Complementarian Versus Assortive Marriages

On a previous post in the comments, this little exchange occurred.

Steve Sailer May 18, 2012 1:35 AM


Thanks.
Along these lines, I was fascinated by a recent offhand comment by tech guy Jaron Lanier that nobody has yet written the history of the role of women in Silicon Valley. The impression I got was that very bright, very social ladies in Silicon Valley have introduced a lot of the extremely bright, not very social nerds at the core of successful start-ups to each other, the way salon hostesses in 18th Century France introduced so many of the philosophes to each other. But maybe that's the wrong impression ...


Jehu May 18, 2012 9:20 AM

Steve,

I agree that a lot of such men used to outsource an awful lot of their family social functioning to their wives. Are marriages of that sort (seriously complementary with heavy specialization) terribly common in Silicon Valley anymore?


This of course prompts me to wonder to what extent marriages have become less complementary than in the past.
First, let me explain what I mean.
When a man looks for a wife in the complementary model, he's looking for a wife that complements him in the sense that she covers his areas of relative weakness, making their partnership a more complete whole.  The classic example of this is the extremely social and extroverted wife who creates the social calendar for her introverted husband out of whole cloth.  Said wives are usually around 1 sigma lower in raw mental ability, but have far and away more social capability than their husbands  (read the term 'very' as typically being 2-3 sigma, and extremely as 4+ sigma, and you won't go very far wrong).
I'd say a majority of the wives I knew when I was growing up were of this type---these were baby boomer  and silent generation women.  There was even a conventional wisdom at the time---if you're introverted, get an extroverted wife, with the converse less frequently recommended for extroverts to pick an introverted wife.
 
Now though the model seems to be a lot more of an assortive one.  Your wife usually has a talent set not too terribly dissimilar to your own.  For instance, my wife and I are both INTJs, and we have several INTJ-INTJ couples as friends of ours.  Samson refers to this as 'Professional Class Incest' http://samsonsjawbone.wordpress.com/2010/10/30/professional-class-incest/
 
Whereas my father in law (an engineer) picked a gentle church secretary who studied drama in college as his wife, I went for another engineer.  His choice was pretty typical of his generation, and mine reasonably typical of my own.  Interestingly, we both have a complementary model for roles within marriage, with extremely similar divisions of labor and specialization, but his arrangement was far more common when he was my age than mine is presently.
 
Sailer is probably on target that the wives of engineers in Silicon Valley had a major role in lubricating a lot of the ad hoc companies that got started there in their early days.  Wives of Engineers, or WOE for short was in fact a support group near a university that I attended back in the 90s--although the group was mostly at least a half generation older than me, so they were mostly complementary rather than assortively selected wives.  Anyone want to bet that said support group networked on their husbands' behalf like crazy?  Were I a betting man, I'd wager that 3-4 handfuls of Major Professors were more influential than the WOE equivalent, but they're probably the only group with more weight.  Major professor networking is still extremely strong---I've both been helped and have helped to get jobs through my major professor's network.
 
Assortively-selected wives is a pretty massive social experiment when you think about it.  It would be a topic for some bona fide social science to investigate what sort of impact it has actually had.  Performed with an honest search for truth, it could probably even meet the 'Smart Redneck' gold standard of social science---which is to say that it could produce superior predictions and insight to the group I described in
http://www.chariotofreaction.blogspot.com/2012/05/of-smart-rednecks-and-low-church.html
I did consult a smart redneck friend of mine when deciding whether to offer marriage to my wife, and he considered it to be a good idea, but one datapoint hardly constitutes a consensus over the whole class of which he is an exemplar over the whole notion of assortive mating.
 

Implications of Cochrane's "Spell Checker" Narrative

As promised in the last post, let's return to the implications of Cochrane's narrative.
For the sake of having a tractable beast to grapple with, I'll summarize it:

Most of the genetic component of whatever capability you have is based not so much on which genetic variants you have, but the number, severity, and positioning of the minor mutations you have accumulated, courtesy of your own insults and the total accrued mutational load of your ancestors.
So, under this narrative, people who are smart for genetic reasons are just less damaged than people who are average, or in some cases, just damaged in different ways.

