IQ scores are falling and have been for decades (2018)
cnn.com
cnn.com
I've had increasing trouble reading books for years. It stresses me out, I can't just sit for hours reading, I have things to do. It takes real... something - focus, mindfullness - to actually sit down and think in an explorative way that isn't strictly driven by work.
This isn't that surprising. IQ tests a specific type of intelligence, and we probably don't leverage that sort of intelligence day to day. Instead, we create hyperfocused individuals and build structure and process around them so that they can collaborate. Being generally intelligent and having general problem solving skills is less and less important, or at least we treat it that way.
TBH looking at how the future is going to look like (no not utopia), those general skills seem to be more and more important on the contrary.
Being “too specialized” will hurt society in the end.
I agree and disagree. There are arguments in favor of both sides. Look at what happened in software development alone. Where you were only expected to push basic code before, many employers now expect you to be a flexible mini-IT department on top of having the social skills to communicate with customers and managers. At the same time, they specialized other things to a degree you're now a "dotnet developer", "java developer" etc., as if specializing in that direction was ever the goal of software development / computer science.
My hypothesis is the availability of low quality passive entertainment 24/7 - namely tv - is what leads to iq scores declining.
When did tvs become affordable for everyone, 1970s perhaps?
We've now come into an era where there is also an abundance of information: Pretty much anything you can imagine is just a button-click away.
Young people in particular have to carefully select what information to consume, and there's a whole attention-economy built around wasting people's time, trying to manipulate them into buying shit they don't need.
Humans didn't evolve in such conditions - everything was always scarce. So I think that's why a lot of people have a hard time dealing with it. I believe there's a huge potential market for software that acts in the interest of the user, helping to deal with this abundance of information (pretty much all software that currently exists mainly works to the benefit of the company, in particular ads/data collection). But it doesn't need to be that way. So let's build solutions.
I don't even know what that means. That sounds like they'd be ranked only a tenth of a percent lower than US universities, which doesn't jive with the rest of your point.
QS World University rankings assigns 40% to Academic reputation, and 20% to Citations per faculty, so it's pretty dominant.
Going to University doesn’t affect IQ much, IQ is not learned.
I consider myself a person of average intelligence who learned very early on that preparation can set me ahead of the group.
I practiced interviewing, public speaking, coding, writing, test taking, etc, and it's helped immensely. I mean, most tests tip their hand later, which allows you to go back and revise earlier answers. most writing is formulaic, you just have to find a good example. any system that you are evaluated by can be learned.
To prep for grad entrance exams, I wroke up early every Friday, got ready, drove around, sat down and took a timed practice exam at 930 sharp. all to emulate my Friday 900am exam appointment. I got the score I wanted.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" -- Goodhart's Law
I have never seen anyone I would consider really smart who took these tests seriously.
Even so, most of the discussions about IQ are about individual scores and a lot of pseudoscience.
His premise is that higher education offers little to no value. What theoretical value a higher education might provide is squandered because people are too busy living their lives, namely working to make ends meet, in order to leverage it. This certainly has proven true economically as we can see that incomes held stagnant through the rise of post-secondary attainment, contrary to assumptions of the past that speculated that college graduates would be able to earn more as a result of having a higher education. Similarly, and perhaps related to, he posits the features tested by IQ are not being practiced because people are too busy to carry out that practice.
ther are a usually few general courses (civics, economics, etc) at every undergrad, but these are usually low quality, mostly useless, and absolutely dwarfed by the usual introductory classes (usual STEM for STEM, etc)
for example https://offertaformativa-unitn-it.translate.goog/it/l/inform...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...
Also curious what you mean by thinking of education as an investment being part of the problem. What is the problem, and why does framing education as investment contribute? Are you talking about purely financial forms of investment? Education is widely viewed as social, cultural investment by society, as well as economic investment, and this is widely agreed to be a good thing, isn’t it? At the personal level, education is also viewed as a career & future financial security investment, and this also seems reasonable, no? I feel like the most important investment my education bought me was the freedom to choose my career path over time. Had I not gone to university, I do believe my choices would be more constrained than they are today.
IQ tests mostly measure the hardware part (pattern recognition, working memory, spatial reasoning, attention to detail, speed, focus, reasoning about abstract rules)
the software part is mostly about applied epistemological rationality, how good one's life strategy is, and how well one can execute that. (of course there's a hardware component to this too. someone with good emotional resilience, low neuroticism, high self-motivation achieves things with relative ease given the opportunities)
then there's a measurement problem. if someone is taught the importance of attention to detail since they were very little, taught to control their emotions better (eg. boredom), then they will likely score better on the hardware test too.
that said our collective knowledge is much greater than decades ago, our teaching methods are better too, but alas not everyone received the same top quality teaching.
plus there is a big issue with the curriculum. most people are tragicomically underskilled in dealing with themselves and other people, hence they are bad at recognizing and solving problems that brutally impact their lives (and the lives of those around them).
aaand of course there's the plain old resource availability problem (everyone inherits, the question is what. advantaged people get advantages with very high probability, disadvantaged people get disadvantages...)
and reading does develop a certain sort of intelligence that is important and is very useful...I saw my own youthful reading and its good effects in the computer science classes that I passed and where 80% of the class just could not do the work...intelligence counts....when you spend your youth reading books for hours a time, year in and year out, your brain grows "smart muscles"...and that makes it easier to focus on difficult problems...
I saw a lack of that sort of intelligence when I worked for a large government agency and when people lacking in that sort of intelligence made a huge mess of designing the business processes for that agency...intelligence counts...
society at large and especially those at the top pretend that intelligence no longer matters...but they are wrong...
> and one reason why we read more was that television was just not as good as it is today...
I feel like there's a little disconnect between these two statements. It's not that television is taking priority, it's that the times when people used to break out a book -- that they carried in their back pocket or purse! -- now break out their phones and engage with social media, or they check their work email, or respond to slack messages, or they get involved in texting, or they play some video game just to make the time go faster. I suppose some of them put in headphones and watch Netflix, but I don't see that often, to be honest.
The world has gotten so busy and defaulting to 'on' that no one feels they can default to reading a book, but you can. You just have to decide to carry a book and, instead of breaking out a phone at those times to stay connected, you just let yourself be disconnected, and you read a book. Or meditate.
That's how I go about my life, and frankly I don't understand why more people don't. I never use my phone unless it's an emergency. I get a lot more out of life meditating and reading books than checking my email, playing candy crush, and engaging with twitter.
I've experienced this as well, and the only solution I have found is to take periodic breaks from my phone and all social media. Within a day or two of minimizing phone use that natural curiosity and desire to learn and motivation to read reemerges.
The 10 years and many loans it took to get through bachelor's and PhD were the best and most important investment I made in myself to get out of the factories and warehouses and into an office with great pay, and oh incidentally an amazing job.
Moreover it's painfully easy to exploit your way through especially if you're already rich. Just go doctor shopping with Mommy so you can get a 504 and accomodations and stimulant medications.
