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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

That standardised test administered by the US military has some history. The idea was that folks who were below an 85IQ would be harder to train. During the Vietnam war they tried abandoning the requirement and the results were sad. It cost the military a lot more in remedial training, but the real tragedy is that these folks died at 3 times the rate of people who would have passed the test. They weren’t cut out to be sent to a war zone.

So intelligence is important for military service but a person’s completion of high school isn’t an indication of low intelligence. They may have dropped out for any other reason. It’s entirely possible that they may flourish in the structured environment the military offers.

It’s fair to ask if the IQ test is a good measure of intelligence, or if it’s measuring something else. But in this context, it’s measuring something that is strongly correlated to success as a solider.

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A friend of mine I met while serving in Afghanistan,

He was working for the Department of Agriculture, trying to get the Afghan farmers to grow saffron instead of poppy. He was a professor in agronomy and would help his students back home in the US with their assignments.

He had signed up for the US army and ended up serving in the Special Forces in Vietnam for 2 years. He dropped out of school when he was 13.

In my opinion, the military should be a second chance for a country’s citizens, who have for some reason slipped through the cracks.

You are making an assumption that a person dropping out of school at 13 in the ~1960s would have the same education level as someone dropping out of school at 13 today, let alone that the conditions and circumstances one would find themselves in having dropped out are equivalent to the 1960s. Frankly, especially with the crumbling and cracking discipline, order, and hierarchy in the U.S. military now, you are also making an assumption that they would gain the benefits you surely assume based on a historical perception.

Two things. I didn’t say anything about school in the 1960s. I only said, they used they’ve used the IQ test for about a century to good effect. When they abandoned it for expediency, the results were tragic. That’s why they’ll stick to the IQ test, correct or not.

You’re saying that the US military has issues and it may well have. I’m no expert on that. But I still believe that a person who has dropped out of high school has a lot to offer society. It seems like the US military is coming around to the same line of thinking, as long as the person passes the IQ test. I think that’s a reasonable compromise.

The program might fail but if we never try then we’ll never know.

Do you have a source on the 'cracking discipline, order and hierarchy' of the US army? I know a 35 yo French artillery officer (now he's teaching new officers) who has worked with the US military for 15years, last year he told us that the US army is the only western army that didn't stagnate and became better, organization-wise, in the last 15 year.

That makes sense, it's one of the few armies which has been involved in one war or another, at scale, for the last several decades. Practice makes perfect. And this is probably the only way such an organization can evolve, just like a muscle will only evolve if used, and will atrophy otherwise.

I think the original reason for requesting the high-school diploma is two fold. On one hand the person can come back and pick up where they left off, with a better chance of serving society. But maybe the more important one was that it lowered the chances of teens enlisting it the pit of desperation, seeing themselves as failures, with no other way out. Those may not be the people you really want because those may not be the people who really want you. This is the kind of deal that's hard to pull out of, and the Army would probably not want to be in the situation to have a wave of desperate teens realizing they just made a rash decision. The Army also doesn't want to be drained of new recruits, so here they are, taking what's on the table. It's a clear sign that young people are sending to the Army though.

Whatever you think might be going on with the overall discipline of the US military today, it has nothing on how bad things were in the Vietnam era. Enlisted men slipping grenades into their officers’ tents after getting high as a kite in a combat zone was a regular occurrence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging

This comment just shows you to be ignorant and contrarian.

Fragging was more often a rational act of self preservation than drug-induced madness. It was mostly soldiers getting rid of officers who were likely to get them killed. Heroin and weed don't just turn otherwise good men into murderers.

Maybe my phrasing implied too much causality, but a mixture of psychoactive drugs, extended sleep deprivation, and combat stress could turn anyone into a murderer.

And recent research absolutely has shown that heavy cannabis usage in adolescence and early adulthood does have a clear association with an increased risk of developing psychosis and schizophrenia. Just because the war on drugs lied about the effects of less harmful drugs like cannabis doesn’t mean they can’t be hazardous to your health like any other substance.

Regarding heroin - one may not be particularly murderous while zonked out, but addiction can make people surprisingly aggressive.

I’d also like to add that the company-grade officers stuck in the mud alongside enlisted were less at fault for the needless deaths than the incompetent general staff or the political actors who got us and kept us over there in the first place. You might enj the novel “Matterhorn” by Karl Marlantes, a Marine infantry officer who served with distinction in Vietnam. Or you might prefer “Dereliction of Duty” by Lt General H.R. McMaster, a renowned commander of the GWOT era who wrote his PhD thesis on the failures of Westmoreland and the other generals who mangled Vietnam.

All I know is that my army captain was the first real role model I ever had. Perhaps it doesn't work out that way for everyone, but I bet it does for many.

> the military should be a second chance for a country’s citizens, who have for some reason slipped through the cracks.

Of course the military is the answer /s

The cracks are on purpose.

