"In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society."
It is presently a commonplace of Western culture that women are worse at spatial reasoning than men, and this is commonly attributed to intrinsic biological differences.
It turns out this may be highly questionable. A study in PNAS studied two nearby tribes in northeast India, one with a strongly patriarchal organisation, one with a strongly matriarchal organisation. Both share the same agrarian diet and lifestyle and DNA tests indicate they are closely related.
In the patriarchal society, women did noticeably worse on spatial reasoning. In the matriarchal society, women and men did about the same.
The authors carefully do not overstate their results, claiming only that they demonstrated that culture influences spatial performance "in the task that we study." However, this promisingly suggests quite a bit of room for improvement of measurable aspects of intelligence may be feasible with proper attention to culture and nurture.
What measurable aspects of intelligence do you attribute to genetic causes? Can you test it this well? How would you fix it and help people be all they can be?
News coverage: ArsTechnica.
To take an issue that is no longer controversial, and therefore less likely to get us massively downvoted than gender differences or little known primitive tribes with strangely politically correct ways of life, like Margaret Mead's Samoans: The Soviet Union.
As a source of information about the Soviet Union, academics were absolutely dreadful and utterly worthless compared to almost any other source of information. They engaged in massive flagrant barefaced lies, and doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed. After 1990, they improved markedly, and suffered total amnesia that their positions had once been completely different.
One would have received a far more accurate and up to date account of the problems of price control and central planning by listening to old Reagan speeches, than by reading Samuelson.
Recall Samuelson's infamous graph showing that the Soviet Union (thanks to its superior economic system) would inexorably overtake and soon surpass the united states.
The later editions of his book required greater adjustment of inconvenient facts to produce the desired prediction, which all students were required to agree with or be marked down.
Since political correctness has only gotten worse since then, one should conclude that on any issue touching directly or indirectly on any of the sensitive topics, academics are not reliable.
Further, there is an ever growing collection of obscure and minor topics that once upon a time, for reasons complicated, obscure and long forgotten, were once relevant to one of the major sensitive topics, resulting in an official truth being issued on this minor topic, so that just as the US has a thousand military bases in countries that no one has heard of to protect against long forgotten acts of aggression by a Soviet Union that no longer exists, academia has a thousand taboos, where speaking the truth can get one in big trouble, like treading on a hidden mine, on issues where no one would expect such a taboo. Indeed, it is on these obscure complicated minor issues that the basic unreliability of academia is most strikingly apparent., since on the major issues the academic position is subtly false in a clever way, whereas on minor issues it is apt to be just plain false in a how-many-fingers-is-O'Brien-holding-up way.
Your citation of a blog post by a tenured academic (Don Boudreaux) gives me confidence in my position. If, further, those "old Reagan speeches" depended upon the work of academics (e.g., Hayek), then my position seems very secure to me.
But I am more interested in spending my time in this conversation on the subject of the OP.