Our IQs have never been higher – but it hasn’t made us smart
bbc.com
bbc.com
As an older millennial that's gotten pretty cynical: why should I read? Most of what is written is just like this article: an attempt to mash some ideas together and explain an underlying phenomenon that the author doesn't really understand. I'm pretty bitter about how much time I wasted in school reading things that were bunk (wait, Columbus did what?) And as study after study gets debunked (until last week, I used to believe exercising willpower sapped physical energy--thanks HN), and "experts" can't agree on questions like what caused the financial collapse, I've become pretty convinced that most of the theories underlying public policy, diplomacy, and the course of history are pseudo-science if not outright fantasy.
Millennials, I think, are utilitarian and unromantic. Fancy ideas in books don't hold much appeal to us because as the web makes information more available, we realize nobody knows what they're talking about.
It's a bit like holding seminars on why people don't exercise at a gym, or about how bad it is that people don't learn to code at a developer convention, right?
“I have a second book out this year that says to young people ‘for god’s sake, you are educated, why don’t you read!’”
Go to museums.
People writing nice-sounding words does not in fact necessarily constitutes wisdom.
Sure -- it's just a pity neither you or me or anyone will ever come in contact with them. Everything we think/write/read is based on assumptions/axioms. You don't even have to "dig" to realize that, you just have to scratch the surface.
That being said, reading is still invaluable, you just have to be thoughtful about what (and how) you read. Don't pick up a book without something you want to learn that has real value ahead of time. If the book isn't leading you towards your goal, stop reading it and find another book.
Additionally, look for books that enlarge your picture of the world. Occasionally, pick up a book written by someone with a very different viewpoint from yourself and try to take the author's perspective. Find books that draw connections between disparate ideas.
Because reading is not just a utilitarian activity. Reading widely—things that may not be immediately useful, things that may be against your belief, things that may just turn out to be completely wrong—is an important step towards forming a critical appreciation of anything you may encounter.
Personally, I've long come to realize that much of my attitude towards everything from work to politics has been shaped by reading materials that often covered wholly unrelated topics. More importantly (and much to my chagrin), it seems that many crucial lessons came from works that I outright hated and was forced to drudge through against my will.
I don't mean to discount your conclusion: Almost always, almost everybody doesn't know what they're talking about. But almost always, almost everybody is a little right, and bits and pieces you pick up from the most unusual places will inform your solution to a problem many years down the road, or at least remind you that every story has more than one side.
You'll usually not be led too far astray if you read works (fiction, poetry, philosophy, non-technical nonfiction) that are widely agreed to belong to some kind of Canon. Odds are if you think one of those books is crap, you're just not ready for it.
(There are definitely truly great books that don't often make those lists, though.)
Reading (non-technical writing) well is a skill (just like reading technical works is) and it may take time to develop it. Pretty much no-one starts off their reading career getting more than a fraction out of most books they read than they might when they've had some more practice—practice, not just thoughtless experience.
If you want a utilitarian reason to read: reading improves one's writing.
One widely-agreed-upon effect of reading good writing is expanding one's sense of empathy. A good book will often give it a workout. Books can also reduce feelings of isolation and loneliness by exposing us to others' intimate thoughts about life, some of which will match up with things the reader may have thought were unique to them—and here's proof that those thoughts and feelings aren't just not unique, they're probably not even rare!
Books can be a mirror to one's self. A gut-punch just when we need it. Inspiration when we're down. Something human to hold on to when nothing else is there.
But they don't give you all this for free.
I had this happen reading this book: http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Waterways
The main character described the experience of watching all his friends vanish as they started dating, feeling abandoned, wondering if something was wrong with him. It felt like a sick joke everyone was playing on me. I mentioned experiencing the same on Twitter (referencing the book), and the floodgates opened.
Apparently that's a very normal experience for gay people.
Not to invalidate this but I was under the impression that this is normal for a large majority of people in general, not just gay people.
But that's my limited perspective as someone who's not hetero or bi. I could be wrong. I spent my first 29 years thinking everyone was making up the whole concept of attraction before I figured out what all those feelings I had for guys were.
From what I've read and heard, heterosexuality is like riding a roller coaster with a good safety record, and bisexuality is like riding the same roller coaster, but the other passengers are lions.
I specifically quoted that part because I think it actually shows what rayiner is talking about and it seems like you missed his point.
What's happening is that you sense a benefit from reading and because it feels true, it seems perfectly logical to project that benefit out to everyone else who is not you. But it's a post-hoc explanation instead of scientific research.
