Indeed, the Flynn effect has to be caused by a general shift in what is regarded as a "normal" environment (because change has been too rapid for genetic change to contribute significantly), even if we don't know for sure what it is about the environment that has had this effect. Flynn's book makes this point, I think, that genetics/environment studies are only ever studying the range of environments that are actually around at the time of the study. One can fantasise about a researcher in 1912 identifying a few people who somehow had the 2012-normal environmental factors and studying them; assuming (dodgy I know) that the Flynn effect continues and will continue for another 100 years, we could be thinking about identifying the people today who have environmental factors that will be normal in 2112... It's a fantasy, because many of these factors are not, probably, things that can apply to a few individuals (e.g. in 1912 you might have had to find a few individuals for whom the integrated circuit had already been invented!) but an interesting one to me.
I once conceived of a device that infants would wear that would monitor what they were looking at, and describe the object(s) of their focus to them in their native language. For example: "red ball" would play in a 6 month old's ear as they played with a red ball. When they switched focus to the giraffe rattle, they would hear: "giraffe rattle". I considered writing a short story in which the programmers had an indexing error in their dictionary, causing thousands or millions of babies to hear the wrong words; or alternatively, a malicious hack causing babies to hear words like "demon" when they focused on their parents.
At any rate, I certainly think that tablets could make a substantial impact on early childhood development. It's very intuitive for babies and toddlers to touch things directly on the screen they're viewing. Puzzles, sorting, counting, and matching exercises can all be done more easily on a tablet than in real life when one lacks fine motor control.
I remember reading that someone hypothesized that technology was one of the underlying causes of the Flynn effect, but I can't remember if it held up to scrutiny.
I know that IQ tests are re-normed, and I know that this accounts for what would otherwise be a continuing rise in scores. What I'd like to know is whether or not the variance would be rising as well, and to what extent.
The issue of people altering their own environment, causing a feedback effect, is the main point of Gladwell's book Outliers as you probably know. Incidentally, it is the to-me-obvious fact that this also applies across the generations (parents who are successful, for whatever reason, typically give their children environmental factors that will increase their chances of being successful) that make naive regression-to-the-mean models such as the one in a certain recent thread annoying!
It seems to me that you have the perfect opportunity to make your case in that thread. As I recall, a couple of your objections were addressed since your last post.
