> In truth the IQ is a purely statistical measure. It has no direct relation to brain performance, is not proportional to it, and doesn't even have any linear or otherwise straightforward relation to it. The only thing you can say is that somebody with a higher IQ will show higher scores on most other brain performance tests as well, but the IQ doesn't say how much higher.
Anyway just because it wasn't designed to have a linear meaning doesn't mean it's useless. It measures what percent of the population scored better and worse than you. That's still a useful fact to know, just like people talk about "the top 1%" instead of specifying exact income brackets.
He didn't say that it was
If one is more interested in discussion of the effect itself, and whether the IQ score changes reflect actual changes in intelligence between generations, Flynn has a longer and more academic discussion on the subject here: http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/about-us/directory/beyond...
Our parents invented the Internet too ...
Which ironically is what our parents called the "Application layer" when they were designing it ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite#Compar...
Things have definitely evolved a lot, but as far as "social media" (reminds me how much I hated that term when they first started using it, when the basic profile + messaging concept had been around over a decade) goes, it's more like comparing a Tesla to a Model T, rather than a whole new type of technology.
All that happened from about 1945 until 1970. Then it stopped. I find it impossible to believe that we learned everything there is in 25 years. Something is broken.
What's "broken" is that it takes more than 25 years to work out the practical uses of a lot of these discoveries. We see much more of the total fruit from a discovery in 1950 than we do for an equivalent discover in 1990.
Except (and this counters GP post also):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Our IQs are steadily increasing. Or so it appears ...
With equivalent tests to those administered a few years ago scores are steadily increasing. It's not necessarily that we're getting smarter of course - far more likely to be the case that these tests become the "definition" of intelligence and our children are more specifically trained for them.
That's not what I meant. I meant that "scores" were increasing - which is the reason for normalisation against present population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Flynn_ef...
IQ test scores have been rising at an average rate of around three IQ points per decade
So IQ in absolute terms has been increasing steadily - but this doesn't necessarily tell us anything about whether intelligence has been increasing or not.