Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking | Daniel Dennett | Talks at Google

I like this idea quite a bit, although I'm not exactly sure it would be a startup in the end because the willingness (ability?) to pay amongst the target market here must be quite low, I imagine. Just free styling here, but the way to go about it would be to bundle a sort of 'package' of tools into a couple of various tiers, from easy (low input of time/funds) to challenging (more pricey/difficult). One wrinkle is that I think there is a spectrum from pretty clearly verified IQ boosters.. such as psychologically verified games like n-back, and proper nutritions (EPA+DHA, etc etc), to ones that are much more speculative or carry some baggage that 'underclass' folks (that sounds sort of bad ha) might be extremely reluctant to participate in.. eg meditative practice, nootropics, etc. (Brain) food for thought.. :P With regards to the Victorian study, I read through that last week and it is not immediately clear to me from the literature that reaction time is really a reliable indicator of g. Conversely, the Flynn affect suggests that IQ has really been going up. And if you've read any of Flynn's stuff you'll find that he has quite a nice explanation here, which is that the more brilliant heuristics/words/thinking tools pioneered amongst scientists, inventors, so on are slowly filtering down into the masses generation by generation. Perhaps what this suggests is that education in a new way- introducing folks to a library of new 'thinking tools' rather than just memorization etc- m