Americans’ IQ scores are lower in some areas, higher in one
news.northwestern.edu
news.northwestern.edu
American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the 'Reverse Flynn effect' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511744 - April 2023 (456 comments)
(I think all of this is really silly, and put very little credence in IQ tests as an instrument, or lean on the Flynn effect as anything but a sort of interesting metaphor for progress in the 20th century)
Others put very high credence in the decline they see around them (cultural, educational, attitudinal), and in other information such as the different articles noting doubling of dementia and cognitive issues in a few handful of years in several territories.
Interviewing for a Swedish fintech, they had me do an online IQ test in front of a webcam proctor before they would send me the take home assignment. I passed the IQ test with max score but didn't get the job.
What was the point of the IQ test? Why not just send people the take home assignment directly? Surely if they can do the takehome they have a great IQ to begin with. Is the IQ test some Big-tech fetish? A fintech fetish? A Swedish hiring fetish?
The lengthy IQ test felt completely shoehorned in the recruiting process and was a massive waste of time, and told my friends to not bother applying for jobs there.
Anecdotal evidence: me. Can reliably get high scores in IQ tests. Trained to pass IQ tests as a child. Regularly questions the validity of IQ in internet comments.
Update: ...Now waiting for the sniper of the day to find the light and express itself. Edit: Oh, I see: you probably wanted me to write "i∉G ∧ Q(i)". But actually it works for any property P: the fact is, the i is not part of the group...
Second logic confusion in this tree...
found em
Surely they reveal some traits. Issue is, they do not reveal other traits which are relevant to the whole "intention".
> The upshot of this research is that work sample tests (e.g., seeing if people can actually do key elements of a job -- if a secretary can type or a programmer can write code ), general mental ability (IQ and related tests), and structured interviews had the highest validity of all methods examined (Arun, thanks for the corrections). As Arun also suggests, Schmidt and Hunter point out that three combinations of methods that were the most powerful predictors of job performance were GMA plus a work sample test (in other words, hiring someone smart and seeing if they could do the work), GMA plus an integrity test, and GMA plus a structured interview (but note that unstructured interviews, the way they are usually done, are weaker).
> Note that this information about combinations is probably more important than the pure rank ordering, as it shows what blend of methods works best, but here is also the rank order of the 19 predictors examined, rank ordered by the validity coefficient, an indicator of how strongly the individual method is linked to performance:
> 1. Work sample tests (.54)
> 2. GMA tests ..."General mental ability" (.51)
> 3. Employment interviews -- structured (.51)
> ...
This is a summary of the peer reviewed article "The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings."[2]
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[1] https://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-ta...
("Emotional Intelligence", "Focus"¹, grit...)
[¹Capitalized as they are also book titles]
Children with problems almost always have much lower IQ. 50-70 for the most troublesome. There is a long process of testing to get them help / in a place where they are not injuring themselves, her, and or other students.
Not all, but many of the parents in complete denial about the reality of the situation.
They gave us something similar to an IQ test - some logic, some reasoning, some general knowledge.
Afterwards a guy called me into his office. Said nobody had ever aced this test before, and joked that I should be applying for his job. Told me bluntly they weren't going to hire me, because there's no way I'd stick around long. Guess he would have been right...
I've much preferred the "boring" jobs I've had to the brainy ones, which I mostly find to be miserable. I'm only not doing a "boring" job to this day, because they don't pay half as well as the brainy jobs. Not sure if that's a majority attitude among my peers (or those smarter than me, of whom there are plenty) but given all the other personnel problems low-skill employers put up with, I can't imagine smart-person-boredom would even register.
Now, smart people deciding they'd prefer to like work less, but have way more money? Or deciding at a much lower threshold that they don't need to put up with abuse or even illegal behavior (so very, very common) from a manager, and leaving, since they have tons of other options? Those, maybe, would tip the scales. I'm skeptical that boredom is the main problem, though it may be a nicer (to the employer) way to put it.
For what it's worth, g-factor is correlated to many different cognitive abilities. A person's individual competency areas are highly correlated to other competency areas. For a job where cognitive ability is relevant, knowing the g-factor is predictive of job performance.