It's the same as someone noting that Einstein played violin so therefore, we promote the idea of learning musical instruments to help with creative thinking. Play piano to help unlock the mysteries of universe or write that next novel!
Or an ex-soldier that was forced to make his bed every morning is advising that everyone should make their bed because "the feeling of accomplishing something small snowballs into productivity for the rest of the day". Well, that sounds plausible but it's also post-hoc reasoning instead of something scientifically proven.
A lot of writing about history, diets, self-improvement, hiring, etc is like those examples above. Take an idea that feels true to me and therefore, it must also apply to everyone else. Some computer people do the same thing... we find that our knowledge of loops and IF/THEN statements is helpful to us outside of programming domains so we think everyone should learn to code. However, if we apply scientific rigor to that advice, we must be willing concede that forcing a child to write loops in elementary school may have zero measurable changes to the adult fireman or ballet dancer. (I'm not saying we shouldn't try it but let's not be seduced by post-hoc reasoning.)
Sure most of what's written is bs. But I really like books as a medium , reading inspires a reflexive form of cognition. Even if you read the same content,online you're more likely to just alt-tab away and forget about it while reading will kinda force you to understand things slower, to digest information in a different way. I think good romances are like transformers, there's more than meets the eye.
I find this an odd idea given that you're a lawyer. And an appellate lawyer at that. You have to have read to understand how to frame your cases, how to argue effectively by being knowledgeable about other relevant cases and law. Did you learn these things by osmosis?
Yes, the world is still a mystery in many ways and no one has cracked the code. But the ideas put forward by kooks like Trump, anti-vaxxers and creationists are still idiotic and vastly inferior to the general mainstream ideas advocated by serious scientists and researchers. Just because there's a possibility of being wrong, isn't a reason to succumb to defeatism or paralysis-by-analysis.
There is a wealth of knowledge out there that can help you better understand the world and live your life. Yes, finding and vetting this knowledge is hard work, but it sure beats watching The Jersey Shore.
Millennials are growing up in an environment completely filled with a lot of paid for bullshit information, and can only find culture that isn't venal dishonest marketing controlled by Baby Boomers in the cracks between commercials. I get why they hate information. I'm from Gen X - I've had to walk for a half-hour to get to a payphone to call someone who may or may not be home (depending on if someone I ran into the day before told them that I would call, for which they remained home and near the phone.) Space was limitless back then. Millenials know they've been robbed, and that makes me happy with them and hopeful.
When I realized this, I stopped feeling guilty about pretending to be knowledgeable about topics I truly know nothing about. Outside the realm of the hard sciences, where objective data are sovereign, the experts are pretty much just better bullshitters than everyone else.
In a world where "might makes right" is still the deepest foundation stone of civilization, convincing the mighty to agree with you makes you right. While being technically correct is still the best kind of correct, being believable gets you paid more.
What really chaps my backside now is reading my kids' textbooks.
The "objective data" isn't some inherent peculiarity of hard sciences. It's a feature of long tradition of aspirations towards intellectual honesty, distilled in the usage of mathematical methodology.
You can get a good data softer sciences, but this demands lots of work and paying attention to proper statistical methodology.
It gets more difficult less you can apply mathematics, but there's nothing in particular that makes bullshitting acceptable. Even in non-mathematical fields such as history and archeology, there's still possibility of hard evidence; it just requires lot of humility what you reasonably can infer from it, and sometimes you have to accept that there's not enough data for making conclusions.
The possibility of knowledge requires that everybody does their best to pay the necessary respect to the gods of science that enable its existence. Science is a social project that can't function unless participants believe in it and demand intellectual rigour of each other, work to reduce bullshitting. Giving up and joining the bullshitters does not make you more knowledgeable; it just amounts to treason.
If you want the BS to go away, you have to put an end to the entire world consistently rewarding it. Good luck accomplishing that with nothing more than reasoned, logical arguments.
I feel that I'm cynical about facts like you are, but quality fiction is an amazing view into the world of the past or of different people. The thing about fiction is that it's not trying to convince you of something, its not true or false, its a story with some historical and cultural backdrops.
Read some Camus, Hess or Hemingway. Read literature that wasn't originally written in english like Season of Migration to the North, The yellow sofa, I am a Cat or something by Naguib Mahfouz.
Reading physical books is a great way to maintain your focus, you think differently when you are digging into a real book. It encourages you to think deeply and avoids the surface thinking that we are so used to with all our modern technology.
I'm totally with you on the absurdity of 'facts' these days, but good literature is something else all together.
And here is precisely why you should read, because you obviously don't know what you're talking about.
