Deborah Hill Cone: Dumb today, but not tomorrow

I'm feeling extra-thick today. I let my 4-year-old use my Macbook to play Thomas the Tank Engine games and - surprise - she broke it. How thick of me was that?

The financial news gets grislier and more complicated. I have nothing to offer on the question of how the media will manage to find a sustainable business model. What would I know anyway? Paul Holmes has won the Qantas media awards yet again. Bitter, me?

Of course I could write a column about something like the astonishing MP expenses scandal in Britain - taxpayers being charged for moats and porn and silk pillows - but columnist Rod Liddle says "Our MPs are corrupt and venal" and really, what more is there to add from a thicko like me except: same.

Everything I read seems to be sneery and mean. Last week a Sunday paper managed to run a feature being snarky about an entrepreneurs' conference aiming to find ideas to beat the recession. One of the suggestions was "fix the weather", which the journalist - Qantas award-winner Kim Knight - scoffed at with some "What the ..." smartarsery. But isn't fixing the weather what the whole climate change malarkey is about?

So I could write a column saying that people should stop being so beastly. And speaking of which, why do people hate Christine Rankin so much? But then I might have to be sneery about someone like John Minto. Here is what the campaigner for tolerance has to say. "She's self-serving and arrogant with a vastly inflated sense of her own ability. She is pomposity personified and as the last few days have revealed, she comes complete with her own sideshow." Christine speaks highly of you too, horsey-face. But then, that wouldn't be kind. And of course, Paul Holmes has said it better already.

So I went looking for some good news to cheer me up. And I found it in lovely Professor Jim Flynn from Otago University, who is in the news again with his heart-warming Flynn effect, which gives hope to morons like me who not only don't win awards but are too scared to even do the IQ tests on Facebook. The Flynn effect is his finding that the latest generation of young adults has an IQ on average three points higher than in the preceding decade.

The Times reports this week that the idea that genes determine intelligence is being re-thunk. Intelligence and How to Get It author Richard Nisbett says the view that braininess is hard-wired is based on identical twins who were adopted out separately at an early age. On being tested much later, they showed remarkably similar intelligence, which researchers concluded must be innate. But Nisbett says the studies assume the adoptive families are different, when adoptive families tend to be stable and middle-class.

Nisbett also put a lot of store by the Flynn effect, concluding with the uplifting view that we can put in some hard graft and get cleverer. It is a bit late for me, but my daughter might be in luck. "We can talk to children, read to them, teach them to categorise, compare and contrast. Give them stimulating after-school activities ... Encourage self-control: offer gratification in the here-and-now, one biscuit, or better rewards later, two biscuits, because self-control is a better indicator of high marks in exams than IQ scores."

Okay, from now on no more Thomas games, but we will be analysing the Paul Holmes archive thoroughly. In a nice, non-sneery way of course. And two olive-oil biscotti for a reward.

deborah@coneandco.com