If it selected for adaptation the curriculum would be different, things like figuring out the area of a circle using given materials, not abstract shit. If it selected for intelligence there would br a huge battery of exceptions, handicaps for the working class kids, because they have to put in way more effort than the kids living with their parents who are unemployed, likewise with non-traditionals.
I cannot fathom a successful professional that does not balance 'I must innovate the sysyem even if it hurts me' against 'I will work within this system for my own personal benefit by providing exactly what is requested of me'
https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/504faq.html
Is this being abused?
- Rich people can painfully easily exploit something to make their ROI much higher
- That something can be an immensely valuable investment for the non-rich
> a certain amount of wading-through-the-bullwhip tenacity (useless but mandatory curriculum -> non-questioning serf mentality)
And I think a lot of people (though not me and maybe not you) would find that that is a good description of attributes employers would like. And for many people the point of a college degree is appealing to employers rather than proving oneself to be intelligent.
While I see your point - a whole lot of people do have salary increases over a 10 year span - a whole lot of jobs people want require "X piece of paper for Y years of experience" and you cannot get that experience to begin with without either 1) the piece of paper or 2) knowing someone.
bls.gov tells a more complete story, in that machine operators make significantly less and job openings grow at a significantly lower rate than software, aerospace, robotics, and AI specialists, many of which require a degree, (and the siccessful outliers are not worth pushing as a good model for the 90%)
I can't say there wasn't a different, even a better road to some measure of success and an enjoyable career, but I can say this path was a miracle of positive life changes for me and every penny of debt I pay back to the fed is absolutely a victory lap.
Me too. But I read way more than I read when I devoured scores of books. I just do it in the web browser.
I always had very short temper with books. If the book didn't captivate me with first few pages it never got read by me. I just moved to another one.
I always really liked anthologies of short stories, because amount of the ideas to amount of text was the best there. Way better than when the author stretched just a handful ideas into a novel.
So now, with internet filled with so many interesting texts I have real trouble with books, because my short temper got even shorter. I also know a lot more of the ideas than I did when I was younger so it's hard to encounter something novel to me. So a book, that's captivating, dense and novel is really a hard find. And others get ditched by me at some, usually very early, stage. I just have even less patience for them than I had ever before.
Some of my favourite time with two of my friends is going to a bar or restaurant in the afternoon and reading together. The tradeoff is I watch less TV and have basically disengaged from social media. But that’s more than worth it to me.
> Higher education has never been a worse investment.
While I realize you’re talking about social investment here, the idea that TV and media are better investments of your time than earning a degree seems problematic at best. TV & media will, generally speaking, not help you get a better career, right?
The Fed has published very recent stats in the US that people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income of people without a degree. I previously suspected it was slightly higher, like maybe 10 or 20 percent, and I felt like that would be a big number, but the fact that it’s double across everyone in America is massive, and a bit mind blowing to me. The income gap is 3x if you get an advanced degree. That seems like a pretty good investment, doesn’t it?
Worrying about 15 years is short-sighted too, that’s not very long. If you pay it off in 15 years, and then you have 2x the income of someone who didn’t go to school, you’re 35 making great money and in a job with better prospects and mobility than if you didn’t have debt but took a job that didn’t require a degree. This is, of course, statistically speaking. Some people do manage to do very well without a degree, but it’s pretty important to understand that it’s not even close to the average outcome.
My personal experience with student debt was that it got me a job out of college that paid well enough that I paid off my student loans much faster than I’d anticipated. I thought it was going to be 10 years, but it was more like 3. (To be fair I didn’t borrow that much, and cost of college has been rising faster than inflation ever since I graduated.)
I don’t see a lot of reason not to invest in education. The fear that it might not pay off doesn’t (for me anyway) push back that much on the strength of the nationwide correlation between degrees and high income.
I’m a little sad about reducing it just to money too, education is an investment in other ways too. When done well, it can be time spent gaining knowledge, investigating history, helping people understand more of the context of what’s happening here and now. Education provides freedom to explore, both now while you’re studying, and in the future with your career. I don’t have a lot of belief in the idea that the opportunity cost is too high.
What other investment at that age has a better expected ROI?
The way the information is presented implies causation. Get a degree, earn twice as much.
There’s been a ton of study of the question of whether people succeed because of the skills they gained working on the degree versus the credentialism of just having a degree. The answer across many papers is that it’s a healthy mix of both, that there is a large component of causality (getting a degree leads to success) as well as a large component in the other direction (being smart & driven leads to getting a degree).
Do note that a wide swath of our economy is based on jobs that require a degree, and are not based on being “successful” with or without. It’s not a fair playing field where there’s equal opportunity to people without degrees. A big part of the income gap happens because our system is setup to reward degree earners, and so it’s guaranteed to be at least partly causal.
Also really important to pay more attention to what actually happens as opposed to what could happen theoretically. Yes people might succeed with or without degrees, but how often does that actually happen? There are some amazing and compelling anecdotes, but ignoring the stats is a bad idea if you’re trying to decide whether to go to college or not.
Look at patents in the US as an example of how people might succeed with or without a degree. There is no degree requirement and nothing stopping people from inventing without a higher education, nonetheless the overwhelming majority of patent holders have degrees, the majority are advanced degrees beyond bachelor.
https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/most_inventors_have_g...
I feel like the better measure would be comparing their productivity, rather than the base rate at which society, on average, appears to value degrees.
Productivity could be seen as the social return for a social (tax based) investment in education, and indeed we do measure things like GDP and compare nations on a global scale. In that sense, education appears to be a good investment socially. Countries that have high rates of education also have high GDP.
Aside from that, unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to measure “productivity”. You might want to take a stab at trying to define what that even means for people in various careers. It’s easy to measure the productivity of factory workers, but insanely hard to measure productivity for doctors or writers or advertisers or nearly any white collar job. Is productivity measured by how much output there is, regardless of quality? Is productivity measured by how much money exchanges hands? These things could be even worse than valuing education, no?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with requiring that a job applicant meet minimum standards, in fact most people are wildly in favor of requirements when it comes to, say, doctors & lawyers, not to mention our infrastructure designers and safety inspectors, etc.. It’s certainly within the purview of the employer to define those requirements, and okay for them to require some well rounded ness and non-vocational skills, right?
The selection effect has, like I mentioned earlier, been studied extensively, and many researchers have come to the conclusion that despite the credentialism, college degrees also do impart useful knowledge and skills on the degree holders, even when attempting to adjust for many possible confounding factors such as family income, family education, and the filtering weight of the credential system. It’s not that hard to accept that the majority of people who spend 4 or more years trying to learn actually do learn something and achieve some general skills, right?
It’s complicated, but I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing that society & business widely agree to allow the bachelor’s degree to represent a certain level of preparedness. Yes, it’s a wildly blunt measure, often inaccurate, and it may be commonly misinterpreted too, since we’re really talking about minimum standards, and not a measure of skill, but I see reasons why the state of things might have evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a first approximation.
