Online tests suggest IQ scores in US dropped for first time in nearly a century

It's renormalized every so often because the average has been going up for decades.

Yes, but the authors of this paper hold the test constant, so if people get smarter, it’ll show IQ rising

Yes, I knew those kids and there was very little that could have helped them other than more parental care and involvement in their academics. They wore it as a badge because it's the only badge they could wear. For those[1] you cut your losses but one should be careful to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.

[1] For these kids a "Gymnasium/Hauptschule" system might help them where kids who obviously don't have the aptitude to learn, can be productively diverted into vocational schools as, in practice, by fits and starts that's where they end up, if they avoid drifting into crime. Most I knew were able to avoid crime that landed you in jail, but some succumbed to it.

This trend has been going on for a while. Here are some snippets, some about personal experiences and others about the shortage of qualified teachers (obviously this leads to teachers not even knowing anything beyond what is presented in the textbook). Another major problem is violence permeating into schools which disturbs academics outside the school and within.

Also, this is not unique to the US. Other countries are also seeing an incursion of "achievement stickers" for everyone in lieu of academics.

http://www.csun.edu/~ar8361/paper1.html

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2022/...

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-us-broken-education-...

https://www.studentachievement.org/wp-content/uploads/Rigor_...

The researchers behind one of the Norwegian studies have made some very weird arguments in public statements that aren't part of their research.

They said that the drops in IQ are not explainable by immigration, but this is something that is only the case in their own study in Norway where the IQ drop was something like 1-1.2 points per decade, while the countries with big drops-- France and the UK have drops that are about 3.2-4.3 times higher.

Here's an article about it, for those interested: https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores-falling-in-worrying-r...

They try to end the article with some feel-good hand-waiving, but so many things have changed since the mid 1970s, that it feels ridiculous to use lack of formal reasoning as an excuse. Since there's no data on it, nor on "fluid intelligence", there's no reason to assume later generations have more or less of either. If they do lack "crystallized intelligence", they did indeed become dumber.

You will do well to remember the racist history of IW tests. Maybe we should be celebrating that scores are going down on what is essentially a racist test.

> Of course, historically, we see that the rich and educated upper echelons of society have apparently always struggled with fertility

They still had plenty of kids, and their kids didn't suffer from early deaths nearly as much as among the poor.

>historically, we see that the rich and educated upper echelons of society have apparently always struggled with fertility

Do you have a source for this? I've read that it was the opposite until the 19th century. (Supposedly the source for this claim is "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World".)

>Of course, historically, we see that the rich and educated upper echelons of society have apparently always struggled with fertility.

This is exactly backwards; in the medieval and early modern era the wealthy had many more surviving kids than the poor. This has been established by birth and marriage records. The reason is because in these eras, physical survival was a challenge, and contraceptives did not exist, so the wealthy were the ones who could afford to keep their kids alive and healthy in large numbers.

This is part of why there was so much competition among siblings for the titles and positions of their parents; there was never enough to go around so the life of each person was a constant struggle against the overall flow of downward mobility.

Yeah I've seen it in the US too (non-iodized salt being "better").

I'm not celiac but allergic to wheat, and it's kind of annoying when I look for a gluten free option (because it's more familiar than wheat free, and generally equivalent) how quickly other people will jump to follow my "example" as if I've played some kind of moral trump card. But at least in that case it's leading to a wider variety of grain choices without many negatives I know of. In the case of milk and salt it's often blindly reducing the nutritional value.

Yes, the point isn't just that fewer people cook at home but that people who do cook at home more frequently use non-idiodinised salt because idionised salt is the most boring and conventional option and home cooking has moved from a chore to a recreational activity. So you have people going to restaurants, which often don't use idionised salt; people eating prepared meals, which often don't contain extra iodine; and people cooking at home, who use artisinal pink Hamalayan sea salt or similar fancy salts which naturally don't contain the added iodine.

Growing up I always wondered why there was "iodinised" table salt and other salt and why we had "iodinised" salt. Only knowing that some people in my extended family couldn't have iodine and seeing that more expensive salts don't contain iodine, my impression was always that iodinised salt was somehow cheaper and worse quality. I think a lot of people feel the same way about gluten or lactose, especially when they hear about people reacting badly to it. After all if it hurts some people, it must be unhealthy, right? Nevermind that gluten is literally just wheat protein and they had no issue eating a whole plate of seitan "chicken", which is literally almost pure gluten.

"Psychometrics is a soft science with serious replication problems except for IQ which is as hard as physics and reliable enough to be used to stereotype large groups of people and draw broad sweeping conclusions about politics, ethics, and sociology." - The IQ crowd

Some previous discussion on HN. All who mentioned some Norwegian study from 1950 were voted to oblivion.

It is not.

"Comparing brain volume before and after individuals were exposed to SARS-CoV-2, this study documents significant cortical gray matter loss, equivalent to nearly 10 years of aging." [1]