Letters Remain

Tag: intelligence

  • The Presence of Books and Children’s Intelligence

    The number of books in your household has more of an effect on your child’s academic achievements than your education or income, a recently published study (pdf) has found. Suggesting that the effects seem to be far from trivial, the conclusion indicates that simply the presence of books in their house can make children more…

  • Improving Intelligence by Knowing About Intelligence

    Lecturing students on the fact that general intelligence can be improved and that certain races and genders are not naturally more intelligent than others (in-line with current research) can improve test scores–especially for members of the groups typically thought of as having limited intelligence. It’s not just theoretical: the findings were applied successfully to schools…

  • The New Nature-Nurture Argument

    As it stands, the nature-nurture debate is wrong, proposes David Shenk in his book on the subject, The Genius in All of Us. Shenk submits the idea that we overestimate the effect genes have on many heritable traits, especially intelligence (or that ever-elusive ‘genius’). According to Shenk, and he is persuasive, none of this stuff…

  • The Downside of Scientific Progress

    Scientific progress is making most ground-breaking academic achievements occur later on in researchers’ lives. This in itself is not a bad thing, of course, but could it be signalling the end of the polymath (or the intellectual polygamist, as Carl Djerassi would prefer it be called)? Back in the early 19th century you could grasp a…

  • Deliberate Practice Breeds Genius

    I initially thought that this was just going to be another superfluous variation on the 10,000 hours theme (from Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, Outliers). OK, so while it actually is that, David Brooks’ look at how to forge modern creative genius is still fairly interesting. Coyle describes a tennis academy in Russia where they enact rallies without a…

  • Raising Smart Children: Concentrate on Effort, not Ability

    An old Scientific American article looks at the findings from three decades of research into how to raise intelligent children. Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that…

  • 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll (100 Most Important Living Intellectuals )

    The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll is a list of the 100 most important living public intellectuals […] compiled in November 2005 by Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy on the basis of a reader’s ballot. Top five: Noam Chomsky Umberto Eco Richard Dawkins Václav Havel Christopher Hitchens Foreign Policy requires (free) registration to access the list.…

  • The Correlation Between IQ and Atheism

    Times Higher Education reports that there is a strong correlation between a high IQ and a lack of religious belief, according to Richard Lynn, the controversial psychologist. In the past Lynn has performed research into what he believes is the existence of race and sex differences in intelligence, and has called for the “phasing out”…

  • Books That Make You Dumb

    BooksThatMakeYouDumb is a little ‘statistical’ graph on how average SAT scores correlate with what books people read. Accepting it’s unscientificness Virgil (the creator) lists the most notable things about the data: Harry Potter is the most popular book. The Bible is the second most popular book. At least among college students, Harry Potter is, like…