Reason is a bit snarky, I find it annoying too. (Though not as bad as the Skeptical Inquirer, which is the snarkiest I've ever read).

I got a subscription to them because I thought it would be a cool rational, intelligent magazine. Instead it was self-righteous, close-minded, and unoriginal, stuck in a rut of debunking stuff that's obviously bogus.

I didn't renew.

I still think skepticism is cool...but not the way they do it.

I agree with you that the account is biased. Personally, I find the data about how people are doing later much less telling than the story of how it all happened. And I think its an important story about how irresponsible governments are.

While I've read accounts that gloss over this government responsibility for the Love Canal, I have not seen contradiction or dispute of these facts:

*) The site was originally a government dumping site, first for the city of Niagara Falls, and then by the Army which dumped chemical warfare material and detritus from the Manhattan Project. The toxic waste was government waste as well as company waste.

*) Hooker did not want to sell the property. The local school board forced Hooker to sell them the property by threatening to seize it via eminent domain. So Hooker donated it for a token 1$, and took a tax writeoff.

*) Hooker specifically warned the local government that this was a dump site and not good for building houses or schools on. (Not for altruism, but because they didn't want to get sued later). They brought School Board members to the site and made test borings to show them the dumped chemicals to try to convince them not to build any underground facilities. They placed a long restriction in the deed to warn subsequent owners of the dangers, recommending the site only be used for above-ground facilities, preferably over asphalt.

*) The local government ignored all this and put in sewer lines and storm drains which pierced the seals. They took fill from the site and used it for top grading at a different school that was being built(!).

*) The clay cap was, *for the standards of the day*, an acceptable seal.

You can find this information places that have nothing to do with Ronald Bailey, for example, see

http://web.globalserve.net/~spinc/atomcc/history.htm
http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba198.html
http://onlineethics.org/environment/lcanal/hertz.html

Or the original muckraking Reason article from 1981, which is a little biased, but extensively documented:

http://reason.com/8102/fe.ez.the.shtml

Now admittedly, Hooker dumped lots of toxic waste there. And I agree with you that the clay cap was not entirely sufficient. While the biased libertarian accounts say that it was the municipality drilling which caused the entire problem, I don't think this is true, from other accounts it sounds like the site was so polluted that it was going to be problematic to use no matter what. On the other hand, the *off-site* pollution which eventually occured (after a couple decades) may well have been from construction activity breaching the barrier.

So the fact remains that this is a story about government forcing a company to hand over its toxic waste dump, and then building a school on it, despite repeated warnings from the company. This sounds like the governments fault to me, not the company's fault, and I think its a bias against companies and for governments that causes it to be misperceived. I don't like the bias in Reason's account, but I can understand why they get pissed off by such blatant misrepresentation.

I also planned to bring up the Flynn effect!

So Patri's question becomes, 'what would it be like with 20-40 points instead of the 10-20 points we're used to?' Though of course it could be 60+ points a la the Beggars In Spain series...

I think the most interesting upshoot will be a nice healthy skepticism about the importance and/or relevance of IQ scores.

IQs certainly measure *something*, even something reproducible. However, I tend to think we overestimate the importance of IQ, or 'g', or whatever you want to call it, because it is so highly corellated with wealth, education, social standing, et cetera.

My loose understanding is that there are three basic causes of IQ rises being bandied about, two of which have had large effects in the last few hundred years: improvement of nutrition, effectiveness of C-sections, and the environment becoming more complicated.

Nutrition improvement has an obvious effect - allows for better development and maintainance of mind and body.

Effective C-sections means that babies with larger heads can be born, with the expectation that their mothers will survive to help raise them.

Complication of the environment puts IQ solidly in the realm of a lot of other physical activities - it is possible that we develop as much brain power as we need, and not much more. This would also neatly explain why we aren't walking around as obvious super-geniuses: the added brainpower of the new generation is mostly being used to negotiate the new environment.

Keep in mind that myers-briggs T v.s. F is a question of preference, not development.

Yup yup! one of my beefs about the MBTI. preference is not ability.

Many T's with super IQ's are tripped up by poorly developed F's and are essentially crippled by poor impulse control. So EQ is just if not more important than IQ in a practical fashion. I assume that higher intellignece in both areas will cause gaps.

I'm a smart guy who socialized very well. I don't view it as an either/or proposition: in my case, it was a matter of the environment requiring both: I went to a high school which both had small class sizes (my graduating class size was 23), and stressed academics. When I got to college, I was ready to both party and do the Weird Science experiments, and didn't have to choose. I think one reason why kids often neglect one over the other is that the payoffs are often disproportionate in places with either large class sizes or small interest in learning.

One question in artificially stimulating intelligence is whether the older generations will get to do so too. If they do, then there isn't likely to be a huge effect, since they'll be able to keep up. If they don't, then I would expect children to become estranged from parents on the basis that they don't have much in common.

There's always going to be the gene link, and the effects that has - parents will still favor their own children (and to a lesser extent, children their parents) over strangers. But if the Nurture Principle is right, the child will gravitate even more to its peer group, and it will be less likely that its parents' generation will fill that role.

Your tradeoff argument is a good one, and may well be part of it.

But the existence of counter-examples does not disprove my theory. I'm positing a correlation, not a perfect link. "Geeks tend to be less well socialized" is not disproved by the existence of well-socialized geeks.

"[I]f you put smart kids into an environment where both learning and socialization are important, they'll do both."

My personal experience backs this up. I went to college with Patri, at a school for raging math and science geeks. I knew a great many people who came to Mudd with poor social skills, and who spent time developing said skills while there. My socal skills certainly picked up in that environment.

I've always theorized that this was because we had so much in common, and learning wasn't frowned upon (unlike so many modern high schools), but your interpretation makes sense, too. (And the two are not mutually exclusive.) Put in a situation where learning and socialization were emphasized, we picked up quick.