Self-confidence and a well-memorized vocabulary can make a mediocre person seem superficially brilliant. I’ve known a few of those people, and had the misfortune of working with a couple of them too. It’s like a really fancy box full of rocks.
Sometimes there are these super brain kids who are VERY smart, like finishing college at age 14 smart. But people should realize intelligence isnt a continual growth curve. It seems to level off after awhile.
So yes, that 12 year old kid might have brains on par with a 20 year old but by the time they are say 21, their peers will probably be caught up with them.
I will also guess that a lot of the Flynn effect is, as part of the link suggests, the variety of media available. Compared to a farm boy from 1900 the modern adolescent has experienced so much more. One example I like is horse races. They were everywhere when I was a kid, but I’ve never been to one. I hazard a guess that 99% of Americans under 50 never have either. Yet, I’ve seen hundreds of them. The local news used to report them as sport in the 1960s on tv. Quincy went to one in every other episode. National Velvet, The Black stallion, Three Stooges, … you could not miss them. The world? I’ve seen places from almost everywhere in the world, in stunning HD.
It’s not just visual. The plot line of Law and Order alone, besides giving plenty of fodder for discussions here, has show how many weird twists and turns. The same is true with every drama. We don’t watch Romeo or MacBeth over nad over again, we go from the ancient times to a galaxy far far away, we see ever torturous twist of any Greek legend morphed to another day. Checkers is replaced by a variety of board games requiring developing minds to think, grasp concepts and plan - then replaced with video games that demand the same and a break-neck pace instead of all day to play Monopoly or Risk.
Anything that challenges us to learn burns those synapse connections that much faster and wider. Wer’e lab rats running ever more complex mazes. The challenge makes our minds strong.
I’m gonna say it is because natural selection tolerates a ball curve of inherited abilities. Rather than demanding an exact performance level.
This was part of the the thesis of a pop-science book Everything Bad is Good For You: Our entertainment media is getting more complex, with denser narratives with more plot threads going at once and less hand-holding to keep the audience from losing track of everything. The author even made the case that reality TV, with its emphasis on personal relationships, was increasing our emotional intelligence because we had to keep track of more personal relationships compared to the scripted shows of yore.
The problem with that specific work was that it was a piece of pop science, as opposed to a reviewed paper, so the reviews it got were from book reviewers, who naturally focused on things like readability more than footnotes and engagement with previous academic literature. A review on Slashdot has this:
I have long held that a lot of the problem with modern society is caused by children learning how to socialize by watching sitcoms.
Life and relationships is not a collection of snarky one-liners delivered over a laugh track. As well, a healthy life has little controversy and bickering. Which is far too boring to show on TV.
As a result our kids learn to be snarky drama queens. Who then raise their kids the way TV taught them to.
Not good overall.
Bottom line: “enrichment” can also be derichment. The world is teaching everyone something every second of every day. Whatever you pay attention to is what’s your personal teacher.
If most of someone’s world is TV or Call of Duty, or whatever, then those are the lessons absorbed.
Trump is really smart because he went to a school tougher than any military academy.
I’m fairly confident that teens have been snarky drama queens since before the invention of the sitcom.
All sitcoms do is provide them with particular lines to use. This is more than learned behavior.
The reason, in general, is because all biological systems exhibit variation. It’s the basic building block of evolution. Mutations happen.
The fact that dumb people have smart kids doesn’t rule out genetics. In fact it exposes exactly how genetics works! Every giraffe ever born had a short neck until one came along whose neck was longer and it helped and he passed it along… it all starts with a gene mutation that causes variation. Some work, some don’t, some are meh.
Genetics. Siblings usually grow up in similar environments but have varying levels of cerebral talent.
My sister went to Northwestern and Harvard Law School, my stepsister went to Princeton, my stepbrother went to Yale, my mother is an Optometrist, my stepdad went to MIT.
Still none of them even remotely have a vivid imagination like mine. They never could even begin to match my story ideas. I’ve also been working on a massive Youtube video with 40 different locations I’ve designed with a map editor, perfectly timed with music and several ideal subjects to use for digital paintings that I’m including.
To me (I don’t think it’s an opinion actually) a fantastic imagination is the best possible skill on this planet. What other skill can you go such a distance with, beyond Earth and incorporating so many aspects and detail of existence at once?
Many people seem to think that traveling is the most epic use of time on this planet, planning out elaborate trips to exotic locations. And then they live their whole life with little to no imagination, not realizing that it’s even more rewarding, for example the rest of my family.
And some people are born drama queens, no need to grow that tall. I wouldn’t know if my niece was born a snarky drama queen because at first she didn’t talk much, but if theater hadn’t existed she would have invented it.
