The Mutability of IQ

Via Ezra Klein, this book review by Malcolm Gladwell on James Flynn's work on the statistical changes (and significance thereof, especially as it pertains to race) of IQ over time.

Gladwell:

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. In Flynn’s phrase, we have now had to put on “scientific spectacles,” which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are. [emphasis added]

A test like the Wechsler test, or any IQ test, really, can't help but be testing (and made up of) localized, culturally bound knowledge. There is no way for it to be universal, since those that created it - us humans - do not have a universal knowledge or perspective (though of course many privileged folks claim to do so).

Klein on that paragraph:

If, rather than testing some innate capacity known as "intelligence," IQ actually tests how familiar individuals are with a particular mode of abstract analysis, that throws the whole universe of hereditary determinism into chaos. It suggests that what we call intelligence is, on some level, closer to a skill, and it can be refined and strengthened through practice.

I think Klein gets it exactly right: Intelligence is not immutable - or, at the least, whatever it is IQ measures is not immutable.

Certainly this should lead to a whole new set of policy prescriptions, especially in education.... but it won't.