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ZeroGravitastoday at 10:20 AM2 repliesview on HN

The Flynn effect has its own little nurture vs nature debate within it.

Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted?

Or was it people being trained from birth for a world where doing abstract brain teaser tests was important.

Notably both cause problems for the typical racist's use of IQs. If you can improve the scores with such interventions it makes a lot of their genocidal policy recommendations seem less scientifically sound, so they put a lot of effort into denying that IQ scores can be improved by interventions. Even though they have been, for decades.


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sokolofftoday at 11:10 AM

It seems obvious that IQ test scores can be improved with interventions and further that actual [as opposed to measured] general intelligence can be affected by environmental factors that shape whether the brain develops under good, neutral, or damaging conditions (nutrition, sleep, language usage, stress, etc.).

With all the energy that's been spent on the topic, I'm slightly surprised that this isn't entirely settled by now and any opposing view being relegated to fringe/flat-earth territory.

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Qemtoday at 11:58 AM

> Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted?

The ban on leaded petrol probably also helped.

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