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Comment by toasterlovin | Hacker News Reader

Color me skeptical. Pretty much every intervention ever tried has failed to measurably increase IQ long-term. The only exceptions are fixing nutritional deficiencies. If you could reliably raise IQ by a standard deviation in reasonably nourished children, it would be one of the most profound socio-political developments of all time (on the scale of major economic transitions like agriculture -> manufacturing -> knowledge work).

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Well average IQ of the human population around the world has been increasing in the past decades if not centuries. And it's not because we're evolving within a few generations.

There have been massive improvements in average nutrition over the last few decades though.

Your parent is right: IQ has been increasing. Even in countries where you wouldn't expect the cause to be improved nutrition. But nobody really knows why, nor has anybody discovered an intervention that can, on its own, reliably increase IQ.

Not only nutrition, but overall childhood experience is getting better worldwide. Even in countries that had no malnutrition, there was a lot of space to improve in children<->parents relationships etc.

Meanwhile some countries that were really good in all areas a while ago are now reporting minor IQ decrease..

There's been really interesting work showing correlations between this increase in IQ and improvements in diet.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3044837/

Minor nitpick. I understand what you're saying but average IQ is by definition 100 (with a deviation of 15). The scale itself moves, e.g. new 100 would usually be more than 100 in previous iteration of the test [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

IQ of groups around the world have been improving, but the composition of groups has changed.

Eg Africa went from 1/2 the population of Europe in 1950 to 1.6x the size today.

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