He therefore says that if we could 'spell-check' a person's genes, that we could expect very significant improvements in their performance in a host of ways.  This would be akin to doing some maintenance and repair to an old ship that is barely running---a lot of low-hanging fruit is probably available for the picking.

Now, in order to implement this sort of thing, we need not just READ capability on genes, which we have at the semi-productized level (PGD screening for single gene defects is available now), but also WRITE capability (and of course, knowing what to write, to spell-check one needs to know how to spell in the first place). 

If this narrative turns out to be the substantively correct one, I don't see any huge insurmountable technological obstacle to implementing it.  One learns what an undamaged copy of gene X variant Y looks like by inspecting lots of different people's versions of it, and you can infer what a pure copy of it should look like, in a similar manner to defect metrology in semiconductor manufacturing development (where if you had a gold copy for comparison, you wouldn't need to do the development in the first place and even once you master the process, you STILL have defects and have to throw away some of the chips you manufacture).

Also, this narrative would tend towards working on existing people in addition to prospective ones.  The only advantage PGD patients would have is the vastly smaller number of cells that would require spell-check.  So this poses questions of when do I cease to be me as well as when do children cease to be 'mine'.

Let's say Cochrane develops a spell checking engine that uses a tailored virus to accomplish damage control---going through your cells and fixing them progressively to the proper spec for whatever genetic variants you happen to have.
Let's stipulate that his technology is good enough that you experience around a 10% improvement in general functioning, by taking out a reasonable amount of the trash that you've accumulated.  Are you still you?  Maybe you can run a 40 yard dash a little faster and you're somewhat healthier with a few years more expected lifespan, and improvements in your brain are on the order of 5 points of IQ or so.

I'm inclined to say, yes---with the hedge that at some point, quantitative improvements take on a qualitative character.  People who have major dysfunctions corrected---for instance, thyroid regulation---often experience greater effects than these and I've not seen them lament that they are not 'Themselves' anymore, nor have I heard such reports from those around them.
I'd be less confident if the improvements were much larger though---for instance, say a person went from the equivalent of an 70 IQ to a 160 IQ---would anyone recognize them?  Would they recognize themselves?  Would their soul depart and be replaced by another?  At this point, we just don't know.  This is far outside of our realm of experience.  The insights gained from this research tread on theological as well as scientific grounds.  Is the idealized version of you still you?
Looking at the PGD case, it raises the question, is the idealized version of your son still your son?

Being a reactionary Christian, I don't honestly worry terribly much about this, as God has already promised me an even more idealized version of my body post-resurrection than Cochrane could ever hope to deliver and assured me that it will still be me, just more so.  So technology which simply hopes to repair some of the effects of the degradation post-Fall hardly threatens me.

But for a hint as to what sort of opposition that said technology would encounter if this is the correct narrative (in question) and should it be developed and productized (almost certainly if the first premise is true), I invite you to ask the question....who....whom.
I'm sure the Second Sigma, for instance, would gin up all sorts of reasons that the protocol is evil if it looked likely to reduce their effective advantages and position in society.  I'm also certain that the usual suspects in love with Death (and frequently also, with Sin who is the mother of it), would find reason to howl at the prospect of even a 10 year extension of average maximum lifespans.
Let them howl, should the center hold, their sound and fury will signify nothing.  Betting on a technology not being developed and used when the prerequisites are present is, IMO, a fool's wager.

Children of Who, Exactly?

Commentator Anonymous raises some fruitful questions in the comment section for
http://chariotofreaction.blogspot.com/2012/04/dungeons-and-dysgenics.html

I've been considering a question lately of great personal importance. Perhaps I'd like to frame it first.
Lots of people here would probably consider genetically enhancing their kids once the technology is at the level necessary. I've been wondering lately what "your kid" means. It's pretty straightfoward in a natural birth. But if you start changing the genes, to what extent does the fact that the base material was yours still make the kid yours?
What is the difference between a substantially genetically altered child from your sperm and a child from another man's sperm?

As an aside, it is probably a good idea to pick a pseudonym for such communications.  It doesn't even have to be unique, I have several that I use in non-overlapping domains.
I made a first pass at an attempt to address our esteemed commenter's questions, but I think to do it justice, it will require a post, perhaps more than one.

