Comment by rjf72 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjf72 | Hacker News Reader

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It's unbelievable this is getting downvoted, because it's 100% true and a very major problem in society. I've taught lots of young players and success or failure has 0 to do with intelligence. It's a matter of who can stay focused and actually do the work it takes to improve (which at that age/level is tactics tactics tactics). The second they "discover" social media or the endless stream or inanity on e.g. YouTube, it's game over.

It's a big part of the reason I stopped teaching. It's so disappointing to see somebody make such rapid progress, start getting distracted by digital entertainment including social media, and then see all their potential (alongside extensive wasted effort on my part) just flushed down the toilet.

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A sharp but, in my opinion, very related tangent is the Flynn Effect [1]. It was the observation that IQs were increasing over time. IQ tests are always normalized such that the mean is 100 with a standard deviation of about 15. However, Flynn observed that the absolute score of a 100 in e.g. 1950 was higher than it was in 1920 and similarly on forward. Until the 1990s.

Sometime in the 1990s this all changed. In numerous developed nations the Flynn Effect has reversed. Now, for the first time ever, a 100 IQ score would be less today than in e.g. 1985 in many developed nations. And the declines have been quite dramatic reducing on the order of 1-2 points per decade. Keep in mind that 1/15 = 0.07. Somebody who is at the average of 100 would be ahead of about 50% of people. Reduce that by just 1 point he's dropped 0.07 sigmas and is now only ahead of 47% of people. And that's a population level event recurring each and every decade!

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

I stopped teaching piano for much the same reason. The level of focus just isn't there any more (obviously there are exceptions.) Not that I blame the students, If I'd grown up in this day and age, I certainly would rather be gaming or jacked into social media than practicing.

I don't think there's a strong research-based link between the Flynn effect reversal and Internet usage, social media, or videogames; in fact, (correlative) evidence implies it's something else, because the Flynn effect reversal actually started in the mid-70s in some countries, long before videogames or the Internet (or its precursors) were widespread enough to cause mass societal impact. "Kids today" have always been the bane of the kids yesterday; I don't think their behavior or culture is the source of stagnation, and the timelines don't line up.

The Flynn effect dropoff correlates decently well with the increasing rise of wealth inequality in developed nations; given the fairly strong link between IQ and wealth, I wonder if that might be a cause.

Please do share what you're talking about regarding some sort of a reversal in the 70s. To my knowledge all declines, and certainly anything that could fairly be called widespread, began around the mid 90s. There was some isolated stagnation prior to then, but I'm not aware of any consistent and clear declines - the like of which we're now seeing.

As for wealth inequality, some of the first places the decline was clearly measured in are throughout Scandinavia. There is compulsory military service in various nations such as Finland and Norway, which also entails IQ testing with public data available - provides a nice massive sample. It goes without saying that these are some of the most egalitarian nations in the world by most metrics people strive for today, including wealth distribution. There has been no clear reversal of the Flynn effect in developing nations which, by contrast, tend to have dramatic levels of wealth (and other) inequality.

For another hypothesis that some may be thinking but not want to say, immigration is also controlled for in these studies. It's quite an interesting phenomena that may shape the future of our species far more than many of the issues we consider of otherwise critical importance.

In Denmark, the Flynn effect began declining (although didn't yet start reversing) as early as the 70s:

> Teasdale and Owen (2005) examined the results of IQ tests given to Danish male conscripts. Between 1959 and 1979 the gains were 3 points per decade. Between 1979 and 1989 the increase approached 2 IQ points. Between 1989 and 1998 the gain was about 1.3 points.

I don't think that trend of declining growth, shifting into the negatives recently, has much to do with something in the 90s; the decline started much earlier and has been fairly linear and consistent over time.

Edit: In addition, most of these measurements have been taken from people in their mid-to-late teens — meaning that whatever caused the decline presumably started at least a decade before the decline was measured. TL;DR: I'm not convinced that social media or any reasonably-modern changes are to blame: this dates back to the Boomers or perhaps even earlier.

Also, an article from Slate noting that in Norway, IQ scores began declining in 1975:

> What they found is that for Norwegians born between 1962 and 1975, IQs increased within each family by 0.26 points per year: Younger brothers had slightly higher scores than their older siblings, relative to expectations. (The researchers had to control for the more general fact that older siblings tend to have higher IQs than younger ones.) From 1975 until 1991, this tendency reversed, with test scores dropping by 0.33 points per year within each family.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/09/iq-scores-going-down-re...

As your quote says, that study is talking about birth years, not the year they were tested. Since it's based on conscription it's around age 19-20, so the decline was measured between ~1994 and 2011. Your lead paragraph also states as much:

"...At some point in the mid-1990s, IQ scores in these countries tipped into decay, losing roughly one-fifth to one-quarter of a point per year..."

This is misunderstanding the point. The issue is not IQ scores are not increasing less rapidly - they are now decreasing!

Increases asymptotically approaching something near 0 would be completely expected. To understand why think about something like developmental malnutrition. Developmental malnutrition causes reduced IQ. As this form of malnutrition was reduced in a previously very poor area you'd see a substantial increase in average IQ. But then as future generations also have stable supplies of food, this increase would disappear as the stable food supply would no longer provide a relative increase compared to past generations. Make sense?

IQs getting literally lower is something very different than IQs growing less slowly.

Needless to say, I agree that it's a major problem, and one the full extent of which we will only experience 10-15 years in the future. One thing is for sure: something _has_ to be done now.

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