I'm not assuming this. I have independent reason to consider universities to be corrupt, extractive institutions. This is downstream of their oligopolistic position wrt the labor market, but a hypothetical set of less-evil institutions than our current universities would still be an efficiency problem to be solved.
The early steps places like Google have taken towards accepting certification programs are an example of (attempting to) cleanly separate the value that a degree confers, without cutting off access to large swathes of the population or condemning them to mountains of debt.
Ie, there's a lot of signal in degrees, but there's a LOT of noise, and there's a massive amount of economic and moral value in finding better-quality signal.
> I see reasons why the state of things might have evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a first approximation
Yes, I hope this comment makes it clear that I'm not assuming that degrees are literally useless for hiring. But that is an extremely low bar, and I think it's similarly difficult to justify the claim that degrees are a remotely efficient bar for a big chunk of what they're currently used for.
I grew up rich enough that I was able to deeply enjoy four years of intellectual exploration and partying, but that's cold comfort for the people locked out from being a firefighter or starting medical school or a thousand other productive pursuits, because they couldn't surmount the barrier of an additional tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars that the inefficient degree requirement confers.
This isn't just theoretical: the choking-off of opportunity is IMO a massive tragedy relative to a world that was less enamored with the degree. That doesn't suggest we can simply burn the job market's credentialism down, but we can be clear-eyed about the current system's flaws and set our headings correctly for incremental change.
Thank you for providing measured, balanced, and considered explanations, expansions, and clarifications.
First rate.
From the article:
> [Article] These environmental factors could include changes in the education system and media environment, nutrition, reading less and being online more, Rogeberg said.
> [Article] The earlier rise in IQ scores follows the “Flynn effect,” a term for the long-term increase in intelligence levels that occurred during the 20th century, arguably the result of better access to education, according to Stuart Ritchie, a postdoctoral fellow in cognitive ageing at the University of Edinburgh whose research explores IQ scores and intelligence and who was not involved in the new study.
> [Article] Access to education is currently the most conclusive factor explaining disparities in intelligence, according to Ritchie. In a separate study that has not been released, he and his colleagues looked at existing research in an effort to demonstrate that staying in school longer directly equates to higher IQ scores.
> While I realize you’re talking about social investment here, the idea that TV and media are better investments of your time than earning a degree seems problematic at best. TV & media will, generally speaking, not help you get a better career, right?
I'm saying that higher education has never been a worse investment. Not that it's a bad investment. It's just higher risk and higher cost than ever.
> The Fed has published very recent stats in the US that people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income of people without a degree.
That's really tiny considering that it costs 4 years of income + potentially a huge amount of debt with serious compounding interest.
> That seems like a pretty good investment, doesn’t it?
It seems like it can be a fine investment for some people. If you're rich and won't take on debt it's a great investment.
I'd really like to see a breakdown by major and institution. I don't think going and getting just any 4 year degree is going to make you a success.
So don't. Read little bits here and there as you get a chance. I frequently read a few pages while I'm waiting for people to get ready, stuck in waiting rooms or sometimes in a slow moving queue.
Paperbacks travel just fine.
That's literally the opposite of what any empirical research on IQ shows.
I've seen many of the claim correlations of IQ with "success" like career trajectories, divorce rates, better health and longevity, etc.. However, I've yet to see any strong correlations. Does IQ have a correlation stronger than 0.5 with anything?
IIRC, I am pretty sure parental income, or lack thereof, is a better predictor of "success" than IQ.
My understanding is that IQ researchers invented a lot of the statistical techniques used across the social sciences today, and I think faired the "reproducibility crisis" fairly well. It's about as empirical as the social sciences get.
> I've seen many of the claim correlations of IQ with "success" like career trajectories, divorce rates, better health and longevity, etc.. However, I've yet to see any strong correlations. Does IQ have a correlation stronger than 0.5 with anything?
0.5 correlation is pretty big in the social sciences. I mean, think about: there are probably hundreds or thousands of factors that influence your life outcome. Much of the differences we see tends to come down to what researchers call "non-shared environment", which is just a fancy term for all the random stuff that happens in your life.
For a single factor to have such a large effect is pretty amazing.
> IIRC, I am pretty sure parental income, or lack thereof, is a better predictor of "success" than IQ.
A lot of which can be explained by the parents' IQ.
IQ doesn't explain everything, not by a long shot. It just explains more than any other single factor, and should generally be something researchers should control for whenever they attempt to measure some other phenomenon.
Reading books. So at Stanford nobody watched TV. I think later Netflix, a bit. The only time I knew a peer was watching television was some girls in my dorm getting together to watch Gossip Girl, and only that. Just that show. And it was a very abnormal thing, nobody else anything at all. Keep in mind you can play eg Super Smash Bros at the library, there's a video game section in the library and you can play video games if you want. You can try out new titles. I did that.
If you watch TV, you won't get into Stanford, basically.
The ideas and ideals of Asian academics produced very strong results, but were not unassailable. And in this case there was adherence to tradition, sticking to what works, so the ideas and ideals were similar to other East Asian cultures. So generalization was possible, at a first approximation.
Well there's differences but they are hidden from first view, so for instance there's differences in study habits between North and South Choson Korea, the North students were systematically were scored adversarially but passed the Confucian Exam all the more. Those Koreans from the North (especially in the most mountainous regions) were doing exactly what Asian students are doing now in American Universities: "the more you push us down, the stronger we'll be, and the more success we will attain, the tighter the quota the more we'll fuck the quota."
Same goes for Jews before the Holocaust. Hard, hardcore, especially with medical schools, I heard a story of Columbia (or NYU?) medical school refusing their own college valedictorian just because he was a Jew. Simple as that.
But then...it got watered down, unconstitutional, I don't know, things just ain't the same. Still work like fuck, but...just not the same desperation. The muse that helped me most.
The best muse.
Yes, I thought it was explicit in the conversation that we're talking about averages. The claim that spatial intelligence is European also doesn't mean an eg individual black person should feel disadvantaged in the realm of spatial intelligence.
So it sounds like these are things that make no money but Africans can be good at but that's just a glitch in the economy. For instance an American President really has to be very very frosty. 10 Hertz at least. In that capacity Barack Obama Jr. was among the best presidents, perhaps the best in clock speed. Yeah his policy persecuted me from the first month to the absolute end of his term, but I can still look at the bigger picture. Trump also, look at him in the Ali G show DVD, that's how frosty he is. Steve Jobs, and Ross Perot. Ross Perot outclocking Steve Jobs, Perot would have made a great president. I would say faster than Obama or Trump.
There's other forms of intelligence too. Like tied to the senses. Intuition. Having beautiful dreams, doesn't matter if they're forgotten when awaking. Autism obviously, but that's too easy. Mental retardation, in particular in how dead on it makes them on the straight and narrow, that's a priceless blessing.
Because the only real worth of a person is if they're good, and not bad. There is nothing else.
Intelligence is ability to build mental models that predict reality. If you see a lightning strike, build a correct mental model of it and use it to create electricity to power a light bulb - that's intelligence. But cracking a clever joke about the lightning strike that rhymes with something doesn't need intelligence - that's a purely mechanical skill.
