An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

> If you look at the problems we have in the world today—climate change, income disparities in this country that probably rival or exceed those of the gilded age, pollution, violence, a political situation that many of us never could have imaged — one wonders, what about all those IQ points? Why aren’t they helping?

> We have a guy [representative-elect Greg Gianforte of Montana] who allegedly assaulted a reporter and just got elected to the U.S. House of Representatives—and that’s after a 30-point average increase in IQ. We had violence in campaign rallies.

> What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other people’s expense.

There is a separate discussion to be had about testing criteria causing schools to narrowly focus on them, but I don't really see that in the article.

There's another discussion about smart people being ineffective - which I thought he was going for at first - but which I didn't really see much of.

There's yet another discussion that could be had on smart people needing more ethics, but his examples were mostly political. I can see the abstract appeal of saying that testing for wisdom or ethics will incentivize schools to teach them better, but it's a bit sinister if all the examples are political or based on something he saw in the news.

The first two sentences here might sound provocative, but 100% of his specific examples were recent political news and he literally writes admissions tests. There were so many other directions he could've gone in if he were talking about wisdom/ethics more generally. I'm not sure what else to think other than e.g. if you don't believe that income disparities are a problem, then you lack wisdom & ethics and the admissions tests should screen you out.

You're probably better off finding another article that focuses on one of these other more specific issues if you want to discuss the US education system.

http://www.billderesiewicz.com/books/excellent-sheep

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect