I.Q.-Enhancement and Napping as Methods of Improving Business Efficiency

Ha! My fiancee’s a resident… I’d like to go tell the hospital she needs naps during her 30 hour shifts, it’ll boost her IQ. See how quickly I can get thrown out :)

You’re not loopy, but you are making an assumption that is probably unwarranted. It isn’t clear what scores on an IQ test measure. While it’s almost certainly true that IQ scores are positively correlated with general intelligence (whatever THAT is), it’s not at all clear that learning a technique that raises scores on an IQ test will lead to better problem solving abilities in real world situations.

Suppose that A is positively correlated with B and B is positively correlated with C. You’re suggesting that increasing A (perhaps artificially) will increase C. It just doesn’t necessarily follow.

(In case it isn’t clear: A = IQ score, B = General Intelligence, C = real world problem solving skills.)

This isn’t to say that memory techniques or speed reading techniques or … will NOT help with real-world skills. It just isn’t something that MUST be true even accepting all of your premises.

Carl,

You seem to not be aware of the very well established links between I.Q. (as viewed via tests, of course) and performance within society. I’ll forgive you if you dismiss the following claims as I lack the energy to dig up the research yet, but here are the basics that you WILL confirm via research.

People with low IQs TEND toward the following characteristics:

• far more children out of wedlock
• get incarcerated at a far higher rate
• give their kids into foster care at a much higher rate
• work low difficulty / low-pay jobs
• have far less education, and give far less to their children

The highly liberal Malcolm Gladwell was on NPR recently talking about IQ. He was being asked about the IQ debate of nature vs. nurture. He basically demolished the pure nature arguments with some very solid data. But when he was asked about the strength of IQ in general as a metric, he said the data was VERY strong.

He basically said that those with a 120 IQ are exceedingly likely to do “better” in life than someone with 100. And he’s a super-liberal guy, bent on doing the most important thing — influencing environment to raise IQ for those with disadvantages like poverty. His point was that people in poverty and without access to books and such are being completely retarded and almost guaranteed failure by stunting their IQs.

Basically, IQ is EXTREMELY important as a metric. When you look at the states in our country with the highest illigitamacy, they are also the states with the lowest IQs. Wedlock, education, salary — all these things are correlated positively or negatively to IQ scores.

It’s real, Carl. Seriously.

What is NOT real is the concept of a pure genetic IQ number that you get and cannot change. The environment, especially during the early years, is absolutely critical to the development of IQ. Genetics are important — everyone’s seen that — but so is environment.

Also, here’s a look at what mainstream science has to say on the matter. This was a statement put out by like 50 leading scientists back in 95′ to respond to the Bell Curve fiasco. They wanted to tell the public what REAL science believed about the issue, and they were explicit in not interpreting or coming to conclusions based on the data the way the Bell Curve authors did.

http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/wsj_main.html

Notice the same claims being made that I made above. And this, according to everything I’ve read, is still the commonly held belief of the experts in the field. IQ is real in the sense that it has massive real-world effects, and it’s highly tied to both genetics and environment.

Check into it.

Sorry I didn’t get back to this sooner. YES, there are MANY things that correlate to IQ. I don’t dispute that. But it is absurdly EASY to increase scores on an IQ test. For example, you could work through a book of puzzles of the sort that might appear on an IQ test. My claim is simply that doing so would increase your IQ score, but would not necessarily increase the other things to which IQ is positively correlated.