Having gone to an elite school for undergrad, I'd argue most students were around 2sigma or slightly below, but almost universally also had 2sigma levels of work ethic, self-discipline, and goal-seeking.
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
So the average US high school has about 0.5 kids who get admitted to Harvard, about one every 8 years. So if Harvard is admitting exactly the smartest US kids (plus a smaller number of even smarter international students), all of them are probably smarter than any of the smart kids at your high school.
But they probably aren't. I didn't apply to Harvard, myself. If I had, I probably wouldn't have gotten in.
(Changed pretend to purport)
Now, cultural fluency questions have appeared on IQ tests, especially in the past. However that's not so much an attack on the idea of "g" as it is a problem with antiquated methods of measuring it.
That's not to say that IQ tests are that accurate. The biggest confounder I know of is ADHD, which causes the tests to come out five whole points lower on average. I'm sure there are others.
There are a lot of cultural factors involved in believing a seemingly pointless exercise like matching squares is worth doing. You have to believe that something good can come out of it in general; and you have to believe that something good can come out of it specifically for yourself.
More seriously, random pattern matching questions are the best you can do to control for the not-caring factor, because they eliminate the advantage of test prep. The SAT has a significant test prep factor, which I agree is highly confounded by "culture" (a byword for how much your parents make you study) and the circumstances and opportunities related to test prep, including the motivation of the student, and the availability of a place to study and study materials. IQ tests are significantly more meritocratic than algorithms interviews or the SAT.
OT, but I really love GlaDOS and hope there's another Portal soon.
I'm not sure if we want to do that because the capacity for working hard is often more valuable than "g". One's capacity and willingness to work hard for a long time is impossible to untangle from one's circumstances including one's upbringing. Fairly testing for that is much harder than testing for g but it may be too crucial to ignore.
-Thief 3, some Hammerite (paraphrased)
IQ is a meme, and once you get away from the ivory tower and see how everyone else has to make it, you realize just how jacked the entire thing is. The thing in this case being the prestige class. Noblis oblige is dead, the new money is stark raving mad, the old money couldn't give a shit more. Nobody has any more of a clue than anyone else, and the executable bad idea is valued over and above the good idea that just doesn't seem quite ready to crystallize yet.
The biggest curse in my opinion is to see and grok the magnitude and nature of the problems but to not be in a position to do much about them besides trying to explain it to a handful of people and hope a couple understand, are in a spot and mindset to do something about it, take it, and run with it. It's kind of like being a Chief or high level enlisted in the armed forces from what I gather. Too busy getting things done to keep the status quo moving, but also facilitating bottom up information propagation and nudging the command structure in the right direction via reality checks.
Oh... The dreams that have died from learning how the world really works. They are a plenty.
Source for the story, please?
> But they had carried their luxury to such a pitch that they had taught even their horses to dance at their feasts to the music of the flute. Accordingly the people of Crotona, knowing this, and being at war with them, as Aristotle relates in his History of the Constitution of Sybaris, played before their horses the air to which they were accustomed to dance; for the people of Crotona also had fluteplayers in military uniform. And as soon as the horses heard them playing on the flute, they not only began to dance, but ran over to the army of the Crotonians, carrying their riders with them.
-- Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists
The Aristotlean source he cites is lost.
Which magazine / when? It sounds like this might actually contain some insight into the thinking of the magazine's editors, which could be interesting (so long as one is careful to assign no truth value to the content).
Edit: Googling has led me to a few, all citing this one paper from 2006. Political Psychology, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Aug., 2006), pp. 511-526 TLDR: The methodology is a bit loose, taking biographical achievements in earlier life and correlating them with people of known intelligence who did similar things. This leads to the perhaps-unsurprising result that they were all estimated at above-average IQ. I'm not sure why a 2006 paper would be turned into article fodder now.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24055883/
So what exactly an IQ test is measuring differs between cultures (though it certainly is measuring -something- since there are other correlations), since even the separately identifiable and measurable abilities that lead to someone doing well on an IQ test differ across cultures.
To my understanding, IQ tests do measure generalized intelligence, and a lot of standardized tests correlate to them fairly well.
However, elite universities have been deemphasizing standardized tests for decades in favor of fuzzier admissions criteria. This, among other things, enables discrimination against minorities that overperform on standardized tests (historically Jews, currently Asians).
You’re right that the elite class is a self-selected cultural elite, but standardized tests are less of a tool and more of an impediment to their self-selection process.
My guess is that somebody does a successful show and everyone else jumps in the pool.
To refresh my memory, I just looked at a bunch of years of network programming. The 'rural' comedies don't seem to make that much of a footprint. If anything, a person could probably build a more convincing, invented-from-whole-cloth, essay about the birth and death of Western TV shows.
I think I probably agree with you though that Westerns (both on TV and film) are probably the almost stereotypically American genre that used to be hugely popular and is largely non-existent today.
But I'm not sure I'd assign any great significance to the fact other than shifting tastes and, perhaps, sensitivities.
Could the rural purge have been the result of network executives alienated and at odds with the viewership they were nominally at the behest of?
Urbanization did not increase significantly at this time, so it seems cultural factors are the better explanation.