I'm with Grinity's DS12 - the book seems to me a nice corrective to a straw man.

Well, maybe not a total straw man. I suppose that there probably is a tendency in our society to think that once you've quantified something you've found its essence. And insofar as the point of Gladwell's book is that a high iq isn't sufficient for success then I suppose it works against that tendency. But still, my impression was that Gladwell's talent lies in taking a not-very-deep point and writing very well about it.

That said, there is a deep question in the area. Namely, if iq doesn't measure success - and perhaps isn't even a very good measure of intelligence itself - then what is? The book that seems to me to address that issue head-on and in an interesting way is Thomas Flynn's What is intelligence?. Has anyone read that one?

Flynn is the psychologist after whom the "Flynn Effect" was named. The Flynn Effect measures the rise in mean iq scores relative to a given normed sample from 1947 to the present. (It also retrodicts a pattern back to 1900 or so.) Flynn argues that the effect - an average increase of 0.3 iq points per year - shows either that iq isn't measuring pure intelligence or that our grandparents were all mentally retarded (the phrase he uses). He prefers the former explanation to the latter.

The crux of the discussion is organized around the various ways in which social factors enter into one's success on the tests. There is an interesting discussion of re-norming, and of the history of the various revisions to the WISC and SB, and he attempts to explain why the aptitudes they test for are so much easier to come by in the general population now than they were 100 years ago. All this leads him to resist the idea that cross-generational comparisons tell us anything about relative iq, while still insisting that within a generation they can be relatively effective. There is a heartbreaking discussion of how scoring an exam relative to obsolete norms can artificially inflate the iq scores of death-row prisoners, some of whom become eligible for execution as a result of the mistake.

I'm not at all sure what I think of Flynn's new proposed model of intelligence (which has iq as one factor), and I'm not even sure what I think of his explanation of the Flynn Effect in the first place. But the topic overlaps with Gladwell's book considerably, and I felt that I was in the hands of a much more interesting and insightful thinker.

I'd love to know if anyone else is reading this book, and if so what their impressions are.

BB