Let's start by discussing in a cursory fashion the genetic enhancement technologies that are likely to show their heads in the decades to come.  There are two big narratives out there insofar as how people inherit capability X.  The first is typified by the article below---specific genetic variants contribute pluses and minuses to said attributes, possibly with some weird nonlinear or multiplicative effects.  This is the big meta narrative behind the human genome project as it applies to what we term genetic 'enhancement'.
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/008589.html
(Article describes several single gene variants that are associated with larger/smaller brains and higher/lower IQ)
The second narrative comes to us by way of Cochrane, although it has a long pedigree.
http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/more-thoughts-on-genetic-load/
This narrative is basically that it isn't so much the variants of the genes that do the damage but rather the accumulation of mutational load.  Applied to intelligence, it would imply that a 'spell checking' protocol---probably akin to the defect detection process used in semiconductor manufacturing---would result in very substantial improvements to that capability.  People with higher intelligence, in this narrative, mostly just have genes in that area that are just less broken by mutational vandalism.
This, by the way, is a REALLY old narrative---most ancient cultures believed that they were the inferior descendants of much more awesome ancestors, who typically had much longer lifespans and were more capable in a host of ways.

The good news is that it is likely that we'll have a much more clear picture of the extent to which each of these narratives is true fairly soon now that sequencing has found its own analog of Moore's Law.

If the answer is mostly the first narrative, we'd expect to see productized implementations of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis deployed, probably in the 2020-2030 timeframe.  They'd probably evolve into some sort of best 1 of N protocol, where the prospective sperm and eggs were filtered according to the best information available.  Would a child born of this protocol be still yours and your spouse's?  I'm inclined to think so.  You'd expect to see this a lot for children who are already born using IVF and other fertility treatments, making them likely the beta and alpha testers of said protocols.  It's also exceedingly unlikely that such technology can be stopped politically since there's no bright line to form a useful Schelling fence behind.  You can talk about remediation (good) versus enhancement (bad), but the line between them is very blurry indeed and there's every incentive to blur it beyond recognition.  Plus it is unstable from an engineering standpoint, every enhanced child creates pressures for more to enhance theirs as well.  Such a process is already used if memory serves for Tay-Sachs, so it's unlikely that the genie could be crammed back into the bottle even should we wish it.
Philosophically, on this, say you selected one combination of sperm and egg from, say, 25 possibilities.  All of them came from you and your wife, so the child born of it is still obviously yours.  You've loaded the dice, but God still casts them.  I bet you loaded the hell out of the dice when you selected your mate too, you scoundrel, I know I did.
How much 'better' on average would such children be?  Honestly, I don't know, but does it really matter?  If you were to exceed the Duggars and went ahead and actually had all 25 potential children, and one was clearly 'superior' insofar as you or society deems to define it would there be any innate evil in this?  I don't think so, and I think most parents with large families understand that some of their children 'rolled better than others' even though the proverbial dice were the same.  None, in as much as I know, have called for the Handicapper General.

The second narrative is far stickier in its implications if it is the dominant one, frankly, even if it has equal weight to the first in practice.  I believe I'll give it its own post.  As I alluded to above, it has some distinctly Antediluvian overtones to it.  It raises serious questions, not just of when a child ceases to be 'yours' but where does the boundary of 'You' versus 'Not You' lie.  I'll wrestle with that in another post, when I am less fatigued.

Dungeons and Dysgenics?

This post obviously isn't intended to lay the issue of dysgenics at the feet of Gary Gygax, who after all, had six children.  I chose the title simply because Dungeons & Dragons and similar games which are always associated in the popular imagination with same was such a cultural force for those growing up north of the second sigma back in the early 1980s.

Among the smart people who I knew and shared social circles with growing up, in one respect I seem to be a fairly significant outlier.  Most of this group has passed 40 now, so it is appropriate to take stock as opposed to simply saying 'let's wait and see'.

That respect is that I have children.  Two presently, three with fairly high probability, and four is probably at more than 10-20% probability.  Of most of the rest of the people that I knew growing up and in college that are beyond the Second Sigma, very few have children, especially the women.