Sure, nobody's omniscient, nobody can have perfect knowledge of even one subject. But not everyone is equal - there are some people who know more than others. Typically, those who know more are those who read more, and it's not just by reading better material (here's where paying for content is really a good idea), but by reading all sorts of stuff, including the bad and just plain wrong, and being able to recognize it for what it is.
And yes, I know the inevitable comeback will be "but how do I know the bad from the good?" and the answer is again reading, but also being humble and taking advice from those more knowledgeable than you, and reading what they recommend. Hell, one of the best recommendations I ever had was to read Rippetoe's "Starting Strength" and that came from HN. I've also found that if I get a lot out of a book, the best thing to do is follow up on it's sources. Bibliographies are highly under rated.
And then there's the other standard reply that gets trotted out: "I don't have enough time". Really? How much time do you spend watching TV (including streaming)? How much time do you spend playing video games? How much time do you spend reading "free" content that's only written to sell your eyeballs instead of reading something you paid for, written by a knowledgeable author?
Not all content is created equal.
Sometimes I wish HN had a highlight function like Medium.
Please make your points without stooping to personal attack. Your comment would be much better without the first sentence, which is just a slap.
I think we have seen so much more value created by people thinking perpendicular to the norm. Do you need to know the history of the taxi industry to create Uber? Do you need to know the history of the grocery industry to create Blue Apron? I would argue that knowledge of the history can bog you down and influence your approach to solving problems.
Do you need to know the history of monarchies to understand that the person who was born into power is not representing your needs? Knowing the history doesn't help you decide that being governed by somebody who you and your peers are able to elect would more effectively represent your needs.
I would argue that ideas aren't born out of a historical perspective, but that they're born out of current need and that the historical perspective only serves to tell you why you can't do something.
Another definition of "smart" is the accumulation of knowledge and facts.
The 2nd definition is what the BBC headline and James Flynn is talking about. He's concerned we're not "smarter" in the sense of not reading more books, and not knowing about history like The 30 Years War, etc. In contrast, when another writer like Joel Spolsky talks about "Smart and Gets Things Done"[1], he's emphasizing the 1st definition (aptitude).
So yes, IQ and knowledge are decoupled from each other and can increase at different rates. E.g. there are a lot of high-IQ physicists out there that can solve crazy equations but are not interested in reading a bunch of history books. In JF's framework, this makes those scientists "dumber".
[1]http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...
Ironically, the more "smart" you are, the less broadly "knowledgable" you are. PHD's are very "smart" but have narrow "knowledge". Whereas a mountainman, or someone living on their own of the land might have to have "knowledge" about many small things to survive, but might not be the brightest tool in the shed.
I'd be careful with both of those generalizations.
PhD's aren't necessarily smarter than anyone else. On average, PhD's -- especially at top institutions -- probably typically have above average IQs. But I'd wager a guess that the same is true for non-PhD's working for top employers (or starting successful companies).
Similarly, while it's true that PhD's have very deep knowledge about a very narrow topic, that doesn't preclude them from also having a lot of knowledge about many other topics. Especially since intellectual curiosity probably correlates better with PhD than raw intelligence.
True, I was generalizing. I was using a subject I felt most people could understand in order to relay my point.
>> "Smart" and "Knowledgable" are often used interchangeably, when really they are sets that just so happen to overlap in some places.
Hadrian is interesting not because he's Hadrian and he was once a Roman emperor. Hadrian is interesting because he commanded to be built an enormous military fortification. The history of that fortification includes his motivations and that of his generals. There may even be a relationship to the economic circumstances of the time, and there were likely some interesting political ramifications. That's what's interesting. Hadrian could just as well have been named Buttface and there would still be something to study there.
However, in a wider context the history of disease, the history of technology, and the history of systems of thought do more to shape our world than the history of people. Yet, sanitation for example is generally ignored relative to the story's of people.
Despite the old cliche, you're not particularly likely to be condemned to repeat mistakes made by Hadrian from not learning that aspect of ancient history, on account of not being a Roman emperor.
Most teachers are ingrates.
I only learned to start to love mathematics and history after reading the works of non-ingrates and learning to play with the concepts.
We are conditioned to despise subjects which lend themselves to play and fancy of thought by teaching them so awfully. I'm actually mad at all the money spent on the teachers and schools who taught me. I could've learned more from a smart guy in 6 months than 12 years of public schooling.
But in defense, a lot of learning is remembering symbols (aka facts and shit) and recognizing them. But it's like learning "1, 2, 3, 4, 5...". You don't get the magic of operators and functions.
