Reconfiguration

Finished Steven Pinker's eminently readable The Better Angels of Our Nature today. Much food for thought in its sweeping pages. Plenty to argue with and to nod in recognition of.

One idea that comes late in the book managed to startle me in its simplicity and obviousness, leaving me to wonder why it's never factored into my thinking - indeed, never been actually thinkable for me. This derives from the prof's explanation of the Flynn effect, i.e., the remarkable fact that IQ tests have to be regularly 'renormed', making it harder to score well in order to balance the higher scores achieved by successive cohorts. I first came across this oddity in Ian Deary's excellent Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction in which Deary quite understandably attempts no definitive explanation of the phenomenon. Pinker's explanation, in contrast, is short and sort of sweet: we are getting smarter as a specie with each succeeding generation.

That just can't be true, part of me said, reading Pinker's thesis. It's entirely counter-intuitive, as any teacher is likely to tell you. But The Better Angels puts up a very good case for the notion, strong enough for me to wonder if I've seriously been misreading the signs over a life-time. The jury's still out on this one for me, but just getting said jury to excitedly confer on the matter is no small feat.