How? There's a long history of failure at raising people's IQs by environmental changes, and it doesn't seem to be for lack of trying.

You can however lower IQ with environmental changes very effectively.

Getting rid of parasites improves educational outcomes of children. Possibly their IQ as well.

Who knows how much smarter would we be if flus, colds and other duseases didn't ravage bodies of our children.

My understanding is that removing lead from a variety of infrastructure has done wonders for people's intelligence, as has enabling better family planning.

Which failures are you talking about?

I consider those to be in the category of not lowering people's IQ. Making someone dumber is fairly easy: just drop them on their heads as a child, malnourish them, and expose them to lead and lots of parasites. And make sure they don't get enough iodine. But in rich countries we've already fixed those things, and there doesn't seem to be much else we can do.

IQ is something very narrow. The fact that you can do some symbolic inference on paper does not mean that you will be more successful in life

From my school mates I have seen many of them who had on paper low IQ to have great careers as entrepreneurs, salesmen, athletes, craftsmen. I have also cases with top students who did not go anywhere.

So I am not sure whether an average increase of IQ would help the society.

Literacy for sure helps, but I am not convinced about IQ.

This is false: "The fact that you can do some symbolic inference on paper does not mean that you will be more successful in life"

IQ, more than any other psychometric measure, predicts a wide variety of positive life outcomes including income, health, longevity, not being incarcerated, etc.

Here [0] is a simplistic article about it, but there are endless studies and discussions about this, all with the same clear and uncontroversial result.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-...

Further reading:

[1] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/07/massive-danish-sibling-...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=iq+predicts+success

IQ correlates quite heavily with practice time on multiple choice tests though.

Who spends their time doing lots of tests? Rich kids. Being wealthy also predicts a wide variety of positive life out ones including income, health, longevity, and not being incarcerated

No, this issue of test practice being a confounder has been studied exhaustively for decades. There are many ways studies have been designed to determine its impact.

For example: Examining the predictive value of IQ tests between siblings in the same household (who generally have the same access to resources).

Answer: IQ remains very powerfully predictive even within a household.

A century of study and attempts at intervention have all pointed to an overwhelmingly clear result: It's not wealth that makes someone have high IQ. It's high IQ that makes people wealthy.

Children do inherit high IQ from their parents who had high IQ, but the mechanism of this isn't through wealth, it's genetic. About 80% of the variance in IQ is by genetic parentage.

Example study: Examining adoptees' IQ scores in relation to their genetic parents versus the parents who raised them. Answer: They inherit their measured IQ from their genetic parents; the adoptive parents have essentially no effect (the last 20% of variation is basically random).

>IQ isnt meaningful because i know counter-examples.

That doesnt mean anything.

Well if you had counterxamples for thermodynamics it would be Nobel worthy news.

The fact that everyone has counterxamples for the IQ’s predictive strength from their immediate cycle, shows how reliable of a metric it is.

I think you may have taught your phone to misspell "counterexamples"

Good thing with Apple keyboard is that you cannot “unlearn” a specific word, you have to erase all of the autocomplete history.

So I will have to suffer with “Counterxamples” for a bit