Intuition is a very different quality. If intelligence lets you build a somewhat accurate map of reality, intuition is a bird's eye view of that reality.
All my money. I can only see it in the reflections off eyeballs. Not even in the mirror. It's a spectator of spectator sport.
Most politicians are exasperatingly dumb, most celebrities are witless mannequins and the richest man in the world is a simple minded moron that acts like a 16yo in the middle of a sugar rush. Don't blame the youth for not wanting to be "smart" when they can see that plenty of mediocre adult content creators can earn more in a week than your average office worker in a month and when their role models are dudes vlogging about getting rich gambling on JPG monkeys and shilling for crypto rug pulls.
You may also participate, if you choose.
This seems to be a sticking point among high achievers, but you really need to dial back any societal expectations you may have. You’re here for a short time, and you’re given the option of watching the spectacle at your leisure. Enjoy it while it lasts.
And the choice to "walk away from this as best as you can and go about your life on your own terms" is mainly a money issue and not one defined or solved by intelligence.
source: several relatives are members
To quote one of Jim Morrison's stage rants from one of the Doors live albums, "I'm just here to get my kicks in before the whole shithouse goes up flames"
You're right, but understand, it takes many intelligent people years to figure this out. It's such a brutal state of reality that many parents are loathe to explain it so clearly to their children.
In my opinion it is a shame that society is mostly driven by the dumber elements of our species. I know this is pie in the sky, but perhaps in the future when humans are multiplanetary, a group of above average intelligence could choose to colonize a planet and only admit those who are similarly above average intelligence. Would be an interesting experiment to see which planet has faster technological and societal progress over time.
The fact that you believe this only shows you to be gullible.
The fact that you choose to believe this only shows you how little you have been around them IRL. Keep finding solace inside your own narratives and consider yourself lucky, most of them are the dumbest bunch of crooks you could ever find.
Why? If someone rises to the top of a very competitive scene, what is more likely? Dumb luck? Or something else?
> They didn't rise to the top of a traditional competitive scene like a college exam or a race to a technology
Not every competitive scene is your preferred kind. The political scene is just as competitive, and I would imagine that it takes just as much work and skill to rise to the top there as in what I would assume to be your field. It might not be the skills you personally desire, but that does not make these people “dumb”, and anyone who believes this (as claimed by various propaganda) is being gullible and falling for simple lies created to make them feel good about themselves. It is often proclaimed, by feel-good rage-inducing propaganda from your own side, that your opposing side is stupid, or evil for its own sake. One should never fall for this; one should never assume or believe that your opposition is stupid or even evil. People have their own (albeit sometimes alien) motivations and skills, which will be hidden, either by the ones reporting it, or by the people themselves. But people aren’t, on the whole, stupid and malevolent, nor do those few who are rise to power.
Perhaps that is what psychometrics should truly be trying to quantify and people should truly strive for if they want to "succeed," but let's be honest. What is the point in knowing one's IQ score if you can't proclaim to others about how much smarter you are than them?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200421090556.h... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328781907_Are_incre...
There was so much more long form content. And instead of going online to bitch and moan about things, the only option was to speak, phone, or write each other.
I am often struck by watching media from prior decades. One much source are the presidential debates. There early ones and even as recent as Dole vs Clinton were educated, cordial, and calm, a far cry from the circus and superficial debates we have in the past few.
Where are the long form interviews or speeches? Were can I find speeches like those done by prior presidents, intellectuals, and activists? Is there anyone who comes close to someone like Martin Luther King, Jr.? One could argue that some of these historical figures are diamonds in the rough. Indeed, it is probably true. But one can question if our modern society allows a breeding ground for these people to thrive.
I think basically anything prior to the pervasiveness of the Internet was different. The promises of the Internet came true. It has connected us, in ways never thought possible, but it's connected the deepest of our primal emotions. We simply cannot ingest the amount of information we're bombarded with. It doesn't promote an environment for deep, considerate, and rational thought and discourse.
thinking outside the box is not easy in a society where thinking differently is not socially acceptable
In fact I don't agree with basically any of this analysis at all. Sort of the fundamental idea behind IQ is that it's innate, not acquired.
Further, the heritability of potential for high IQ isn't really in question. Put another way, it looks like environment can severely diminish the IQ of a potential high IQ child, but it can't probably can't severely raise the IQ of a child born to low IQ parents.
What is heritable is the potential. Environment determines, to an extent, how fulfilled that potential ends up being. This is why smart kids can study and increase their IQ test scores.
Perhaps my thinking is wrong or on the extreme end of the scale, but I would argue that we can extrapolate that environmental factors are a much more important factor than genetics considering various environment factors can affect genetics to certain degrees and your genes mean little to nothing in the worst environments -- only beneficial in the right environments.
Also, if you’re hanging out with people who talk about genetic IQ all the time you should really get a better hobby.
It has always been true in politics that loud and obnoxious narratives sometimes beat out more reasoned and better ideas. Studying history might interest you to see how bad this was a hundred or a thousand years ago. It is very important to stand back and notice that over time, the better ideas are actually winning. We no longer burn witches or drill holes in the skull to release evil spirits. We no longer believe the earth is flat or allow people to keep slaves. You can rest assured that eventually racism and sexism and wasting all the oil on earth to make a quick buck and other dumb things we’re doing today will go away, even if things seem to be getting worse at this very moment.
The sciences and the arts will continue to move forward like they have for millennia, and many people, both smart and not smart by IQ metrics, will contribute to progress. If you care about being an opinion that matters, consider getting involved.
As far as politicians go, please stop watching TV and start reading more of what the government actually publishes. Governments globally are granting trillions of dollars to fund good science and good art and good public works projects. The government is made of people and can be made better or worse by people. If you believe it’s hopeless and you allow it to be overrun by perceived grift, then that will continue to happen. If you take control and realize that the bad actually hasn’t infected everything and there are good people trying to help and that spending time working on it does make a difference, then your opinion and your effort can make a dent in the very problems you’re talking about.
Soon, people began to view the internet as a reality due to the rapid homogenization into 3-4 major websites which are controlled mostly by advertisers. But what I've noticed is that most of the opinions you read online aren't very honest.
Commenters on reddit will grift in the comment section for upvotes. Some commenters on HN will purposely avoid certain topics because their account is tied to their reputation in certain very partisan circles in California. Both of these examples are often the loudest and MOST SEEN (or unseen...) replies due to the low effort alignment with the popular opinion at the time.
Although the internet seems more real everyday, I truly believe it's never been further from reality. No one is truly able to say what they want due to the (seemingly) dire consequences of saying "F*ck it" and stating your true opinion (which isn't all the time, but the option no longer exists). And this even applies in the short term. If you aren't banned, you're downvoted (HN, reddit, Lobste.rs, every website with a comment section...) or filtered by an algorithm tuned to keep corporate sponsors and advertisers happy (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube).