This isn't to say that all of those that I know who are beyond the Second Sigma are barren---indeed the engineers I know from work and several other reactionary bloggers in similar orbits actually have fairly sizable families, often exceeding that of my own.
I'm scratching my head right now---trying to think of anyone I know who is beyond the Second Sigma, has children, and isn't a fairly hardcore religionist.  I know a fair number of very smart atheists, both of the high and low church varieties, but I've not seen any issue from them, so to speak.  I'm not used to effects frankly that seem THIS binary in nature, not when we're talking about real people and not figures and lasagnas etched and baked into silicon.

Anyone care to take a crack at an overarching theory explaining these observations, or to add more data points?

Retrospective on the Japanese Earthquake of 2011 and One Reason Why She is Wired to Test You Occasionally

I recall the day of the earthquake in Japan pretty vividly.  My wife and I and our two little ones were spending some vacation time in a little motel on the southern Oregon coast right up against the shore.  That night I recall reading on the web that there had been a massive earthquake in Japan and later, that the initial estimate of the magnitude of that earthquake had been upgraded to 9.0.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami

My wife had just given birth to our youngest a few months earlier, and we were still in the grey months of the year in the Pacific Northwest, so her morale was pretty low.  Note to the wise:  if you can, try to arrange it so that your wife can deliver her babies in the late Spring to early Summer, it seems to mitigate the baby blues quite a bit, especially if you live in a place with dark, rainy winters like Oregon.

Around 2 or 3 in the morning, a siren starting going off for a tsunami warning.  Apparently they travel across the Pacific pretty quickly.  My wife was really shaken, pulled out of REM sleep by sirens and loudspeakers.  In the parlance of wargames, we'd say that she'd failed a morale check and was shaken.  Therefore it was to me to gather up the little ones and our things and give her specific and simple commands as we executed a speedy evacuation from the waterfront.  One recommendation if you find yourself in such a situation:  give simple and specific orders to the shaken, you need to micromanage them quite a bit more when their morale is in that state.  As it was, we got downstairs with the little ones and packed into the minivan with everything I'd be terribly upset about losing in record time.  One other note:  little babies and toddlers can tell when one of their adults is shaken, and they tend to get really pliable---their instincts are pretty good.  A mile or two away from the scene and the constant sirens and my wife's morale returned to normal, and she was a bit embarassed about the matter.

So what does this have to do with her 'testing' you occasionally---referred to as 'shit tests' or 'fitness tests' in parts of this sphere?  What her hindbrain is looking for is assurance that, should the shit hit the fan, you will be able to exercise what we'll call emergency command authority.  Lots of women have been put to far scarier circumstances than this (as it turned out, the promised tidal wave never manifested at our motel room, although some did hit further south and caused significant damage), and her gut, if not her intellect, still understands such things.  She needs to be able to rely on you to keep your head when hers is temporarily impaired.

Multiple Blood Children, The Hammer of Reality

One of the most interesting aspects of having multiple children shared with a single spouse is how it brings the hammer of reality down on your thinking.  The sort of thinking I'm discussing here is thinking on how all of your children are the same and how they are different.  When you only have one child, it's easy to pretend that things might be a fluke.  It's also easy to pretend nonsense like a child's gender being 'socially constructed' and not real at a gut level.

Looking at my two little ones would beat that out of me if I ever truly held it.  For instance, give the little boy a toy sword, and what does he do with it?  Why, he flourishes it with an excellent grip and proceeds to whack at the floating balloons nearby, or anything else identified by his parents as a legitimate target (he's been taught that he's not allowed to swing at anyone who isn't holding a similar weapon themselves).  Give the little girl a sword, and she too will flourish it with a remarkably effective grip for a one year old.  The difference is she uses it to get attention and to flirt with, flashing a huge grin and capturing the eyes of passers by, such as women of grandmotherly age.  She won't try to whack at anything with it, despite never having been discouraged from so doing.  One displays typical little boy behavior, and the other stereotypical little girl behavior, with no particular prodding required at all.