* income
* marriage stability
* going to prison or not
* job performance
to name a few
The correlation for these things is of course is not 1.0, but its not negligible either. However that isn't really the use, the use is for identifying social/environmental/genetic things that are effecting a populations intelligence. Exactly the sort of thing this article is looking at.
IQ correlates with them after controlling for those factors (and parental wealth, at least, does too, controlling for the others and IQ). Not sure if the others explain anything not explained by parental wealth and IQ, but probably a little bit. (But, e.g., zip code will overlap a lot with both wealth and the non-wealth variation in IQ, the latter since geography will predict some environmental issues known to adversely impact IQ.)
To the extent understanding the dynamics of the effect is “even meaningful”, yes, understanding the contributing factors other than the most important is likewise meaningful.
It's a test of creative problem solving.
Anybody who aces one would certainly be a good candidate for a follow-up interview, but the test alone isn't everything. It's possible to be really inventive but underqualified in some other way.
I could see this being of particular interest for a financial services firm, where "creative accounting" is the name of the game.
> Why not just send people the take home assignment directly?
People cheat. The IQ test made the employer feel like they at least know something objective about you enough to merit continuing with your interview.
I doubt that one showed that. It was just a test of visual shapes/pattern recognition. Could you quickly spot the next recurring shape/pattern from the previous five. How dopes this demonstrate creative problem solving?
I actually had to take the silly IQ test twice, once on my own and a second time with a webcam proctor who watched me (its as awkward as it sounds).
Anyway the proctor told me I got a perfect score, so I next completed the take home, with all three solutions passing the tests (in an optimal way AFAICT). Got rejected anyway.
The IQ part felt like a big waste of time for me as well as the proctor. So long as they insist on this silly game I agree to not bother applying there.
Every situation is different etc but speaking for myself BNPL seems fundamentally unattractive given how many credit card benefits you'd forego [1]
[1] https://www.cardratings.com/financial-literacy/what-is-buy-n...
Furthermore, it's worth considering both the cultural biases skewing multiple choice tests and the rebasing of tests to maintain 100 as being the "mean" value. If IQ tests were absolutely sensitive and specific for performance prediction, corporations would find a way to administer them. At best, MBTI personality tests are sometimes included as part of an overall candidate profile. It's an easier signal to use university pedigree such as Ivy or JEE as a proxy for properties, rewarding a type of monocultural groupthink.
If you want to see someone highly-motivated, consider a parent with kids and a mortgage on the brink of bankruptcy. They'll pass all sorts of tests and get shit done. People who have been through difficult circumstances tend to be the most capable and highest achieving. Special forces and startups tend to attract a mix of people who grew up poor, semi-abused, and/or semi-homeless and race car drivers/fighter pilot types.
> verbal reasoning (logic, vocabulary), matrix reasoning (visual problem solving, analogies), and letter and number series (computational/mathematical) dropped during the study period
> scores of 3D rotation (spatial reasoning) generally increased from 2011 to 2018
Minecraft's full release date? November 2011. Just sayin'
https://www.marketingcharts.com/cross-media-and-traditional/...
I think different scenarios may be suggested.
The Flynn effect itself was likely caused by a combination of nutrition, access to early education, and (simply put) a familiarity with IQ test formats. I never see people mention the latter, but imagine someone from 1932 being presented with an IQ test. The very process (3d shapes, analogies, numbers backwards?) would have been baffling for 100 percent of recipients.
Which means that the scores would have remained unchanged: result values are not absolute but relative to the population.
It is not a exciting thing to ack but at least we know that our school system are not doing its job.
You can not on one hand only give false feedback creating impression that every kids are doing fine while on the other hand hope them to realize that some of them actually are actually bad at doing something so they should work hard to improve (or abandon it for something they are actually good at)
Linus Torvalds or Andrej Karpathy didn't go to school in the US, but they made their careers there, so as long as the US will be the No. 1 gathering place for the world's top minds (and highest salaries), it has nothing to worry about.
It might just as well not have a school system at all. /s
Edit: I'm not from the US, it's just how I see it from my PoV
I don’t know about you, but I definitely wouldn’t hit either of those buttons taking up most of my screen, and I definitely wouldn’t give out specific information on the second screen.