The Great Endumbening
slate.com
slate.com
If you do well on the test, you might get assigned to officer training which means an extra 6 months of service. Many people intentionally answer wrong to get home earlier. I certainly did.
Apart from that, I do believe there is a grain of truth in the article.
Oversimplified: Maybe everyone is being too safe and not exposing children to stimuli that promote better development.
I suspect several factors are contributing to this. 1) As more toys are discovered to be 'dangerous' or 'have small parts' children have less exposure to complex objects or it is deferred to later ages. 2) Adults have less, or are less inclined to, time to properly care for children and thus don't understand that judgement and supervision can allow 'supervised' use of toys that can be dangerous if not properly used, but would be fine if used while supervised. 3) I wonder how strongly this correlates to all parents within child rearing units being in the workforce (single parents, dual income parents, etc)? 4) Or how it relates to decreasing access to natural areas to explore as a child?
These are only some of the social influences that could also be part of the cause.
Unfortunately between that and only having first-hand local culture knowledge, I am unqualified to speculate in a meaningful way about the differences in culture and environment.
Also, just because a trend is increasing does not also mean that there's an underlying masking effect or that there isn't overall convergence. Ideally at least similar studies would be performed on a global basis if a global comparison is occurring.
"As Flynn and Shayer note, Scandinavian IQ declines might well presage future trends in other countries. It may be that, once we’ve made our schools as good as theirs, we’ll see our Flynn effect max out, and then whatever channels feed their anti-Flynn effect will show up in our data, too."
Rather the opposite, I suspect: the amount of time (well-off) adults spend tutoring, coaching, and otherwise interacting with their kids has gone through the roof in the past few decades.
When I was a kid (in Europe), both my parents worked. Starting in first grade, I walked to and from school unsupervised and was responsible for keeping myself entertained in the afternoons until they got home, which generally meant roaming the neighborhood with a pack of friends. This is pretty much inconceivable today.
I mean I'm the age my dad was when his third child was coming and I was only able to buy a reasonable house last year. He / they were able to buy a bigger house, newly built, with more land on a single, low income wage and a 12.5% interest mortgage nearly 40 years ago.
Making these fond arguments slightly more awkward is the fact that this effect doesn't seem to be happening in America, but I suppose all you youngsters lacked the attention span to read all the way to the end of the article. Now get the hell off my lawn.
The roman civilization used lead pipes for drinking water.
(I legitimately don't know; maybe clay pipes would work?)
> Yet French researcher Hugo Delile and his team, reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, concluded that such concentrations were "unlikely to have been truly harmful." The group also claimed that enough criticism of Nriagu's theory had been amassed over three decades to largely debunk it.
> "Lead is no longer seen as the prime culprit of Rome’s demise," Delile wrote.
True, but the theory that this affected public health is a myth.
I don't know about people getting dumber, I'd argue people are getting broader in terms of knowledge (and inane knowledge, and cat pictures). However, overall as humanity we're growing in knowledge at an enormous rate, with financial measures like GDP to follow (see e.g. China whose GDP multiplied several times over in the past 30 years).
Nordic and Northern European states have far more seafood, particularly bottom feeding seafood like plaice and sole, which are fantastic bioaccumulators of nastiness, in their diet than the average American [1] - and marine environments ultimately accumulate a large proportion of fun things like micro plastics, and therefore BPA and phthalates, which have been shown to have a negative impact on gestatory brain development. [2]
It would be illuminating to see what correlation exists, as it may well be causative.
[1] https://www.greenfacts.org/en/fisheries/figtableboxes/figure... [2] https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/common-plastic-chemicals-aff...
I agree. Just look how many site names, youtube channels, game rules, game item stats, memes, pokemon names (is that still a thing?), anime slang, etc. young people can memorize.
No /s, I am serious.
I also don’t think that Socrates would have been any stupider had he learned to write, and it’s only through Plato we have a record of him at all.
Now distractions are all around us (play stations and TV on demand) or with us (smart phones). No more need for being imaginative.
There is also this interesting correlation of declining crime rate which can be attributed to kids wasting time with play stations rather than hanging out in the street.
have discussed this with close friends. In the past we perceived that and considered declining intelligence as an assumption, with recent articles like that it seems to be a fact.
Basically, as this is an average for societies, the average environmental factors are better in Scandinavia than in America. But those factors already peaked, and now are starting a downwards trend:
>The authors note several possible factors, among them worsening health and nutrition, a decline in the quality of education, detrimental changes to media exposure, and the indirect effects of immigration.
OTOH, America's average environmental factors are still improving, so, it's still on the rise:
> It may be that, once we’ve made our schools as good as theirs, we’ll see our Flynn effect max out, and then whatever channels feed their anti-Flynn effect will show up in our data, too.
Note that you can state exactly the opposite hypothesis and still claim the numbers support it. The use of gaming consoles and smartphones improve IQ, but this effect have maxed out in Scandinavia.
Again, just to be clear and lest I'll get dragged down into 'you're racist' myself, I'm not claiming one way or the other. My point is that apparently some conclusions are off-limits from the start; any evidence in that direction must be wrong because of the conclusion it leads to. It's this sort of thing that makes real racists go 'see how we're being censored'.
Agreed. Impartial evaluation of facts seems to be dead.
There is also a plausible mechanism of action, intelligent people tend to get an education proportionate to their intelligence. Educated people have ridiculously low birth rates. Intelligence is heritable.
Just like conservatives will have to overcome their global warming denial, those of the progressive tradition may well have to start accepting what cognitive genomics is making increasingly obvious: intelligence is hereditary and this has policy implications.
Should it prove to be a genetic decline, we have solutions, such as embryo selection, in the wings that can work now with little research. This will get us ~3-8 IQ points per generation:https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
Iterated embryo selection and genetic engineering will be able to offer much more, several standard deviations in multiple traits simultaneously.
But we cannot repair problems we refuse to look in the face.
> In all of these twin studies, however, researchers have rarely accounted for differences in the social context.
...
> Highlighting the insights of Kurt Lewin more than 70 years after his work, the researchers found that socioeconomic background had a major impact on genetic influences on intelligence: More specifically, when twins were reared in high socioeconomic status environments, genes accounted for approximately 72% of variance in intelligence scores between twins. When reared in low socioeconomic status environments, genes accounted for only about 8% of variance in intelligence within the twin pairs.
Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/under-the-influence/...
Can you provide some links to support this? I wasn't aware a trait as complex as intelligence was anywhere close to being selectable in embryos. You name a very specific "3-8 IQ points ours generation" though so I'm assuming you got this value from somewhere.
We can predict roughly 16% of the variance in IQ.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325704105_Flynn_eff...
Although there is still one possible genetic cause, which is people (both women and men; in fact, some studies show the effect is stronger for men: https://www.nature.com/articles/gim200868) having children later in life.
I've since had cause to pursue a path in life in which I've become deeply aware of the other influences on intellect, cognition and judgement, which include the emotional environment (trauma, abuse, chronic fear/anxiety) and the nutritional and chemical environments.
From researching this topic extensively over several years, I'm confident in the belief that even if embryo selection were to help at all, it won't help enough to overcome these other factors.
Conversely, there’s a lot than can be done to help people improve their cognitive ability, regardless of their genetics, by altering these environmental factors.
I believe parent is getting downvotes because of this, but this isn't a matter of opinion or social science. It's hard quantitative genetics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
This is the crux of any inter-generational change in average intelligence in a population. Human assortative mating patterns and the inverse relationship between intelligence and fertility account for some of the effect and some is due to shifts in the gene pool. While we can't and shouldn't discount environmental effects (goodbye lead paint!), the latest genetics research tells us that only 15-25% of variation in intelligence can be attributed to the environment.
Citation, please?
I have barely managed to come to terms that I will never accomplish anything of value in my life. I suspect this is true for most people. As a society, we inherently value diligence and hard work over intelligence because most labor implies more of the former than the latter.
The elites will still be elites. The general population gets a little dumber over time on average, but this matters very little.
We've outsourced memorising facts to knowing how to google it. Factor in calculators, spelling and grammar checkers - yoy can outsource a lot of memorising.
Which doesn't help when you're sitting an IQ test.
That would weigh it more towards logical, spatial, pattern identification and classification (stay clear of colours) type questions.
"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
You'll find no end of people talking about things they do for their personal growth - an ongoing, endless growth. Exactly as if they have elastic walls and eidetic memories. (and no particular goal to grow towards, so they know when to stop, but that's another topic)
So syntactic distinction between the possessive and the contraction is being driven to extinction, by Google's half-smart AI.
This remains to me a deep mystery of human psychology, one I've pondered off and on for some years now.
We're already cretins.
Now, everything is an endless library-cum-sewer filled with content, you can never run out of it, you can't clear out "worse" things, you can't meaningfully filter it - only on a superficial keyword match or vote score.
What point is there to be creative to add a drop to this ocean of content?
Why be creative when society says the purpose of it is to get followers and extract coins from them, and nothing more?