The only thing on the ASVAB the Army cares about is the GT score. When I took the test as a dumb high school kid I was only smarter than 79% of the population and had a GT score of 107, which is too dumb to become an officer. Many years later after almost 7 years programming full time in the corporate world I retook the ASVAB. Then I was smarter than 98% of the population and had a GT score of 129. The max is 130, so I may have had the highest GT score among test takers that year.

The GT score is comprised of combinations of several different segments of the ASVAB of which the most important is applied arithmetic. Those are math problems in paragraph form that requires careful reading and multiple steps of very simple algebra like calculating pricing for a retail purchase and deduction of the coin denomination in return. The challenge there is just finishing the test because they, by design, do not provide enough time.

EDIT

I just want to point out that I did not become more intelligent as I got older. My ability to read and instantly formulate logic substantially improved as I got older through practice. Those, reading and logic, are skills and the performance improvement is permanent.

There are similar results for other IQ tests as well. You can study and practice to improve your score. Which shows that they aren’t really measuring raw intelligence. But, that doesn’t mean they aren’t measuring fitness for a task at least at that point in time.

Intelligence is a fuzzy concept, but it cannot really be separated from knowledge and experience.

We also seem to take it as fact that intelligence is an unchanging attribute you get at birth. Wouldn’t your brain upgrade itself as it optimizes for the world around it?

It's probably more accurate to say that the skills are durable.

> My ability to read and instantly formulate logic substantially improved as I got older through practice

I’d argue that is more intelligent. People generally get smarter as they age (up to a point)

That’s why IQ is relative to your peers. A child with a high IQ may still not be as intelligent as an adult with an average IQ

It would be really fascinating to see a graph of IQ vs chance of being killed in a war (normalised for people in the same role); would it continuously be increasing, or would there be diminishing or even negative returns to IQ beyond a certain point?

There have been studies done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000

I wonder how IQ higer than 85 relates to the chances of dying, maybe still relevant? There's probably a sweet spot not too dumb but dumb enough to join the military.

This was interesting to me as well. I'm assuming the more limited IQ resulted in more of those soldiers falling into inherently more dangerous roles such as the Infantry due to inability to qualify for more technical and safer roles.

85 IQ really isn't that low. It's one standard deviation below average, so about 16% of people are below that.

In your average high school class of 30 people, the 4 stupidest would be rejected by the military on these grounds (assume the bottom 1/31 have such severe developmental difficulties they can't even attend a normal high school).

Doesn't that seem like quite a high bar?

No, it probably should be higher given how complex even bog standard infantry roles have become.

You’re overlooking a hidden pernicious effect, that IQ is a relative measure that does not identify a declining trend very effectively, i.e., any identified decline in IQ is both a momentary and transient indicator as the norm, i.e., 100 IQ, integrated; and the 100 IQ norm also does not say anything about the overall relative state to any other previous state.

In other words, this is how we end up with Idiocracy where a low IQ person becomes the smartest person in the world right under everyone’s nose.

IQ hasn’t declined though. The Flynn effect means that the median IQ has gone up steadily every decade since they started measuring. It’s unclear why. Maybe better nutrition, better schooling, less leaded petrol - hard to tell.

So an 85 IQ person today is substantially more intelligent than an 85 IQ person in the Vietnam war. That said, the modern infantry man’s job is more complex. I would postulate that the job’s complexity has grown to keep pace with the Flynn effect.

Sadly not. The Flynn effect appears to be obsolete. In many countries it stopped in the 90s and IQs have actually gone down a bit since then. Example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#/media/File:Sunde...

For others interested, this doesn't seem to be fully accepted. A few studies in EU countries (and Australia)) have shown slight regressions from past increases.

No studies done in the US which is the cohort here.

Studies have been done in the US. Here [1] is (to my knowledge) the latest, and it does indeed show a substantial reversal of the Flynn Effect. And to my knowledge the reversal of the Flynn Effect is indeed globally acknowledged. The debate at this point is on the cause.

The main reason early studies were in places like Scandinavia is that they have compulsory military enlistment alongside IQ tests, whose results are made available for research. Studies in places like the US came later, because simply getting a representative and comparable sample is non-trivial. There's also the cultural issue that studies on IQ are walking on eggshells in the US.

And it's not slight regressions. We've gone from gradually and consistently gaining IQ, to the current scenario where some studies [2] have shown declines as great as .29 standard deviation per decade. Meaning in 40 years we'd all be a whole standard deviation away from where the mean used to be. That is exceptionally disconcerting, particularly if it doesn't just flat-line at some point.

[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...

[2] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

After the Vietnam war experiment "Project 100,000" (aka McNamara's Morons) the IQ level 80 (9 percentile) became the floor for acceptance in Army. https://www.amazon.com/McNamaras-Folly-Hamilton-Gregory/dp/1...

About 10% of people are too cognitively challenged to positively contribute in the US Army even in the least mentally challenging roles.

At 80 - 85 IQ level person can typically read basic level. They gradate from schools and comprehend simple texts and sentences but may struggle with more complex language structures, vocabulary, and abstract concepts. People with reading disorders or other disorders should not be confused with low IQ.

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