there are some successful philosophers who have relatively modest IQs (125 or so maybe), but Kripke was clearly born with a significant advantage over them. It isn't a surprise, then, that he has been more successful than perhaps all of them. Statistically, the chances of a person with a 125 IQ becoming a renowned philosopher are significantly lower than the chances of a person with Kripke's IQ doing so.
ETA: Regarding democracies, of course that phenomenon isn't limited solely to low-IQ folks. The important point is that democracies will tend to elect people who are slightly (but not greatly) more intelligent than average. If you had a society that had an average IQ of 175, I imagine the same phenomenon would persist, but the IQ of the leaders would be higher than the IQ of our leaders. The problem isn't so much that we can't "know everything about everything," but rather the inherent difficulty in telling the difference between two perceived experts or two people who are sufficiently smart (smarter than you). To quote the movie Good Will Hunting, "It's just a handful of people in the world who can tell the difference between you and me. But I'm one of them."
Last edited by Wittgenstein's Ghost; 11-21-2017 at 01:35 PM..
I think a good analogy for intelligence is athleticism. Plenty of people with mild natural athleticism have had). It is by no means a guarantee of success, but it does make cognitive functions easier.
Just as the NBA has very few nonathletic people, fields that require high cognitive functioning likely have few people with low IQs. Certainly, there are cases of people who have relatively modest IQs who have had great success in such fields, but they are the exception. IQ makes functioning at a high cognitive level easier, and therein lies the advantage. That advantage can be pissed away of course, but it is an advantage nonetheless.
with Kripke's IQ doing so.
ETA: Regarding democracies, of course that phenomenon isn't limited solely to low-IQ folks. The important point is that democracies will tend to elect people who are slightly (but not greatly) more intelligent than average. If you had a society that had an average IQ of 175, I imagine the same phenomenon would persist, but the IQ of the leaders would be higher than the IQ of our leaders. The problem isn't so much that we can't "know everything about everything," but rather the inherent difficulty in telling the difference between two perceived experts or two people who are sufficiently smart (smarter than you). To quote the movie Good Will Hunting, "It's just a handful of people in the world who can tell the difference between you and me. But I'm one of them."
I see your point. Sports is a great analogy for what we are discussing and i agree with everything you said above.
That said, studies i’m discussing would be the equivalent of researching how much professional training/coaching improves an NBA player’s game in the time since they discovered his natural athletic abilities in middle school, to a year after he got drafted and comparing that to an equally talented athletic kid that got no training and is somehow an NBA player. When it comes to physical abilities there’s generally agreement that those can be built upon and improved to a certain threshold but for some reason when it comes to mental abilities that thinking is controversial despite existing evidence. Why i don’t know.
Regarding democracies, a more intelligent population would have its advantages, but i doubt if a more effective government would be a result. Human Nature is inherently self serving and i may be cynical, but I believe that when it comes to power; intelligence and ‘knowing better’ sometimes have little time to do with decision making. The Stanford prison experiment was a good example of this. Smart kids and professor i’m sure, but we saw how quickly that went south.
A UT alumn forwarded this to explain why UT doesn’t offer National Merit Scholarships and looses top students to schools who does.
“The ULN offers member students a $20,000 scholarship, paid in monthly increments over their college careers. To keep getting the money, students have to maintain a 2.0 GPA and stay enrolled in a full course load in order to graduate on time.”
Let’s not forget that educational expenses for most of these students are already paid through financial aid, this is additional incentive to pass their classes so UT can justify their autoadmit policy. No wonder, there is no money left to attract merit Scholars. Not saying this is necessarily a bad policy to reward low performers to graduate but not to forget that UT still needs to attract top students to stay academically competitive with good schools.
A UT alumn forwarded this to explain why UT doesn’t offer National Merit Scholarships and looses top students to schools who does.
“The ULN offers member students a $20,000 scholarship, paid in monthly increments over their college careers. To keep getting the money, students have to maintain a 2.0 GPA and stay enrolled in a full course load in order to graduate on time.”
Let’s not forget that educational expenses for most of these students are already paid through financial aid, this is additional incentive to pass their classes so UT can justify their autoadmit policy. No wonder, there is no money left to attract merit Scholars. Not saying this is necessarily a bad policy to reward low performers to graduate but not to forget that UT still needs to attract top students to stay academically competitive with good schools.
From the UT website, ULN scholarship is a 100% need based financial scholarship. Would be curious to know, if it was started after UT stopped offering National Merit scholarship in 2010? From the explanation, it looks like UT don't have $$ funding left to offer to merit scholars due to ULN scholarship.This is not correct.They do offer other merit scholarships.
I think by not offering National merit scholarship, they are still able to attract most of the top national merit students interested in UT, specially in engineering, business and science who could have got a full ride in some other universities. The top students they loose are the ones who choose to get a full ride planning to go to Med schools (where undergrad college do not matter much as in engineering/business), or those who choose an assured "full ride" or substantially higher merit schlarship in universities like OU, UT,Dallas...etc.
Many UT students gets merit scholarship from their respective department. I don't know the exact figures in business and science schools but UT's Cockrell school of engineering offers 25% to 100% of tuition fees as merit scholarship to its top students, subject to maintaining 3.5 GPA. These scholarships are definitely not as good as a full ride and not everyone gets them, but through UT, they have a better shot in getting paid internship and full time offers from campus recruitment. Most of these companies also go to Ivy leagues and other Top Tier US universities.
From the UT website, ULN scholarship is a 100% need based financial scholarship. Would be curious to know, if it was started after UT stopped offering National Merit scholarship in 2010? From the explanation, it looks like UT don't have $$ funding left to offer to merit scholars due to ULN scholarship.This is not correct.They do offer other merit scholarships.
I think by not offering National merit scholarship, they are still able to attract most of the top national merit students interested in UT, specially in engineering, business and science who could have got a full ride in some other universities. The top students they loose are the ones who choose to get a full ride planning to go to Med schools (where undergrad college do not matter much as in engineering/business), or those who choose an assured "full ride" or substantially higher merit schlarship in universities like OU, UT,Dallas...etc.
Many UT students gets merit scholarship from their respective department. I don't know the exact figures in business and science schools but UT's Cockrell school of engineering offers 25% to 100% of tuition fees as merit scholarship to its top students, subject to maintaining 3.5 GPA. These scholarships are definitely not as good as a full ride and not everyone gets them, but through UT, they have a better shot in getting paid internship and full time offers from campus recruitment. Most of these companies also go to Ivy leagues and other Top Tier US universities.
He was really upset that UTD, UNT, Baylor, A&M, OU etc are throwing money at high performers to snatch them from UT. He believes UT had potential to rise to the level of UC Berkely, U Michigan, UVA level public schools.
He was really upset that UTD, UNT, Baylor, A&M, OU etc are throwing money at high performers to snatch them from UT. He believes UT had potential to rise to the level of UC Berkely, U Michigan, UVA level public schools.
Can't blame them, can you?
UT-Austin is already at that level, by the way. UT-Austin appeared alongside those schools on the "Public Ivy" list way back in 1985. It's only gotten more competitive since then.
No. I don’t blame any schools for appreciating academic potential. They are educational institutions. For Texas, it’s better to have many good schools instead of having only one.
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