I was very disappointed in Dr. Nisbett’s talk. He had some valid points to make about the influence of external factors such as education and parenting on IQ test performance, but they were not presented in a way that was appropriate for a lay audience - the use of terms such as stereotype threat and heritability would have been OK for a talk on the regular conference program but not for the Bring the Family audience. My two non-faculty guests fell asleep during the first part. They did wake up soon enough to hear and object to the leap of reasoning that led from Dr. Nisbett’s point that research shows that SES is negatively related to IQ scores to his claim that increasing the Earned Income Credit and minimum wage would therefore be a good policy move (presumably because that would somehow have a direct causal effect on intelligence?) I suppose the talk did have some value, in that it led to a few hours of conversation about what the research says and about where there were fallacies in the reasoning he presented.