Another big thing one learns is that despite possessing very similar genetics and an extremely similar environment, each child really is significantly different.  All we can do in essence is determine what tables their attributes will be generated using, it is not to us to determine the exact fall of the dice.

More things difficult to explain from a Darwinian or a folk animal husbandry frame

Most people who think seriously about HBD tend to view it from either a Darwinian frame of reference or from the frame of what I'll call folk animal husbandry.  Folk animal husbandry tends to talk about things like 'the apple not falling far from the tree'---an expression, which, if you think about it, implies pretty strongly a strong central tendency based on genetics with some variation due to randomness and environment, especially when the modifier, the wind wasn't blowing too hard when that apple fell from the tree, is applied.  In addition the expressions about 'good stock' (sometimes 'good pioneer stock', with the stipulation that 'the cowards never came, the weak died along the way' applied) abound in the language.

For most practical HBD purposes, these frames are equivalent.  Honestly, creationists are more likely to agree to the practical application of HBD than are evolutionists, probably due to memetic entanglements.
Most creationists, for instance, will not dispute the claim that the races are partially inbred families writ large.  The ones who know their Old Testament will even point out the particular pedigrees involved going back to Noah.  Most also won't dispute the claim that different families have different tendencies towards large or small endowments in various attributes.  The ones who are lower case o orthodox won't even balk when one points out that said endowments are not fair in any human sense of the word---there's no point-based character generation going on here, God is not a Champions or Hero system gamemaster.  Those with a good practical command of Scripture will quote 'Hath not the potter power over the clay, to make one vessel unto honor and another unto dishonor?'  It's also not unlikely that the Parable of the Talents will be shared with you.  The creationist feels no need to pretend equality in any human sense, because he is confident that human beings are of equal (or at least inestimable) value to God. 

But whichever frame one chooses, one has two huge problems to deal with---two huge brute facts that challenge our frame.

The first is alluded to by a commentator on the 'Final Judgment of Darwin' on homosexuality.  The evidence that the trait is partially influenced by genetics is reasonably strong, but the depression in TFR that it causes is extremely strong.  Using either frame of reference, one would predict that it would be rapidly extinguished from the population, even leaving aside the impact of various 'social diseases', pogroms, or the like.

The second one is the massive differences that exist between women in terms of fertility and ability to safely carry a child to term.  Presumably, if Darwin or animal husbandry optimize ANYTHING, they optimize the ability to produce offspring.  That's about as fundamental as it gets.  Yet we have women like, say, my wife, mother, or great great grandmother who have had no significant difficulties whatsoever bringing a fair number of descendants into the world.  On the other side, we have women like two of my sisters in law who have had a great deal of such difficulty, one of whom would not survive a pre-modern childbirth.  Similar differences exist in terms of ability to conceive in the first place.  Given that even the youngest of Young Earth Creationists believe that humanity is around 300 generations old, that's plenty of time for natural/artificial selection and/or animal husbandry to optimize this pretty key capability and to largely fix whatever genetic variants promote such throughout the population.  Compare, for instance, lactose tolerance, which took very little time to become near universal in populations where cattle were common.

Both of these problems point to the conclusion that we don't understand this portion of reality anywhere near as well as perhaps we think we do.  This isn't to say that we know nothing, or that what we know is not useful (look to the radically increased yields we've been able to squeeze out of plants, for instance, even before modern 'genetic engineering' or, for instance, the incredible amount of intellectual talent the first wave of psychometrics was able to mine out of unexpected sources).  But it does tend to indicate that we should try to avoid straying too far from the actual data. 

Besieging Moldbug's Cathedral: Help From Inside the University System

http://mangans.blogspot.com/2011/09/minorities-up-to-1500-times-more.html

In short, the University of Wisconsin-Madison was sued successfully by the Center for Equal Opportunity to release its admissions records, which they then mined to produce the jewel of legitimate grievance Mangan has so generously shared with us. Now, everyone who isn't a total idiot knows that racial preferences exist in the university system. But what everyone DOESN'T know is just how massive said preferences actually are. None of this surprises anyone with a basic knowledge of HBD and Statistics. For instance, around 1 in 6 black people in the US is of above average intelligence. One in 50 has more than a 115 IQ, which is the basic ante for a real degree program at a school with real standards---and which used to be the average IQ for college graduates (presently that number is closer to 105). However this creates massive representation ratios---because for a white person, approximately 1 in 2 are above average intelligence, and 1 in 6 have the 115 IQ mentioned previously. Those familiar with the normal distribution recognize, of course, that the representation ratios just get nastier and nastier as you move up the sigmas.