Inb4 "If you have opinions that are reprehensible enough to need silenced, you aren't worth being heard" - Give me a break. No one is perfect. Not to put you on trial or put words in your mouth, I just wanted to include that bit.
> Who would struggle to be smart in a society that rewards idiocy and blind alignment to asinine political discourses
I agree with this to a point. A lot of this happens online first, and companies will do whatever they can to align themselves with what's popular online at the time. These companies align to whatever the most virtuous opinion is at the time. To touch on your original point, these few dozen companies can almost be viewed as a microcosm of society as a whole. None of their alignments are real. Maybe that's why you roll your eyes when a big company suddenly aligns to some virtuous "cause" very soon after a viral movement online?
>a society where the loudest opinion is the only one that matters
I agree, but only on the internet. Conversations in real life don't contain upvotes or retweets. Even if people seem to behave this way in real life, everyone has their own thoughts and opinions. This will always be true, because those thoughts and opinions are one of the few things that define a person.
> the richest man in the world is a simple minded moron that acts like a 16yo in the middle of a sugar rush
There seems to be a lack of self awareness in this statement... Do you really believe this? This isn't a snarky post at an attempt to seem condescending either - I'm genuinely interested.
> when they can see that plenty of mediocre adult content creators can earn more in a week than your average office worker in a month
Content creation is NOT easy. Have you ever tried to do it? I know it seems like I'm nitpicking your post, but you seem extremely jaded. If you made a strong effort to take an objective look at the world at large, I promise you would reconsider some of these claims. Or not. But what matters is that you are honest with yourself.
The joke is that of all sites, imageboards are probably the only places you'll see real stories called out as fake more than the other way around. Those are also the few places you can be about as real as legally possible, if you're willing to give up your sanity for it.
>I agree, but only on the internet. Conversations in real life don't contain upvotes or retweets
I believe GP is more alluding to how the world overvalues charisma, which is absolutely true. So much importance is put on presentation, social skills and the likes, it's hard to argue we're all saints willing to filter based on information alone. Even democratic voting has surprisingly many similarities to upvote culture, when you think about it.
If it was just conversations we'd have to care about, that'd be one thing. But in a way, this charisma requirement has seeped through the entirety of the world. Partially because even in real life, you're still competing with whatever is available in the other party's hand with a few swipes. Partially because the interconnectivity of today has absolutely exploded options, and humans are brutal enough to filter lesser options.
There is a logical evidence: those attracted to that area will invest more in it. Exercise of natural Intelligence also involves avoiding "early stopping": there a determined personality, facilitated by an interested personality, will push forward.
Maybe the ones in your country.
In other countries there's been plenty of politicians that had teaching positions in universities in their past, published in academic journals and so on... and yet know how to act stupid when useful.
Children make the selection. They have an impulse to inflict lasting psychological trauma on kids who are smarter than they are. Like bright feathers in the wrong forest, IQ is a detriment in an environment that's hostile to it.
Weird how that "simple minded moron that acts like a 16yo in the middle of a sugar rush" became the richest men in the world and revolutionized the rocket-launching and car industries. I wish I acted like that when I was a 16yo and had a sugar rush!
It didn't really evaporate, it's happening right now, except not in Norway.
> Similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia have demonstrated a similar downward trend in IQ scores
The hypothesis that people just don’t care and are therefore cheat themselves dumb would have data looking completely different. And unless your also arguing that this applies to absolutely everyone you would be seeing a bimodal distribution as a clear sign of this effect on the population intentionally scoring worse.
It might be hard to find numerical evidence for it, but many people will tell you that conscription in their country basically became a joke (if it existed at all) and you could wriggle out of it easily, or get an easy ride.
FWIW, I know people from all those countries who will verify this, plus South Korea and Israel, where it is not a small thing. I've heard of Isrealis even preparing themselves especially hard in order to do well on the conscription, something I'd never heard of since.
Another suggestion is that it has to do with the fact that this test is taken at a specific age. My very scientific hunch is that in the past few generations, adolescence was extended by decades, and the real problems in life started way later, while in 1975 people still married young
> What specific environmental factors cause changes in intelligence remains relatively unexplored.
What might these factors possibly be? Some candidates I am aware of, that are known to affect IQ: heavy metals in infant formula [1], increases in baseline CO2 levels [2], stress [3], deficiencies caused by soil depletion [4]. Leaded gasoline seems to have been ruled out by timing.
It's interesting to me that this started in 1975 and is observed across Europe. Do we know of any major changes in habits or industrial practices that started around that year?
[1] https://www.legalexaminer.com/home-family/baby-food-lawsuits...
[2] https://medium.com/wedonthavetime/co2-affects-our-thinking-9...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/31/science/study-ties-iq-sco...
[4] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...
Too bad the study did not also look at IQ differences between private/public schools over the same period. By private, I mean the schools that only the very rich can send their children too.
Also, I did read somewhere else, a study was also done on increased CO2 and intelligence and found higher CO2 could lower peoples intelligence level.
edit: Former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan endorses Kerr for state schools superintendent
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2021/...
GOP-backed candidate for schools chief says she’s a Democrat
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-wisconsin-elections-deb...
Nonetheless: scholarization is surely impactive but not necessitant on Intelligence.
>> What specific environmental factors cause changes in intelligence remains relatively unexplored.
If IQ tests don't accurately measure intelligence, what's the worth of discussing those environmental factors?
Does it matter that the test didn’t correlate to what we think of as intelligence? No, it’s not the point of the study, it’s just showing the tendencies of a measure that has scientific interest. The reason the measure has scientific interest is because of those correlations.
People get so insecure around the whole IQ test range. Imagine if someone had released a study showing humans were getting shorter over time and that environmental factors were to blame, and all the comments were from people arguing that “being short doesn’t make you less attractive! Being short doesn’t mean you can’t reach the top shelves, because you can just use a ladder! Height tests are bogus, I scored 5’3” in one, but I’m really good at basketball!” It’s silly and overshadows the really interesting scientific investigations that are possible because we have this great measure.
I'm not saying that.
I'm saying if you don't know what IQ tests measure, you don't know what the external factors are causing.
That could maybe indicate that lower percentile IQ are just as - or more – successful at leaving descendants nowadays than before.
If we consider the world spent half the century in large scale conflict, maybe that was an IQ “filter” (since, for example, academics wouldn’t be drafted to the front lines), but now humanity doesn’t face the same pressure?
> "It's not that dumb people are having more kids than smart people, to put it crudely. It's something to do with the environment, because we're seeing the same differences within families," he said.
But if that was to blame then we would likely already start seeing a recovery as it’s been banned everywhere.
The increase could be due to improved nutrition following WW 2, such as better access to food overall and the iodization of salt.
For the decline, my money is on PFAS (https://www.sixclasses.org/videos/PFAS) and organohalogens more generally. Iodine is also a halogen, and all the other halogenated compounds we are pumping in the environment could interfere with iodine metabolism. These compounds are in nearly everything, and we're using ever larger quantities of them.
