Are young people smarter than adults? Research shows differences diminishing
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
This is called the Flynn effect. But it’s tapering off, probably because nutrition health and education can only improve so much (don’t think any of those have changes substantially since the 80s/90s), which would explain why you see this effect get smaller and smaller now.
Your idea might also be correct, but I thought they were actually talking about the Flynn effect here. I might be wrong though
Perhaps the more computers think for us, the smaller the cognitive differences between us become.
The simplest example of this most are familiar with would be how much worse we are at directions/recalling street names since GPS became ubiquitous.
When was the last time you needed to remember a street name to get somewhere?
I think it's the opposite. The wealth of information on the internet is only as good as your ability to both understand and apply it, but also filter out irrelevant, misleading, and outright false content. The bell curve is still there, but it's probably moving to the right globally as nutrition and education get better.
That being said, I'm very concerned with widespread manipulation via subtle propaganda. Ads are a (mostly) benign form of this, but I find it hard to believe governments aren't at least attempting it.
However there's not doubt in my mind that I'm far less creative, far slower to reason and far slower to grasp concepts today than in my early 20s.
In some ways I notice I'm smarter in the sense that these days I have more knowledge to fall back on so I wonder if this biases my IQ score a bit. For example, when I take IQ tests I often recognise patterns like the fibonacci sequence which I wouldn't have been familiar with in my teens.
In many ways I'm a more capable human, but specifically for tasks requiring creativity and adaptability, I'm far less able than I was in the past.
I'm an amateur musician and throughout my teens and early 20s I enjoyed writing music. I still do enjoy writing music but I've noticed in recent years I seem to lack the creativity to write anything I care for. I think this is partly that I have too much experience which biases my creativity and I fail to do anything interesting because I fall into familiar patterns. But even in areas where I have less experience I seem to struggle to be as creative as I once was. I guess the only way I can describe it is that it's like that intellectual rebelliousness I once had is not there anymore.
Startups are also harder today because I find I'm slower to adapt to modern approaches and lack creativity in similar ways I do in music.
It's depressing as hell. I wish I could extract my knowledge and have my stupid old creative brain back. At least then I could do interesting stuff.
Sharing because I don't know if anyone here relates. I'm only in my 30s too so if this is the trend I'd hate to think how uncreative and boring I'll be as I get older.
First, it is obvious that, in the top, a young smart person will beat an older one in the kind of tests that IQ tests measure. You can see that in sports either, speed beyond strength is one obvious one.
In average, young education could play a big role and better education in the old could beat a worse education. For example, an average observation, my father on his late 70s beats people in their 20s in doing mental math not because he is a genius because his generation had a better general education in math than the people at 20s. My dad is far from being a genius, he is not dumb either! but his average skills, as measured by IQ are obviously higher than the average young. Clearly my dad is now slower but also on language skills is fast enough to beat in associations an average young.
Now, we are in 2024 and we need to reassess what IQ measures in terms of intelligence pragmatism. Also, the smart individual vs the smart group. For achieve success, even in the research laboratory you should forget about individual IQs and think differently.
Another corollary for this is that psychology, at some extent, is time dependant and the trues from the 1900s could be falsenin 2024. It is not like math.
Originally IQ was defined as "mental age" divided by actual age and it was for testing development of children. The actual age was capped at 16. So it was expected for any person 16 and over to have the same result in the test to have the same IQ.
You don't need a 'better general education in math' to be good at mental arithmetic. In fact general education in math' is pretty much irrelevant to mental arithmetic.
To be better at mental arithmetic, you need to learn and practice mental arithmetic.
I am willing to bet your father did exactly that when he was younger, compared to today's 20 year olds?
Your father might or might not also have had a great general math education. But that's pretty much irrelevant for the topic at hand.
(I'm a mathematician by training, so I have a pretty good 'general education in math'. But how good my mental arithmetic is depends very heavily on whether I've recently had reason to practice.
I was my best at mental arithmetic in about 7th and 8th grade. 7th grade is when calculators are first allowed in schools where and when I grew up. If, like me, you keep forgetting your calculator at home, that means all of a sudden your mental arithmetic gets a lot more of a workout than before.)
I don't want to focus on his math mental skills but his overall education was better. He can also beat people in language/words associations.
