Quote from: BTCMILLIONAIRE on February 08, 2018, 10:36:27 AM

Quote from: Ibian on February 08, 2018, 10:24:14 AM

Quote from: BTCMILLIONAIRE on February 08, 2018, 10:15:42 AM

Quote from: Ibian on February 08, 2018, 10:05:40 AM

Quote from: BTCMILLIONAIRE on February 08, 2018, 10:01:41 AM

Quote from: Ibian on February 08, 2018, 09:47:38 AM

Quote from: HairyMaclairy on February 08, 2018, 09:45:16 AM

The strongest predictor of socioeconomic status is the SES of your parents. On that basis only smart babies choose to be born to wealthy parents Grin

IQ is mostly genetic. There is literally nothing we can do about it, as far as we currently know. Blame your parents if you wish.

I disagree with that notion. IQ is a statistical measure of rather arbitrary test results of tests that can be practiced for. If you really cared you could increase your IQ to 120~140ish by sheer effort. From that point onward we're so far to the right of the mean that no tests really exist in sufficient volume.

I agree that you can practice for IQ tests, which is exactly why I didn't do it when I took one years ago. Felt like cheating. That said, someone with let's say an "unpracticed" IQ of 80 can't train himself up to 120. There are limits to what is possible, and those limits are inherent to the individual. And even then it doesn't carry over to other areas of life.

I have never seen anybody train themselves from 80 to 120, so I can't even pretend to know whether this is possible or not. But I tend towards believing that sustained practice, perhaps under proper guidance, would eventually make such an increase possible, given that the individual in question actually put their mind into actively improving. And I'd be quite curious to see whether or not such an increase would pass on to first generation offsprings.

And depending on how that "training" took place it might very well carry over to other areas of life, but that'd be up to the individual and the training methods.

The moment I started conflating ideas and concepts from completely unrelated subjects was roughly when I started noticing a substantial increase in my own performance when it comes to learning new things. But that could possibly be just an overall change in mentality, as I used to build knowledge from first principles or from ground up.
Now I use analogies, fill the gaps and then check for logical errors. The latter method is significantly more efficient, but I doubt it would be possible without solid fundamentals.

Point being that there are a numerous potential tweaks to thinking that can be applied to all aspects of life.

And again, it has never been shown to be possible to measurably increase IQ. It's been tried.

What is possible is to teach people to think in useful ways. But that's not IQ.

How hard were they trying though? I recall reading a paper from one of the Ivy League universities that concluded that perfect pitch could not be learned in adulthood. And the argumentation, as well as the experiment itself, was lackluster to say the least.

Really hard. As in everything that can possibly be done within legal and ethical means. This is study time on google if that's not enough.