But then, as the article notes, if IQ is so reliant on genes, then why the Flynn Effect? Why are IQs collectively rising year-over-year in our society [2]? If it is the result of our modern society, where technology perpetually challenges us to think abstractly every waking minute of our lives, then wouldn't the Flynn Effect eventually level off at some point in the future? If it really is 80% genes (and I'm still waiting for my 23andMe results to identify the specific SNPs responsible for my Mensa membership) then how far can that 20% environmental influence take us?
These are the most interesting questions to me. Our brains exhibit a high-degree of plasticity. Making students and teachers aware of neuroplasticity can have significant positive outcomes on their education [3][4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
[3] http://www.edutopia.org/blog/neuroscience-higher-ed-judy-wil...
[4] http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec0...
*edited for formatting.
Today people have encountered trick questions by the time they take IQ tests, so they do better. That might be all there is to it.
That's a pretty interesting thought. You could actually apply that to a lot of "trainable" personal metrics.
Compare the increase in e.g. height, which for some reason people seem much happier to admit is mostly genetic.
Still, as I grew my company, I've realized how inaccurate they can be. Some of the best performing testers couldn't demonstrate a long-term perspective or broad set of knowledge/opinions.
Whereas they were terrific at solving puzzles, they couldn't accept or recognize a puzzle itself.
For me history is just fiction that by sheer accident actually happened (well kinda, because there's a lot of post-factum narrative in history that might be false as any other story). It's interesting that it happened but not that interesting to give it some value that trumps other factors that make fiction interesting.
Nowadays I've just started assuming that real life is bad alternate-universe fanfiction. Someone, somewhere, in some other universe is enjoying a reasonable, functional universe that runs on clear rules instead of sheer perversity.
We could say it's a good read of a spectrum of mental capacity, but to suggest that IQ is capable of anything more is whack science.
Having said that, I think the measure of IQ and related variables such us working memory capacity is very interesting and gives a lot of information about how you can peroform in specific situations. The problem is when you try to infer the individual outcome in a complex environment with a few variables.
Maybe they are crude. Maybe there are better alternatives. That doesn't make them unscientific.
Those who double down on IQ as being infallible have something to lose if it's proven to be hack. And history is not on your side here.
No it hasn't.
BMI doesn't work for three groups of people: it makes very tall or very athletic people think they're fatter than they are, and it makes very short people think they're thinner than they are. But, as GP says, that's less than 5% of the population.
History is very much on the side of IQ realism. Ten years ago people were denying that a general factor of intelligence existed at all, now it's down to nitpicking or argument from ignorance.
It seems similarly unreasonable for most of my friends and family.
When I weighed 160, I had slightly defined abs. Similar to what you would see on someone with 10-15% body fat.
The existence of a lot of overweight people in the US doesn't change what the words "overweight" and "athletic" mean.
What is not objective is looking in the mirror in some lighting and thinking you look pretty good. That's a subjective measurement based on objective reality. Your body might distributed fat in a way that's relatively aesthetically pleasing -- mine does too, it hides it all in the thighs, and people think I'm way more in shape than I am -- and that's not the same thing as being healthy.
Traditional BMI makes short people think they're thinner than they are.
"some one with an IQ greater than 120 is definitely intelligent" == "some one with high blood pressure is definitely unable."
I'm fine with IQ so long as we're not using it as a scientific form of measurement...but we currently seem to.
In my eyes, most novels are trash and there are only a few worth reading.
Relatively few, maybe, in the context of all the books, ever. But there are far more "good" books than most people can read in a lifetime.
That's actually the expected result, by the way. Sturgeon's Law, roughly "ninety percent of everything is crap", is one of those ha-ha-only-serious sorts of things. You can put math around it if you want; if the quality of a given type of media is normally distributed (probably with the bottom end cut off by it never getting published), the best of the best is generally much much better than the vast bulk of what is out there, and so if you measure by the standard of what the best puts out, almost everything is crap.
One of the things that keeps the world going around is that we all have different distributions, though; what is for me a +6sigma novel might be well below average to you.
I'd say to you that bloated page counts are definitely a common thing. It's what you get when you pay by the word. I'd also say that any story can be reduced to a couple of sentences, if you're being really cynical ("One day, Bob defeated the evil overlord and peace reigned throughout the land."). There are stories out there that are quite dense and everything has a point. But, yes, they are the exceptions. The trick is in finding them.
Lord of the Rings LITE(tm): Some guys take a long vacation to throw a ring in a volcano.
See also: https://www.youtube.com/user/HISHEdotcom