To be clear, I think it’s very obvious that genetics has a large effect on g. The key question that you seemed to dismiss above is whether education or really any form of training has an additional effect (or more likely, some complicated dynamic with genetics) on g.
And after looking into this question a lot over the past few years, I think the answer is “maybe, probably a bit”. The big problem is that for population-wide studies, we can’t really get nice data on the effects of education because the Flynn effect is adding a pretty clear positive trend and geographic variance in education levels doesn’t really capture what we would naively think as the likely contributors to the observed increase in g.
And you can’t do directed interventions because all IQ tests (even very heavily g-loaded ones) are extremely susceptible to training effects, with even just an hour of practicing on Raven’s progressive matrices seeming to result in large gains. As such, you can’t really use IQ tests as any kind of feedback loop, and almost any real gains will be drowned out by the local training effects.
To be clear, I think it’s very obvious that genetics has a large effect on g. The key question that you seemed to dismiss above is whether education or really any form of training has an additional effect (or more likely, some complicated dynamic with genetics) on g.
And after looking into this question a lot over the past few years, I think the answer is “maybe, probably a bit”. The big problem is that for population-wide studies, we can’t really get nice data on the effects of education because the Flynn effect is adding a pretty clear positive trend and geographic variance in education levels doesn’t really capture what we would naively think as the likely contributors to the observed increase in g.
And you can’t do directed interventions because all IQ tests (even very heavily g-loaded ones) are extremely susceptible to training effects, with even just an hour of practicing on Raven’s progressive matrices seeming to result in large gains. As such, you can’t really use IQ tests as any kind of feedback loop, and almost any real gains will be drowned out by the local training effects.