Iain Sinclair was one for years before becoming an author in his forties. The characters he writes about from his book dealing days are quite interesting - Cockney wide-boy types who have drifted into book dealing and become quite intellectual in the process.

Not sure it'd be quite the same nowadays with the internet, it's so easy to compare prices and find a bargain - obviously book dealing relies on buying a book for one price and selling it on for more.

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It's political correctness gone mad!

Some people collect things out of intellectual interest. Other people don't. I'd be willing to concede that academically inclined people are more likely to collect certain types of things (rare maps, rare books, etc.) than those people who are not academically inclined. But I don't think this is something inherent in what is being collected. Plenty of people collect rare books entirely for their monetary value.

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There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic

I read a short article in Science News recently that was a wonderful example of how complex this interrelation can be. A study found that children who were breast fed saw an IQ increase of 6-7 points, but *only* if they possessed a certain version of a particular gene.

What makes this fascinating is that if you looked at only the gene or only the environment, you would "prove* one or the other had a smaller effect, and miss the larger, more complex effect. Nature vs. Nurture itself has to die. What we are is due to a complex interplay of genetic and environmental effects.

I also think the concept of general intelligence has to die...I'm not so sanguine about it as the author of the article you posted. IQ itself only weakly correlates with the sort of success we attribute to "being smart", and yet it's the closest thing to g that anyone's been able to come up with. My suspicion is that when it all comes down to it, barring actual abnormalities, any general impacts on intelligence are likely due to common environmental factors, like nutrition, the attentiveness of parents, the educational system, etc. The telling bit in my mind is the way that abnormalities like Autism, Aspergers, etc. can almost entirely knock out one bit of "intelligence" while leaving others apparently untouched. If there's a single g, then why are there Aspergers sufferers who score an IQ of 23 and yet speak with the verbal complexity of a normal adult?

In my mind, the increase in IQ over the course of the 20th century is not so mysterious. Over the same time period, heights increased dramatically. IIRC, the average male height in the US increased nearly 4 inches over that time period. Despite height obviously having a huge genetic impact, people have no trouble putting this gain down to better nutrition. I don't quite understand why people have a hard time putting the IQ gain over the same period to the same thing.
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_{ウセーバラケダ}

Dunno, seems to me that a lot of antiques would require a similar amount of scholarship. I've been leafing through Arts of Asia recently, which is strangely relaxing, and the depth of knowledge from collectors seems half-decent and often draws on academics as contributors. The actual collecting part with auctions and glorified flea markets and so on seems kind of tedious to me though. It's keep up with the Joneses except with rare Tang ceramics.

_{The Political Science Department of the University of Woolloomooloo}

That plagiarism / RA article was interesting. The economist they mention almost sounds like he's taking an Edison approach from the early years of expanding his dedicated research lab. It's project based work, which he is responsible for, but at least unlike Edison he seems to be systematically attributing co-authors.

On the academic writing vs popular books front, they seem to have answered their own question, if you want to be a celebrity professor, you have to turn away from writing densely thought out and written academic books.

_{The Political Science Department of the University of Woolloomooloo}