TheSundial, imagination isn’t a skill, it’s something you can work on a little but more like say height than mathematics. And if you can’t imagine other people enjoying different things than you do, maybe you don’t have as much imagination as you think. Now excuse me while I take my finger out of your eye…
It’s most definitely a skill, because I have it and that’s why I’m able to visualize such a complex Youtube video that’s a world record and also execute it while no one else can.
“Being something people can have” isn’t what defines a skill: I have brown hair, but that doesn’t make brown hair a skill. A skill can be developed. I wasn’t born with the skill to read and write chemical formulas: I learned it, developed it. Now I have it. Skills require certain aptitudes; aptitudes aren’t developed (you have it or you don’t), skills can.
In addition to the potential to be smart on the genetic level, you also need to have the potential to use those IQ points, both on the genetic level and environmental level. We all appreciate that a child born in Mogadishu, with poor parents, may never even learn to read, much less live up to his/her full potential. On the flip side of the coin, we can appreciate the movie “A Beautiful Mind” but for the most part a schizophrenic with an IQ of 160 is never going to be allowed to be a professor at MIT. On a less extreme level, I’m sure we all know someone who was sailing through school at the top of the class until they hit puberty and discovered (a) their penis and/or (b) drugs. What’s your IQ when you sell your slide rule for a tab of oxycodone?
Did oxycodone even exist when people typically used slide rules? 
I remember going to a job fair in Toronto where one student asked one of the HR execs (Esso Canada, IIRC) how important were marks for success? The guy said they did an informal survey of most of the top executives and none were outstanding at the top of their class. There are plenty of stories of “brilliant” people who were hopeless at other mundane tasks. being a successful executive probably calls on skills that are not typical parts of the college curriculum - office politics, organizing, managing personnel, project management. More general smarts can’t hurt, but the top people at Fortune 500 aren’t up there because of their engineering or math skills.
The same might be said of imagination or math skills or any other challenge. Many of my classmates were far better than me at remembering and regurgitating data on tests, but given a practical application problem, were lost.
But on the physical level - your brain is an organized jumble of interconnected neurons. The connections (synapses?) are more efficient connectors when trained, and various activities and pastimes train our brains to do certain tasks. So how good our brain cells are is a matter of genetics and random and environmental development. repetitive training can make people better at certain tasks, but if the layout of neurons due to genes or development makes a person predisposed to be able to do those tasks - then they are “smarter” at them.
Some personality traits - curiosity, determination, fascination with certain topics, taste - all contribute to the motivation to practice. However, what builds those traits is open to debate too.
No doubt genetics plays a role, but the existence of the Flynn effect proves that genetics can’t possibly be the only factor. The genetic makeup of humanity can’t change nearly fast enough in 100 years to explain the Flynn effect - but our environment can.
That (assuming it’s true) is a list of facts.
All of that is “just your opinion”. Please, let’s not get into a debate about that in this form that is dedicated to factual answer to questions. Your opinions are not facts.
But for example, I helped my wife study for an IQ test. Some jobs ask for an aptitude and skills test - thing like a sequence of circles inside triangles of black or white… which one is next in the sequence? By trying a few examples, the concept was far easier to show. I imagine other applicants for the promotion who hadn’t seen this sort of stuff since maybe high school - how likely are they to grasp the idea and figure out "aha - this is black triangle, white, black, white, next has to be black. Meanwhile circle, square, circle, square - next has to be inside a circle. A bit of training always helps.
Similarly, some people are better at guessing math sequences - aha, this is double the Fibonacci numbers, this is squares minus one, this sequence is adding 1, then 2, then 3… Simple puzzles; once you know what sort of things to look for, you can solve much faster. The range of exposure to these is what I imagine the Flynn effect to be all about.
(Of course, there’s the classic - O,T,T,F,F,S,S,… What’s next. This requires you to notice “One, Two, Three, Four, etc.” A much more complex “aha!”.)
when I was in school occasionally id take history and literature classes in the normal school when they realized the only 2 subjects I actually had problems were technical English and math ( I was in sp.ed due to attention problems and physical problems and it was general policy to put kids in foster homes and such in those classes )
And back then it would be what’s called gate/ap today (sort of like the classroom in the old sitcom head of the class) and it was ok since the teachers were well aware I can barley physically write and I couldn’t go down the hallway with out getting lost
Well I showed up in my usual manner back then …at lest something was backwards shoes untied because I cant tie my shoes …
i was embarrassed because it looked like I couldn’t dress my self (to this day that’s still open for debate)the teacher told be not to worry because I was mild and pointed out the kids that couldn’t put a pair of shoes on … wore one piece outfits because mom had to dress them there was a girl that couldn’t count more than 10 numbers in a row … it sounded like I was in the mentally disabled classes
The catch ?
These were the smartest kids in 50 miles! some of them could recite the fall of the roman empire from memory… do high school math in the 4th grade but couldn’t feed themselves anything but a sandwich mostly with out making a mess …
she said “just because your intelligent doesn’t mean your smart and can do everything everyone else can”