EFTA00739235.pdf

From: Jeffrey Epstein <jeevacation@gmail.com> To: David Grosof Subject: Re: have a great day tomorrow! Date: Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:31:09 +0000 call me 561 366 0084 On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 5:32 PM, David Grosof < > wrote: Hi, Jeffrey, I hope you have a great day tomorrow. Will there be restrictions on your travel within US, to USVI, or out of US? I had some dialogue with a pretty expert psychometrics/stat guy about the Flynn Effect book review I emailed you a few days ago. Here's what he said: The reviewer is both right and not right. His understanding of how IQ scores are obtained is correct. He is, after all, a statistician. And his broad-ranging concerns about how the Flynn effect actually comes about may be useful. However, he omits several important matters, one of which is the increasing use of tests like these with school children. There will be practice effects even if the tests are not identical. Think of how much better HS students perform [on average] when they take the SAT a second time. And if SATs are surrogates for IQ tests, as the reviewer argues: well, there you go. Looking for social-cultural-technological-diet factors that produce the outcome is, for Flynn, a cheap shot. Surely something out there is doing the trick; let's make something up. As for the reviewer's examples of test items: They are certainly not on the Stanford-Binet. Asking a child "Why should people look both ways before crossing the street" may not play in the Sahara d esert [cultural relativism], but there are cultural equivalents to such questions, even for arabs, and they are embedded in their local versions. Also, many of the items in S-B are speed related; Binet's original items contained such. I don't think RT has improved that much in century, although maybe attention deficits have increased. And finally, is intelligence, however it might be assessed, distributed as a Gaussian function? All these are assumptions based on late-19th, early 20th c. thinking [Galton, Spearman, others]. Are they correct? How would you know? Then I wrote: Thanks. That's interesting. I. If the spread of the literate intellectuals' way of problem formulation and "solution" was part of the reason for the Flynn Effect, how could we tell? We can't hang everything on Luria's studies, now, can we? 2. I agree that the trend in RT is a very interesting topic. 3. How can a practice effect work if there's no feedback, question-by-question? They don't get feedback in order to preserve the questions for later tests. And I don't think there's been enough coaching and prep books to cause such a large, long and wide trend as the Flynn Effect. Cheers, David EFTA00739235 Then he wrote: > 1. If the spread of the literate intellectuals' way of problem > formulation and "solution" was part of the reason for the Flynn > Effect, how could we tell? > We can't hang everything on Luria's studies, now, can we? You can if you want to. > 2. I agree that the trend in RT is a very interesting topic. There is no trend, is there. More to the point: Binet was interested in identifying 5 y.o. children who were ready to attend school, and separating them from those who were not. Galton was the first to speak of general v. specific intelligences. Spearman later laid out the theoretical [read statistical] arguments. > 3. How can a practice effect work if there's no feedback, > question-by-question? They don't get feedback in order to preserve the > questions for later tests. Taking IQ-like tests simply makes the participant 'test ready', the reviewer's point re Raven's PM. > And I don't think there's been enough coaching and prep books to > cause such a large, long and wide trend as the Flynn Effect. It's not that large, it's not that long, and who cares how wide it is. > Cheers, > David The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the property of Jeffrey Epstein Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail or by e-mail to jeevacation@gmail.com, and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. EFTA00739236