If this is true, you should expect results to be the same across countries, and the measurable drops in IQ should correlate to infection rates.
Five bucks says you won't find that.
Five bucks says you won't find that.
1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9631485/
Do you have a more specific hypothesis of what wouldn't be found elsewhere? Because it looks like you'd be out of $5 from any takers currently.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34973396/
> A significant proportion of individuals experience persistent fatigue and/or cognitive impairment following resolution of acute COVID-19.
> Ten studies analyzed data from Italy, nine from Spain, eight from the US, seven from China, six from the UK, three from Denmark, France, and Norway, respectively, two from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Russia, and the Netherlands, respectively, and one from Belgium, the Czech Republic, England, Faroe Islands, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey, respectively...
Perhaps the actual change was bigger or smaller but the approach to measurement highlighted the change more or less strongly. There's no statistical validity to be had.
Good, calibrated IQ tests measure something, and that something has a positive correlation with work efficiency in at least certain types of work.
That said, there are many types of IQ tests and some of them are in my opinion rather weird, for example anything where your score depends on your knowledge of English language or English history as I hear has traditionally been the case in US.
Around here it seems they try to make the tests as little dependent on language, history and even math as possible and the ones I have taken has largely been about:
- pattern matching (of these 6 squares with various patterns, which one doesn't fit in?)
- sequences (based on these 3 squares with patterns, which is the next one?)
- and that kind of stuff
These skills are things that are very real, very measurable and often linked to work throughput. Yes, I rarely visualize boxes in my head and rotate them and I rarely sift through through black and white squares with alternating patterns at work, but it seems the ability to do so is often linked to the ability to mentally single step code or spot patterns in bug reports.
It doesn't mean that you are good person if your score is high (or low) and it doesn't mean that you will be a good employee and not waste your time on HN.
Anyway, it seems obvious it's culture dependent. Given a person with usual western education and a person who's never dealt with shapes and abstract straight lines in their life - would you expect them to score similarly if they're both very intelligent people? These tests heavily rely on geometric puzzles which already make an assumption about education. The tricky question is how much does that affect differences you'd see between random people tested for comparison.
Then those ratios are what you compare across countries, which is significantly less-problematic.
They're perfectly good for looking at changes over time within a population, you just have to be careful doing between-population comparisons (whether a test is "valid" at that point depends what specific question you want to answer).