Hacker News Reader

Comment by robbedpeter | Hacker News Reader

This is incorrect - iq has risen steadily with improvements in nutrition, public health, and medical science. It's mostly plateaued over the last 50 years, but it's evident that pre-industrial / pre-rnlightenment humans had a much harder life, including things that suppressed potential at an almost global scale.

We may see additional gains if there are globally adopted pedagogical improvements in both childhood education and standard parenting.

Our genetics are the same, but our quality of life is radically better, and that allows us greater potential.

View on HN

> This is incorrect - iq has risen steadily

In particular, we recently invented this peculiar notion that one can boil intelligence down to a number :b

... and somewhat more recently, we are able to apply Goodhart's law.

I am pretty sure people used to call others stupid or intelligent even in Ancient Egypt. Quantifying that measure is not really such a huge leap.

True, the village idiot had iconic status and the donkey was legendary. I always wondered (thoughtfully) what the anti-IQ crowd was all about, was it that IQ tests are imperfect or was it that IQ as a fundamental concept is flawed.

So, the grandparent post is hopefully not betraying my actual thoughts on the matter too much, but I am indeed in the anti-IQ crowd. My thoughts on the matter:

- IQ scores are not a standard measure. There are several different internationally recognized IQ tests, but people who talk about their IQ scores tend to pick the one they do best on and declare that "their IQ."

- IQ scores measure performance on standardized tests. However, they are frequently misinterpreted as a measure of intelligence in general.

- As a result, certain people are motivated to practice for an IQ test, which seems counterproductive.

- Depending on the particular IQ test in question, one's performance on an IQ test stems from their present state of mind, and this is unavoidable. IQ tests, by design, are not concerned with this detail (although, historically, they did account for some crude concept of "metal age" compared to physical age. Which is itself problematic: what is this supposed to measure, again?).

- It is worth noting that IQ scores were originally propped up by the eugenics movement. For example, the most widely used test in the United States was based on the work of Lewis Terman, who at some point wrote "high-grade or border-line deficiency... is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come." Based on that information, there is a likely answer for the question I asked a moment ago.

- Obvious conjecture, but, IQ scores are not really useful in today's society? I have a few years still to go, but so far in my life, I have not once seen an IQ score trumpeted somewhere and thought "that is a useful measure for the discussion at hand." Not in a resume. Not in a debate. Not in a biography. Not in an advertisement. Not in a legal defence.

- So what motivation could we have? People in general gravitate toward answers that make it easier to distinguish the Self from the Other. For example, it took millennia for us to collectively agree the Earth orbits around the Sun. And long before IQ was an idea, René Descartes was a pioneer in trying to explain consciousness through science. To make this work, he was desperate to prove that humans are unique in having free will and intelligence. That animals are machines, over which we have free reign; that humans are special. Because we must be special. So, one of his ideas was that humans have an animal spirit, but we have the ability to control it. That we must control it. But, it is important to note, not all humans do.

- Tests, in general, are a problematic measure of intelligence. A better measure of intelligence will always be performance in regular day to day activity, analyzed by someone with no bias and an understanding of the context. Obviously this can't be standardized, which is unfortunate, but it does not follow that the next-best thing is actually a meaningful measure. Sometimes we humans must simply accept our limitations.

Hey, thanks for the detailed response, your last point is a very insightful one (not to me, though). What I have a problem with, is that generally the anti-IQ crowd (not you, since you do understand the nuances) tend to take the stand that IQ tests are imperfect or even wrong hence they also extend that to concluding that intelligence itself as a concept is flawed, basically the blank slate concept.

Now the last point that you mentioned is a very important. Most average people who make decisions (eg employers) are average themselves so that they fall back on what they know best ( sometime it's IQ tests, in the software world it's leetcode) and what they know best is not necessarily the best. So why blame the normies? (And I'm not denying that a lot of harm comes off it.) What is the alternative for a normie? As a general concept similar methods of gauging people (by normies) on other aspects (like trust) is also flawed, but that is the best they can manage.

All that complaints look similar to the idea that veganism is bad because vegans are annoying or that quantum mechanics is nonsense because some people believe in quantum healing.

I can name one field that justifies all IQ research that was and will be done: education. It has immense value there and can help guide policy on the issues of education and all related concerns such as discrimination.

We know we can quantify intelligence as in IQ because it is what we call aptitude in several tasks (e.g. pattern recognition, short-term recall), and we've found that they are correlated, and aptitude in those tasks is measurable (e.g. ability to recognize pattern and time taken, ability to recall and time taken). If intelligence as in IQ wasn't as transferable as it is we would be calling them different things. For example, intelligence as in IQ and being knowledgeable are different aspects of the popular notion of being intelligent or smart.

That's probably closer to the truth but doesn't seem like the whole story. Modern environments are very different but it seems a stretch to claim they're always (or even often) better.

We're usually comparing modern populations to industrialized populations that lived nothing like ancient populations.

It seems plausible that some ancient populations might've had sufficient nutrition (particularly Egypt at various times) and lower pollutants (less lead, for example), and maybe come out net ahead in terms of average general intelligence.

Would be fun to know if anyone has come close to answering these questions, but it seems like a challenging problem.

It might've actually dipped for everyone born during the decades leaded fuel was used. But that's on a base/general level - education would outweigh that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com