= new reply since forum marked as read
Gotta work now but I shall click later.
Someone here pointed out to me a while back that one reason USAmericans collectively are so ignorant of, and take so little interest in, anything outside their own backyard is the sheer density of USAmerican culture. I think that's very true. Why go looking for anything else when there are 30 things right in front of you clamouring for your attention? Missing-blonde-girl-children stories on CNN, Jersey Shore and a thousand clones on the other channels, US politics and news and views and music and movies and video games and every other corner of "culture", fully occupied.
I find the same is true of many Brits, for instance. Their culture is also very densely occupied, although there is more space than in the US, partly because of the US cultural industry's decades-long drive to export and control foreign markets.
Living in a smaller economy / population / culture like Canada, every aspect of culture is thinner on the ground -- well developed and diverse, just not as dense. We look farther afield for information and entertainment. But I've never looked to Jersey Shore. 
And interestingly, at least some years ago, stats showed that Law and Order, for instance, which was, at least then, reasonably intellectually challenging, got much higher ratings in Canada than in the US, even though we had access to pretty much all the same US content as was available there, plus Canadian content. We just weren't subject to the same pressures, and the same collective representation of what that culture is, as people actually living in the belly of the beast; we were a step removed and able to pick and choose more carefully, I'd think.
This is why I react to people saying "oh, I don't watch that television nonsense" with rolling eyes. I watch a lot of television. There's enough available that actually stimulates my brain, rather than dulling it, to make me quite happy.
In my household, it's Big Brother. It gets worse every year, of course, but we stick with it. Because you can sit there and try to figure odds and work out what factors can be controlled and what can't, and what lie could be got away with and what couldn't, and actually exercise the brain cells. I'm not really good at it because long-game strategizing isn't my thing (I hate chess), but it's still fun.
I actually got hooked the first season when all the players were naive newbies and not models cast for their looks (yech, most of them now, fake boobs on the one side and brawn over brains on the other). When Chicken George decided that the whole purpose of the game was for them to rebel and walk out, I could just hear Jean-Paul Sartre cheering from his grave. George had created his own meaning!
And like to cook though I do, cooking shows bore me to tears. For me, it's real estate.
Escape to the Country on a Sunday morning ... while I chop and simmer and bake. When I've exhausted the week's supply of EastEnders, of course!
And before that, on early Saturday mornings, I actually watch The Rifleman for a while. Nostalgia for my youth and my departed dad, and Saturday evenings eating dinner in front of the TV and waiting for the hockey game (at which point I found something to read). It always has a plot, with a moral, and lots of old stars to spot before they made it big. It sometimes even has women doing independent stuff.
go over every popular news article I've ever read and the actual study it was based on that I then dug up to verify/counter their conclusions. I mean, it's a lot. Like asking "when has a politician ever promised one thing then done another".
In this specific case someone has done the work for me though: http://psysociety.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/careful-science-journalism
For point 2 if you're trying to draw direct comparisons (in this case "watching jersey shore makes you dumb" you need to make the experiment as close to what you are trying to compare it to as possible. In this case they changed not only the story (soccer hooligans versus guidos) but also the media (written/video). Adding more variables makes it less and less applicable. We know that people process video differently than the written word (for instance: no one goes to school to learn how to watch TV). So looking at brain processes for response to video by studying response to writing is going to be inherently weak.
I wonder whether we might see intelligence disparity increasing the way we've seen income disparity increasing.
Just as there is a wider gulf growing between the rich and the poor, after a long period of narrowing -- the rich actually getting richer while the poor actually get poorer -- might we see both higher and lower IQ scores increasing?
The culture gap seems to me to be widening too, with the dumbness of the lower end of the available offerings increasing, and the stimulating material available to people with a taste and capacity for it expanding as well, partly because of the internet.
Forty years ago, ordinary people, including the ones on the left of the 100 mark, watched things like All in the Family and even Columbo -- shows that served you stuff you actually had to think about while watching. If those same people are now watching Jersey Shore and American Idol -- and I don't think many people in the 120+ range really do watch them a lot -- might we start to see some slide toward the lower scores in the already lower segment of the adult population? I'd say it's a little early to tell yet, but I'd be curious. Just a wild theory for now; I need to google.
I haven't lost that many brain cells.
Until the Romulans arrive.
But the Pakleds did make out okay ...
I guess I just liked the thought that even though I'll be centuries dead and gone, someday somebody might figure the universe out. Sort of the atheist's version of a belief in the afterlife, I guess!
