Furthermore, if not for people with unusually high intelligence, there would have been no … industrial revolution
Is this true? Certainly you needed lots of people with IQ>100, but would the industrial revolution have happened if, say, 130 was the highest possible human IQ?
I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t have, though I don’t know enough about the contextual particulars of the industrial revolution to be extremely confident.
I think that studying the biographies of the inventors (to the extent that information is available) would show them all to be of IQ > 130. One could argue that counterfactually their less smart peers would have gotten there later on. There are reasons to think that if this is the case, the lag would have been very long, which I’ll flesh out later on in my sequence of posts.
And if you believe in the Flynn effect, and assuming it operated for at least a while before people started measuring IQ, the IQ 130 people of the Industrial Revolution would have a much lower measured IQ today.
Is this true? Certainly you needed lots of people with IQ>100, but would the industrial revolution have happened if, say, 130 was the highest possible human IQ?
I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t have, though I don’t know enough about the contextual particulars of the industrial revolution to be extremely confident.
I think that studying the biographies of the inventors (to the extent that information is available) would show them all to be of IQ > 130. One could argue that counterfactually their less smart peers would have gotten there later on. There are reasons to think that if this is the case, the lag would have been very long, which I’ll flesh out later on in my sequence of posts.
And if you believe in the Flynn effect, and assuming it operated for at least a while before people started measuring IQ, the IQ 130 people of the Industrial Revolution would have a much lower measured IQ today.
Does the Flynn effect affect the number of geniuses, or just the average IQ?