Our friends inside the Cathedral admissions department have done us a yeoman service here, by being so egregiously blatant about discriminating against white people in favor of hispanics (many who are probably the white people with Spanish surnames I posted about earlier this month) and blacks (many who are probably recent immigrants or foreign nationals). A better publicity coup to undermine the support of the Cathedral I would have difficulty devising myself.

Now the naive approach is to try to simply deny the admissions departments the knowledge of the race of the applicants. Don't count on this working. There are all kinds of ways the two motivated groups (the ones with a burning desire to get their diversity brownie points and the ones who have a flaming desire to bestow them) can coordinate implicitly. There's the infamous essay, the high school they graduated from, the name of the applicant, and now...google and facebook. Anyone who thinks they won't attempt to game any such regimen is smoking something really good. The only approach with half a chance would be to strip them totally of all discretion and use a European-style examination admission system. But honestly, we reactionaries really don't want to solve the affirmative action injustice so much as to use it as a club with which to destroy the Cathedral. Successive good faith attempts by the voters and their representatives to fix this problem subverted by the dark powers of the admissions department which inspire further rage in said voters is EXACTLY what we want. Praise God for his hardening of the hearts of our adversaries.

Why Game works and why that fact is so intolerable to the non-neurotypical mind

There exists quite a bit of overlap between the reactionary sphere, the HBD sphere, the 'Manosphere' and the Game sphere. I suppose that the common thread is that they're all based on the flaunting of certain truths that polite people agree not to talk about. Politeness is a good thing, but it should never be presumed to be the best thing, especially not when different groups are held to different standards of it.

There exists a certain irony that the fundamentals of Game are very reactionary indeed. Some of its exponents, Roissy, for instance, grok this. Boiled down to a few sentences, it is this:

Women in our society are attracted to the high status male. Men are attracted to the young and beautiful woman .

You can argue that these are universally true statements across all cultures, but such is not really necessary for the observations to be useful.

This of course is directly contrary to the line we push in our culture and absolutely contrary to the naive projection of the non-neurotypical mind. I mean----STATUS!? Such a fuzzily defined thing, so ridiculously vulnerable to being spoofed. But that is what women of the neurotypical variety react to, and it is in truth very subject to being spoofed. Spoofing the status game is something we do so commonly we even have tons of euphemisms for it, like 'putting one's best foot forward' and 'showing one's self in the best possible light'.

In much more reactionary times--which is to say, any time before the late 20th century, most societies had pretty strong disincentives for those who presumed to affect higher status than they officially possessed. Acting like a superior tough guy, for instance, would much more frequently draw you into actual physical fights than is the case today. The realities have changed, but the gut feeling of the woman really hasn't. Hell, if you go back further, you'll find that even spoofing the status signals involved in clothing was strictly verboten via sumptuary laws.

Now, the woman seeking to assess your status at a visceral level must frequently just fall back on what level of status you implicitly and explicitly take. Do you treat her as if you had higher status, the same, or lower status? Your luck will be the best if you treat her as if you had higher status, and this infuriates the non-neurotypical mind. This is why teasing her, making her qualify or prove herself to you, and generally not hanging on her every word or taking her very seriously works so damnably well on the neurotypical woman. Reactionary men, which is to say men before the 1960s, generally acted as if they understood this. Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew' is a pretty explicit treatment of this essential fact about men and women. You can mine it out of the Old Testament if you like, the more concentrated ore is to be had from the Bard. I've previously talked about how someone doing YOU a favor tends to make them like you better, a truth that I've seen first articulated explicitly by Ben Franklin. This works extremely well on both men and women. The more positive things you get her to do for you or with you, the more she will like you. This is so insanely contrary to reason that I can easily envision it driving the not so neurotypicals to distraction. But what must be remembered is that human beings are not, in the whole, very rational creatures. For whatever reason, 95% or more of us behave and react this way, and those that don't need to accomodate ourselves to that fact.

