IQ scores in the US have fallen for the first time in decades | Hacker News Reader

IQ scores in the US have fallen for the first time in decades

nypost.com

19 pointsxqcgrek226 comments

Or we can discuss whether IQ is relevant at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20555229

Maybe there is some deep reason, but you also can't expect an increase forever.

I disagree that you can't expect it to increase forever (it's like saying you can't expect evolution to go on forever), but why would you expect IQ to decrease rather than plateau?

A movie was filmed to answer your question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

A comedy, but based in fact - e.g. educational attainment is inversely correlated with fertility. For a less individual view, you can visit Wikipedia's list of countries by fertility rate, and sort them by said rate.

There are no grounds to argue that there are distinct subpopulations of people with different potentials for intelligence. Genes flow fluidly — if you sneer at the underclass and think your line is superior, I suspect you won't have to go back very many generations to find your stock comes out of that same seething mob. Do you have any Irish, or Jewish, or Italian, or Native American, or Asian, or whatever (literally—it's hard to find any ethnic origin that wasn't despised at some time) in your ancestry? Go back a hundred years or so, and your great- or great-great-grandparents were regarded as apes or subhumans or mentally deficient lackeys suitable only for menial labor.

Are you staring aghast at the latest cluster of immigrants in this country, are you fretting that they're breeding like rabbits? That generation of children will be the people your kids grow up with, go to school with, date, and marry. It may take a while, but eventually, your line will merge with theirs. Presuming you propagate at all, your genes are destined to disperse into that great living pool of humanity. Get used to it.

Furthermore, intelligence is an incredibly plastic property of the brain. You can nurture it or you can squelch it — the marching morons will birth children with as much potential as a pair of science-fiction geeks, and all that will matter is how well that mind is encouraged to grow. Even a few centuries is not enough to breed stupidity into a natural population of humans — that brain power may lay fallow and undernourished, but there isn't enough time nor enough pressure to make substantial changes in the overall genetics of the brain.

-- https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/05/08/there-are-no-...

> Furthermore, intelligence is an incredibly plastic property of the brain. You can nurture it or you can squelch it

As a parent, I grapple with this often. I want to believe that I can influence my child's intelligence. But there are some studies on same-age unrelated siblings in the same household that show IQ has a very weak correlation compared to biologically related siblings in the same household: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-06271-015

> Are you staring aghast at the latest cluster of immigrants in this country, are you fretting that they're breeding like rabbits? That generation of children will be the people your kids grow up with, go to school with, date, and marry. It may take a while, but eventually, your line will merge with theirs. Presuming you propagate at all, your genes are destined to disperse into that great living pool of humanity. Get used to it.

This is so bigoted.

Only if you're actually staring aghast.

TBH it's so mocking bigots - but laying it on so thick the mocking is easily overlooked.

The link There are no marching morons is worth a gander.

I wasn’t clear. Yes that’s what I meant for people staring aghast. I believe the only division that matters between people is material or class division.

Interracial marriage is "bigoted"? I thought I had seen everything here, but I never thought I'd see an outright racist call someone "bigoted" for supporting interracial marriage.

Sorry I wasn’t clear. I believe the only division that matters between people is our material differences. Class division.

Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80% - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

Please don't spread the great replacement conspiracy theory.

> There are no grounds to argue that there are distinct subpopulations of people with different potentials for intelligence. Genes flow fluidly

I don't see why we need to talk about "distinct subpopulations" at all, when individuals suffice. Besides, if you think "gene flow" means intelligence is immune to evolution, doesn't that apply to every other trait as well? What you're arguing is that evolution doesn't happen.

He's literally describing what the believers of that dumb "theory" believe; he isn't "spreading it".

Do you also accuse the Wikipedia page documenting Eugenics of supporting it?

what? did you even read the article?

as for the twin experiment, he's not talking about heredity of iq, he's talking about heredity of perceived/expressed iq. there's an important difference that gets lost in the noise.

> did you even read the article?

I did. It's using a lot of words to obfuscate its central thesis: That even if you select against a trait, that trait won't diminish. It may as well be arguing that antibiotic resistance cannot develop, or that corn can't be selectively bred to increase yield.

It's sad that even 163 years after On the Origin of Species, people are still trying to deny it.

The first few minutes is documentary.

Also:

* Life expectancy has been dropping, beginning from before the pandemic. When I read about it before the pandemic, the US was the only wealthy country with this problem, and was dropping into the range of 'middle income' countries like Poland.

* Height (i.e., how tall you are) has also been delcining.

It turns out that if you don't provide social programs like health care, food, etc., people are less healthy.

It turns out if you use human beings as livestock to get rid of heavily subsidized grain under the guise of "national security" people get more unhealthy too.

We pretty much subsidize an unhealthy population while underfunding care.

This is where everyone has to pretend this has nothing to do with immigration. It must be social media or maybe we don’t pay teachers enough…

How would that work? When scores were good it definitely wasn’t immigrants but now it’s falling it definitely is?

For what it’s worth, here is a graph of immigrant population over time.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...

Would you be surprised to learn that states with high immigration have a lower average IQ than states with lower immigration? Do you think California has always been ranked 47/50 in average IQ?

Here is some government data: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8954344/

Are all immigrant populations interchangeable?

I’m assuming you’re implying this has to do with immigration. Care to elaborate and/or back it up with citations?

You mean we didn’t accept enough smart immigrants bc covid and idiotic uscis roadblocks right?

Someone has to say it.

Personally I'm blaming Trumpers and loco god-botherers. Same is happening with "Tories" in the UK. We're all doomed anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com