There is evidence this affects fetal development and cognitive functioning years later (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2799472/), which is also why jurisdictions are banning flame retardants (https://www.tuvsud.com/en/e-ssentials-newsletter/consumer-pr... https://www.sixclasses.org/videos/flame-retardants )
All textiles break and release fibres, and we inevitably end up eating them.
And if you are cooking with a non-stick pan, it is a guarantee that you are ingesting them. It doesn't have to be the PTFE itself, the emulsifiers (such as PFOA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid) are more volatile and have been measured in food cooked with non-stick pans.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6380916/
> There really is a very minimal amount of residual PFOA or other perfluorinated chemicals in the nonstick pans — like, you know, thousands of folds lower than what is observed in the water or food. -- Dr. Mimi Huang, NIH
The article didn't link data so I can't dig in further.
https://personalityanalysistest.com/iq-score/what-is-the-sta...
So many variables here including way the math portion was measured moving to multiple choice in the 1990s when the scores start dropping, hopping on a flight, still skeptical.
Other quick one, all 95% confidence interval on data that moves less than +/- 2.5% either way. I understand confidence interval isn't a straight linear margin of error, it one I'd want to also look at further.
> But more research is needed to better understand other environmental factors thought to be linked to intelligence. Robin Morris, a professor of psychology at Kings College in London who was not involved in Ritchie’s research, suggests that traditional measures of intelligence, such as the IQ test, might be outmoded in today’s fast-paced world of constant technological change.
> “In my view, we need to recognize that as time changes and people are exposed to different intellectual experiences, such as changes in the use of technology, for example social media, the way intelligence is expressed also changes. Educational methods need to adapt to such changes,” Morris said.
IQ tests measure relative to a reference population. So we can speak of the IQ of a person aged 20 born in 1990 on a test where 100 is the average score at age 20 of the population of those born in 1960, etcetera.
Changes in average IQ has been something that has been spoken of in the literature since Flynn was young, back when IQ scores were rising.
So now we need to be really careful about bias in the sample groups.
To say IQ scores are dropping and we don't know why then means to me we don't know what variables were the key drivers of the first groups results so we therefore cannot possibly create a consistent second group to measure against the baseline.
I'm still stuck but I'm often dense and skeptical on these type of analysis.
This is why there are practices around statistics sampling and confidence intervals and whatnot. Of course we can’t exactly recreate, that’s impossible, but we can create samples in a way that the results are generalizable in both the baseline and the comparison. And the results are useful.
I have a friend who says that it’s impossible to know if we can’t sample 100% (“how can we know how it will work in 100 million if we only test in 1000?”) and it’s frustrating how just basic concepts of math and statistics make it hard for them to accept any research.
Another source is the number of clinical cases of mild mental retardation. This will mostly depend on how large the population subgroups with lowest IQ are, but if they are approximately fixed and there's no explosion in assortative mating it would be possible to calculate the true mean from that.
This assumes both classification criteria and testing rates remain constant over time. Both are poor assumptions.
It’s easy to see how such a system can be used to measure a decrease or increase of height over time, even though your normalizing your reporting and even though the markings are irregular.
If you start digging around to see that you're fairly comparing the groups then you'll almost always be able to split hairs. Most statistics outside of a theoretical context are flawed if you poke them hard enough.
Given fertility is negatively correlated with intelligence, and how hereditary IQ is, it's just a matter of time until IQ declines.
This is not so shocking, how many kids does your typical college professor have before 35, is it 0 or 1?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
You're right, who's smarter? The people who manage to reproduce thus pass on their genes or the ones that are "too smart" not to?
- IQ is not as strongly correlated to parents as believed
- IQ is not negatively correlated with fertility
When an article says "we've found evidence against current accepted knowledge" it is not a counter argument to say "Current accepted knowledge says otherwise, therefore you are wrong!"
But we do need better access to the numbers behind both sides in order to participate in the discussion.
> The research suggests that genes aren’t what’s driving the decline in IQ scores, according to the study, published Monday.
> The causes in IQ increases over time and now the decline is due to environmental factors
> It’s not that dumb people are having more kids than smart people, to put it crudely. It’s something to do with the environment, because we’re seeing the same differences within families
But I agree we need numbers, which was the most important thing the article could've provided.
You gain static intelligence (what you’ve learned) using fluid intelligence (IQ). But learning new things quickly relies on a large body of knowledge to draw from.
Lots of poor people denigrate education. “Street Smart” is considered the only useful knowledge. Lots of these parents literally don’t care if their kids fail out of school (after all, they did too and are “just fine”). These kids never build up that critical knowledge early which nullifies their IQ for life.
Bad diet, abuse, crime, high stress, being raised by a single mother, etc also affect IQ. All these things are pervasive in most poor neighborhoods.
Parents don’t affect initial intelligence as much, but they certainly affect whether that intelligence is squandered.
And while IQ is not too much related to education, we let kids do what ever, when ever for a so call peace of mind, so yeah a kid who is never challenged can't have broad skills. I would dare to say that video games are saving IQ scores but for all the wrong reasons (fast pattern recognition and spacial movement related tests).
So in my mind it's a welcome change.
Statements like this have always made me question these tests. Ten points in IQ represents a movement of one standard deviation in intelligence. To believe the quote above would mean that there was a massive increase in intelligence between the 1960's and the 1990's. But an increase of one standard deviation across any trait at a population level is very very unusual, and likely would have been noticed long before any studies were conducted.
Put another way, do we really believe that someone with slightly below average intelligence in 1962, say an IQ of 85, is the intellectual equivalent of someone with a significantly below average IQ (e.g. 75) in 1990? An IQ of 75 typically means you're not in public school or if you are, you're in Special Ed.
(1) Physical fitness. These same years have seen the explosive growth of obesity and related lifestyle diseases. A greater percentage of people in first world countries (and increasingly elsewhere) are either obese or overweight. I recall reading that one way to keep your mind sharp is to be physically fit (cf: "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain" by Ratey and Hagerman). The corollary could be that if you are not physically fit, your IQ will suffer.
(2) Pollution. Air pollution has been shown to affect IQ scores (https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/air-pollution-li...). It could be that greater pollution has been causing lower IQ scores.
(3) Sleep. I recall reading that people get lesser high quality sleep than they used to. It has very clearly become easier to stay up late today. Poor sleep is really bad for you for a number of reasons, including your cognitive performance and brain health.
A phone is what you make of it.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/intention-stop-min...
I absolutely feel that I’ve gotten dumber in the last fifteen years.
I suspect it leaves the guts in place, as Safari is used by the OS, but it should remove the ability to use it as an app.
No idea about android.
One thing, "to each its own", but I would like to /have/ a web browser on my mobile OS devices: no browser I know does text reflow since very many years, which implies, "there is no browser". Maybe you should really assess the quality of your practices: awareness (of the absurdities) will have you manage your actions differently and accordingly.
> Norwegian researchers analyzed the IQ scores of Norwegian men born between 1962 and 1991 and found that scores increased by almost 3 percentage points each decade for those born between 1962 to 1975 – but then saw a steady decline among those born after 1975.
> Similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia have demonstrated a similar downward trend in IQ scores, said Ole Rogeberg, a senior research fellow at the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Norway and co-author of the new study.
its that or there is some common particle that is slowly making us dumb (like lead couple decades ago) and we haven't discovered it yet.
I can think of a multitude of reasons younger siblings should, on average, have a lower IQ than their older brothers. Could this independently account for the 'decline' that researchers are measuring?
Leaded gas wiped nearly 10 IQ points off of everyone and is still used in general aviation.
I'm not saying leaded avgas is good by any means, but I would very, very much like to see some actual quantification of its effects before we all decide it's some kind of global catastrophe on par with having an active nuclear meltdown in every living room on Earth.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/oh6115/perf...
At the least I’d like to see something like an instrumental variables analysis.
Education absolutely increases IQ test scores but wether its an increase in intelligence itself whatever that may be is questionable.
There is some alignment between IQ tests and academic work; an academic background gives you a few tricks for solving those kinds of problems.
It's also not just the case that the "bottom is being raised", but also that the whole distribution was shifting.
I think these kinds of things make it unlikely education is explaining at least the rise part of the curve. To the extent the fall is in a subset of these types of measures of settings it also might not be (but it could be).
The more recent decline has been less well-documented although there are multiple studies using multiple measures that have shown this, so I believe it is a trend at least in some regions of the world (developed, western). I have a fuzzy memory that the decline is stronger with verbal measures (as opposed to nonverbal) but I might be misremembering that.
Education is strongly related to IQ/g/general cognitive ability but they're not perfectly correlated. I think when I looked this up a week ago or so, the best estimates were like 0.50 in a general population sample.
Clinically a discrepancy between IQ and educational achievement is important, as it points to someone not getting resources they need etc.
So yes, they're related, and yes, education could explain general population trends over time, but no they're not the same.
"I'm not sure what an I.Q. is. Dr. Nemur said it was something that measured how intelligent you were--like a scale in the drugstore weighs pounds. But Dr. Strauss had a big argument with him and said an I.Q. didn't weigh intelligence at all. He said an I.Q. showed how much intelligence you could get, like the numbers on the outside of a measuring cup. You still had to fill the cup up with stuff."
Maybe that stuff is education.
We're actually breeding for stupidity.
...or maybe, it just improves your test-taking ability?
The one thing that stands out is that the sample population comes from Norwegian Military conscripts. Since the end of the Cold War militaries have contracted across NATO and Western Europe. I would be curious anyone from Norway could comment on whether there might be a fundamental shift in the data. If a lot of smart kids avoid conscription by going to University somewhere then the results of these tests ought to trend downwards.
The thing is though, it's not taken terribly seriously anymore, and this has probably been a trend since the cold war ended. If you want to avoid getting called up, just about any excuse will do just fine, there's no shame in it at all.
My guess is the people who want to avoid it are the kinds of kids who would rather go and study than run around a field at night. Those kids will also tend to have the higher IQs, which will thus vanish from the test set.
> The study not only showed IQ variance between children the same parents, but because the authors had the IQ scores of various parents, it demonstrated that parents with higher IQs tended to have more kids, ruling out the dysgenic fertility theory as a driver of falling IQ scores and highlighting the role of environmental factors instead.
People pick up on the discrepancies, and overstating our confidence early makes it look really bad when it turns out that the results were incorrect.
The Covid pandemic is a great example of this, a lot of extremely sketchy and highly preliminary studies were misrepresented as certainties. It takes many months to produce a solid scientific study, sometimes even years. Yet here we were, a month into the pandemic inundated in studies that simply could not be solid. But they sounded scary, so they made the news. This created the appearance that science kept contradicting itself. One week the virus had a 40% mortality rate, and then next it had 0.1%. What gives, science?
The basic posture of science is "I don't know". If you gloss over that fact because it's scary when science doesn't have answers yet, then what you are communicating isn't science, it's something else, speculation, the party line, I dunno.
Overall the fundamental problem is a basic lack of faith in grown adults to make their own judgements, and a willingness to simplify the message so much that it no longer is good science. If you don't let people be adults, they will be children instead. That is exactly where we are right now.
Were they? I thought they were being represented as the best current understanding, and it was a given that it was a new disease.
Oh, that's nothing. You should have seen the post-WWII era, when the backlash against Science was rooted about efficient new ways of killing people and destroying the environment (both with and without the atomic bomb), and against authoritarians touting Progress while demanding the regimentation of society and destruction of traditional values and ways of life.
Excessive optimism toward science has had fairly detrimental results in the past. Often the problem isn't science itself though.
A trap is that you can't actually derive values from science, because it doesn't provide any -- whatever values you extract from science are those you put in yourself through hidden assumptions. That makes it very easy to lean on science to ostensibly support almost any action through some line of reasoning like "Science shows that if we kill the poor, we'll be able to reduce taxes by 90%. Therefore we should get our guns!" Science doesn't care if our taxes are high or low, it doesn't care if we live or die. Even if the premise about taxes is scientifically correct (I don't know), the conclusion isn't based on science alone.
That's a bit of a parallel to the discussion of lockdowns and masks and so on, while science may be able to answer what effects these have, science can't say we ought to do these things. That requires something else to be added, although sadly the discussion has almost entirely been about what the science says about these things, not the relative worth of saving lives versus individual freedom vs GDP, which is the real discussion.
That sounds weird. Doesn't that mean they're "measuring intelligence" wrongly, as plenty of people without extensive formal education are extremely intelligent?
eg those same people getting further formal education may indeed score higher on these IQ tests, but the education is in no way changing the persons IQ
The farmer with rich soil has the opportunity to out-produce the other one, but only if he works the land. And the harder he works it, the more productive he will be (up to a point).
Or think of top athletes. Only a few people have the inborn talent to become Olympic champions. But no one becomes an Olympic champion unless they work hard—no matter how talented.
Heritable intelligence is best thought of as a potential. Education can increase a person’s IQ scores for the same reason that working out can increase a person’s athletic performance.
We don’t have a way to directly measure inherited potential in people; we can only measure what they do. Even an IQ test is based on what people do as they take the test.
But also the idea that intelligence is fixed at birth does not align with what we know about brain development. We know the brain develops through early adulthood, and that different life experiences result in physically different brains. While inheritance may put a top-end limit on how intelligent someone can become, it does not necessarily fix intelligence precisely on the IQ scale at birth.
That's is. If we teach from the early childhood we nourish intelligence, if not we nurtured stupidity. The rest might matter to a certain extent but it's mostly background noise.
> “The main exciting finding isn’t that there was a decline in IQ,” Ritchie said. “The interesting thing about this paper is that they were able to show a difference in IQ scores within the same families.”
The study focuses on “two brothers” cohorts and makes the claim that iqs within families are on the decline, but fails to adjust for confounding factors, like the selection bias inherent in their cohort selection process.
Other studies show that first borns have a higher iq than later siblings, and to a greater extent than what this study found!