Yes, this is the reason why charities are always spamming you with more solicitations talking about the generous gifts you've already given them, why salesmen try to get you to do them some innocuous favor to 'get their foot in the door', and why political groups are always trying to get you to make some meaningless symbolic gesture. They're trying to trigger some of the subroutines (crazily ingrateful diplomatic model and faulty sunk cost processing) that you might not have as a non-neurotypical, but are nearly universal otherwise. Much effort over the centuries has been put into learning to exploit the neurotypical mind's nature. Studying some of the works in sales and propaganda can be very helpful there if you keep one thing in mind---generally these techniques work and work quite well.

Why bother with IQ anyway?

A great deal of ink is spilled in the reactionary sphere and the HBD sphere regarding IQ. One might ask why is this so? Is everyone still obsessed with the almighty SAT that they took in their late teens?

The answer to this question is that it's probably the most useful metric compared to the work necessary to obtain it in the social sciences. In the social sciences, you very rarely get correlation coefficients anywhere near that of the physical sciences. People are far messier than even organic chemicals. To get good predictive results out of correlations at the level found in the social sciences, you've got to be looking at large groups of people, at least if you're spoiled by the precision of harder sciences.

There are other metrics that are almost as useful, like executive capacity and conscientiousness, but the big problem with them is that they're generally awfully easy to game. Whenever there are significant stakes involved, the participants WILL try to game whatever test or screening/interviewing procedure you establish. I've been on both sides of such processes, although I've long since interviewed more people than have interviewed me. Every candidate will attempt to 'put his best foot forward'. Your fancy questions intended to reveal the candidate's true nature are discussed in detail in interviewing classes and books. Such is life. IQ at least has the merit that it's damned difficult to game.

There are two major types of IQ tests out there. The first type tests things that are commonly done and studied in the culture of interest. For instance, the old SAT is a good example of this, testing things that have a wide cultural relevance for prospective college students---no math beyond algebra II, for instance. You use the test to rank order the participants and assign scores based on the percentile of each test taker. In practice this corresponds pretty well with what we informally call intelligence in everyday speech. The test is of a form familiar to most of its takers and is difficult to prepare for specifically---even the test prep industry can't normally promise more than 50 points or so. Tests of this form have been affected much less by the Flynn effect, and in some cases, not at all. Sometimes these tests are referred to as tests of 'crystallized' intelligence.

The second sort of IQ test attempts to be 'culture fair' and thus tries to test things that nobody's culture does much of---ideally it's a total novelty, like your first encounter with a Sudoku puzzle. Lots of things like fill in the next picture in this sequence, patterns in matrices or mathematics, and the like show up on tests like these. Such tests are often called tests of 'fluid' intelligence and have been heavily affected by the Flynn effect. I'll advance my explanation of why:

These types of tests USED to be much more of a novelty than they are now to their takers. Look at the toys SWPLs give their children these days. Look also at the sorts of puzzles that crop up in ordinary newspapers and magazines now compared to in previous generations. They retain their correlation with tests of the other sort only because they are continually renormed. Their content, indeed, their type of content has become progressively less alien and more embedded into our culture as a whole. This observation is also consistent with the observation that the Flynn effect has largely stopped in most 1st world nations. This is my explanation of my observation that when I meet a healthy senior citizen described as bright, or very bright back when he was young (and often, in fact usually, tested by some military apparatus to stick a number to that ordinal description), he generally strikes me and others around at roughly the same ordinal level as he was described in his younger years. One could do a study if one had the military IQ test score results from a large cohort from say, 40 years ago with 55-60 year olds today. Would you see their results depressed by 40 years of Flynn effect? I seriously doubt it.

This isn't to say that improved nutrition (although I'll grant, a mixed bag here, but outright nutritional deficiencies on things like iodine, iron, and folate have ceased to be going concerns for most people) and reduction of lead in the environment haven't had some impact---they have, and a small fraction of the Flynn effect shows up on 'crystallized' tests of intelligence. But relatively speaking compared to the artifact above, I think they're small fry.