1. there is growing income disparity
2. is there growing IQ disparity?
1 was simply used to explain what I was talking about. I didn't suggest that income disparity causes IQ disparity. Although it would be an interesting idea to explore.
All the factors you cite are discussed in detail in the wiki I linked in my next post.
No, to any of that, personally. You mistake concerns about the content of the entertainment for something else, it seems. I don't have any objections to video games; I do object to the violent, misogynist content of many of them, for instance.
And it's not what I've said myself, of course. I specifically referred to the internet as a potential stimulus, and I've said I use TV for that purpose myself.
You see, there's the thing -- I don't agree that all TV is passive entertainment. I'm not being passive when I watch a Brit police procedural. Yes, what I'm thinking about is pre-determined, but once one selects a stimulus, that's true of them all, be it a calculus text or Inspector Morse. My dad interacted with Columbo.
I know I'm probably being a little naive on that point, and it's admittedly a very long time since I read McLuhan and didn't really pay enough attention even then. But even admitting that there's a narrower range within which to operate -- even admitting, say, that television watching is always a passive activity -- are there gradations, and is entertainment increasingly aimed at a lower intelligence level, i.e. does it call for even less engagement? And if so, is there an effect?
Like I say, just questions.
Once again, I was not positing any connection between income (disparity) and IQ. I of course am quite aware of the ways in which income itself could influence IQ, including nutrition and exposure to stimulation.
I was just trying to explain the concept of "relative", I guess. And of distribution. I know you don't need such things explained; I mean explaining them generally and how I was applying them to IQ.
Average income in a country, or all incomes in a country, can be rising at the same time as income disparity is rising. The poor are getting slightly richer, but are getting poorer relative to the rich. Or the middle is disappearing. That sort of thing.
Average absolute IQ scores, say, could be rising at the same time as the concentrations in the upper and lower ranges were growing.
It looks like that isn't the case -- at least among children. The lowest IQ scores are now rising more than the highest IQ scores.
Was it me who introduced IQ to the discussion? Because that actually isn't the issue in the OP, I think.
Supposedly IQ stays pretty constant throughout life. Well, I can tell you, I tested at 145+ in childhood, and there's no damned way I would today. Unless, maybe, I started doing as many IQ-type tests as I did back then. Hell, I can't even read some of the books I read as a kid. I picked up A Traveller in Time a couple of years ago, something I'd read over and over in my very early teens, and looked at the first paragraph and thought: wtf?? I did this for fun? A whole book of prose this dense and complex, and I got past this paragraph? Ivanhoe, in the original, when I was 8 -- I think not, today.
Use it or lose it? Well maybe I haven't lost it, but it's gone somewhere it would take a lot of pushups to get back.
Use it or lose the habit of using it? I dunno.
And then you also just lose track of the fact that there are things worth thinking about, things worth "using it" for, and they aren't whatever goes on in Jersey Shore.
And of course then we get to my favourite hobbyhorse, not just the dumbification but the glorification of the dumbness: the adulation of uninformed opinion, the notion that any opinion is as good as any other, that people deserve respect just because they have an opinion, and put it out there. The Jerry Springer syndrome. That's what Jersey Shore plays to: the formation of opinions about anything and everything, and anyone and everyone, based on whatever somebody decides is on offer to have an opinion about, and what will be provided as the basis for the opinion. And that goes for just nastiness, as well as dumbness. There's a lot of nasty around today, and the article in the OP mentioned that possible infuence, too; nastiness could be modelled as dumbness is.
And then the cultural denseness -- there is so much in the culture that is just there in yr face that you don't have to go looking for, that passive reception really is the mode to a considerable extent. What people are surrounded by actually ceases to be stimulation --- one of the reasons, it is thought, that IQs have been rising being more stimulation -- at a certain point, doesn't it? All you have to do is sit back and keep your eyes open and take in.
All of which really still is off track from the OP, which was really more about modelling than anything. See stupid, be stupid. But I've learned a little bit about something, and I will check out your earlier links later.
Again, what I said was just by way of explaining that I am not a cultural Luddite; I haven't voiced good-old-days objections to hand-held communication devices or something, or bemoaned the state of the younger generation. The issue was message rather than medium, in what I was talking about.
The effects of the message itself in that particular regard are a whole nother discussion. One just does have to wonder how things like misogyny are transmitted, though, if one assumes they aren't inborn.
This is not one of my more coherent posts. I do better when I'm talking about something I actually know something about.