Iq isn’t boosted by higher education. This isn’t up for debate. Outside of malnourishment and sensory deprivation it it mostly heritable.
And it turns out that IQ mean quite a lot, no matter which way you believe the causality goes.
The fact that IQ test scores are somewhat useful as a ranking mechanism amongst a cohort is completely consistent with it being just being a collection of standardised tests calibrated to score in a particular way, not an actual "thing" where apparent subtle generational changes might represent genuine changes to our physiology or intellectual potential and not just inconsequential differences in our preparedness to solve paper puzzles.
Sure, except it strongly correlates with pretty much every single measure of fluid intelligence you can think of. And with a billion real life outcomes, besides.
It just so happens that the best statistical distillation of intelligence measures happens to take the form of "paper puzzles". We can, I guess, do a 12 hour barrage of 50 different intelligence tests, but what's the point, when one does the job.
>So two hypotheses
There are plenty of other hypotheses.
Sure, test scores correlate with other test scores (surprisingly badly) which correlate with other proxy measures of intelligence. Quelle surprise!
There's a massive difference between acknowledging a test is somewhat useful in ranking peers and agonising over whether one cohort getting scores in a particular test a couple of points lower than another cohort from a completely different background represents some real world shortcoming of the latter cohort in anything other than that particular set of puzzles. The research establishing a lack of support for supposed "dysgenic" trends (though absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence) because the drop happens within families might be superficially interesting, but we're looking at tiny points of difference in a noisy series. There's typically more variation between Weschler and Raven tests adminstered to the same individuals than the measured generational "IQ decline" the headline is encouraging us to agonise over. When all the points of data other than IQ tests suggest that subsequent generations haven't struggled intellectually compared with their forebears, there's not much reason to suspect the trends in paper puzzle scores are a signal and not just noise.
> TruTV’s Adam Ruins Everything is known for debunking accepted wisdom. It took less than two minutes to demolish IQ tests:
Quote: https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/charles-darwin-sp...
Video: https://youtu.be/W3oUqKUx2o0
Depends on what your starting premise is. If you start out with a strawman like "IQ fully captures a person's intelligence", then yeah it's "BS". At the same time, if you're arguing that IQ tests are "BS" (ie. no value whatsoever), then that's also false, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_c...
Perhaps specific areas could be tested, such as memory - but even with such a basic concept, we know that the ability to memorize a long string of numbers is a highly trainable skill. If we go to 'higher level' mental processes, such as pattern recognition, symbolic interpretation, analytical capabilities (i.e. higher maths), and creative capabilities (inventiveness), again we see that these abilities are highly trainable.
The only real way to sort this out would be to apply the same educational program to a large cohort of individuals, over the course of at least a year, involving intensive one-on-one tutoring, and administer the prospective IQ test both before and after this process takes place. This has come up before and such a study has never been done to my knowledge, nor has anyone ever pointed one out.
Maybe in the early 1900s, but not today.
> As many note, the ability to do well on these tests is greatly increased by practice, as with most testing procedures. The notion that an IQ test is a standalone measure of innate intelligence is not well supported.
Then everyone would score 200+.
> If we go to 'higher level' mental processes, such as pattern recognition, symbolic interpretation, analytical capabilities (i.e. higher maths), and creative capabilities (inventiveness), again we see that these abilities are highly trainable.
Yes. Nutrition, education, etc can help you reach your potential. But there seems to be a natural limit. Not only that, some have a natural talent for it and people have different levels of potential.
If you believe what you believe, then why haven't you used your revolutionary knowledge to increase the IQs of people with downs syndrome. All it takes is training right?
Then, I would probably create a startup that would offer the same service to the children of wealthy families who wanted their child to be intellectually gifted. With an annual tuition of $10,000 over 10 years, their child could be catapulted for life into the top levels of life outcomes and live as part of the elite class in America. Enrolling a mere 1,000 students (200 in East bay, 200 south bay, 200 SF, 400 in Northeast) would net a revenue of 100 million dollars.
Wait a second, maybe I'm onto something here...
Is there a method to dumb yourself down? asking for my smart friends
Not surprising that they succeeded doing that.
So I can't really take into high consideration inference based on average IQ test results. It could also mean that people are becoming intelligent in stuff not measured by the test. I really don't know.
Another point to consider: even if we had the perfect way to measure intelligence, so what? Why waste an intelligent person time doing a test about intelligence? What does this accomplish?
A lot of people want to keep the hyper-intelligent in the same classrooms as the normally-intelligent students as a form of child labor almost. The idea being that the hyper-intelligent children could inspire and help the normally-intelligent.
I always like to ask if they would also be amenable to allowing those students with intellectual disabilities in the general classrooms. And the answer is always no, because those students would slow down the classroom. And I ask why can't the normally-intelligent inspire and help the intellectually disabled. And they still don't get it.
The distance between the hyper-intelligent and the normally-intelligent is the same as that between the normally-intelligent and intellectually disabled. Any help the normally-intelligent may receive is undercut by the harm done to the hyper-intelligent.
They need special resources just as the other side of the spectrum does. But they often get less. And we often have to stretch the definition because while one intellectually disabled child would be enough to allocate resources for special instruction, you need at least 5 to 10 hyper-intelligent children before you're allowed to split them off for special instruction.
Intelligence is a trait, just like height. Some people are tall, some short, some average.
And to measure height only takes a meter. Pretty straightforward and without biases. The creator of IQ tests seemed to have doubts about the validity of the test, so... (validity, not its reliability)
You do understand how the special education system works, right? They specifically place kids in the programs because those kids need the resources. It is not rare at all. Because we explicitly do it. In nearly every school district in America, you will find teachers who are specifically there to service special education children.
Book III of Odes, Horace circa 20 BC
“Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased … The ordinary spoken language has also steadily coarsened. People used to say ‘raise the carriage shafts’ or ‘trim the lamp wick,’ but people today say ‘raise it’ or ‘trim it.’ When they should say, ‘Let the men of the palace staff stand forth!’ they say, ‘Torches! Let’s have some light!’”
Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness), Yoshida Kenkō 1330 – 1332
Sounds legit.
If the number doesnt have any rigorous meaning then who cares if it changes, up or down, could mean anything.
I concede most people don't actively train for IQ tests, especially not people who only have to do it once. But one can't exactly claim "IQ tests are flawless measures of IQ" when they can be trained and gamed, which is the point.
This is false. Look a this reddit post[1] for a summary of the scientific consensus.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/oh6115/perf...
The reddit post just shows that some (maybe even a majority of) psychologists accept IQ. I could post an equal amount of links to psychology studies rejecting it. But that doesn't even matter. What's more important is that the field of psychology as a whole is still in it's infancy as a science. Up until about the 90's almost 100% of it was pure bunk. Psychologists were using the DSM up until only a couple of years ago! Recently there has been the revelation of the reproducibility crisis. In short, psychology has a long way to go before it's on the same level as other sciences, I wouldn't be so certain of something from psychology's dark past like IQ.