Well, _different_, possibly. Neither word associations nor mental arithmetic are the be-all-and-end-all; mental arithmetic in particular has been more a party trick than anything else since the advent of the pocket calculator.
What's hard is not _modifying_ your IQ, but increasing it.
Is mental arithmetic practice not part of a general math education curriculum?
You'll be able to improve your mental arithmetic performance by orders of magnitude from pure memorization + practice alone, but this is not how people typically learn math in general, and rote memorization will not make you a good mathematician in the long run (it's probably not even good enough to get you past university-level exams).
I too am a maths graduate.
My peak mental arithmetic was about age 11 by then I had learned times tables etc by rote and could deal with money - being the UK this was LSD so had to convert between 20 and 12s as well as decimal. Then in the next few years we want decimal so no need for that daily task of converting and we got calculators if we needed figures so little practice - I could still keep track of what the total amount I would pay in a supermarket and calculate change quicker than the assistant using the till but even that has gone as you just pay by card.
Nowadays do you need to be good at mental arithmetic, probably for doing quick estimates but I don't know if educators think that getting mental arithmetic working well is needed.
Which we hear a lot these days but which is extremely difficult to prove. Formal education only helps you so far and only for some small percentage of students.
I had access to what you mean by good math education through school and University, had private tutors at school and so on. I can say that with my peers there is a huge spectrum of innate math abilities. Only about 5% probably absorbed naturally everything we've been tutored through the school (1-2 persons in a class of 30).
I am not gifted with math, so I have OK formal knowledge, however few of my friends who worked in humanities all their life are much better at "head math" than I ever was.
Also, I live in a country which have aggressive math curriculum from young age. Looking how my kid goes through it I can say for sure, that it is massive waste of kids energy to be pushed for general population.
I would say that is extremely easy to prove but writing a solid paper on that consumes a lot of resources. That is why conjectures are part of the scientific method: we can discuss about things that we think are true or not before making a multi-year effort to prove the point in a scientific way.
The problem is when people confuse scientific publications with truth. In math that would be easier for the practitioners but in social sciences we know that we can publish ala Sokal affair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelli...
Ask yourself, do you want a smart 25 year old running the White House? Or an experienced 50 year old?
I don't want to give them even more excuse to raise the retirement age.
"The country as a whole" is a very abstract concept.
I'm aware of the ridiculousness of this, but what can I do? You don't know what you don't know, and the alternative is to say you only know enough at the end of your life :)
I have seen some studies floating around that the most successful age to start a business is 45, so maybe that's closer to ideal, but in any case you will never convince me that the best age is in your late 70s.
Politicians will be pandering to this old (majority) demographic, whilst the needs of the young who are actually running society can be unheard. I'll be one of the (very) old ones if I'm still around, and I'm not looking forward to this development.
People just have access to more and better information. But the education system still sucks, especially in many of the more underfunded public schools
https://nypost.com/2014/01/12/no-space-no-books-no-leader-no...
Because givem their resources they have mass classes and a lowest common denominator approach
https://fensteroneducation.home.blog/2019/09/05/battling-tea...
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/30/us/the-highly-gifted-chil...
Whereas research shows a lot could be better:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/a-better-wa...
And across the world in many places it’s even worse access to education
I wrote about this back in 2014: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
I bought the domain https://teaching.app and have been building a software solution to try to fix it for kids across the country. It requires multiple moving parts, but based on the above insights including by John Mightor and Bloom. That website goes into much more detail about what needs to be done.
PS: gotta love the massive wave of silent downvotes. Why? Not enough substance? Not enough effort spent solving a problem or documenting it? Something you don’t like? Speak up! Ahh nevermind.
The article argues that people used to be more intellecutally capable when they were younger and it diminished with age.
You are arguing that each generation used to be more intellectually capable than the one before, and that that is diminishing.
I’m not trying to accuse you of anything, but it seems like you didn’t actually read the article you were commenting on. Is that possible?
I somehow think the downvotes may be related to something else, though.
Identifying the actual roots of the problems people post passionately about, and clearly explaining the underlying mechanisms that lead not just to this problem but many others they might not realize are related
Researching for years the best ways to fix it, going out of my way to have substantive discussions with some of the top problem solvers across multiple fields, and publish the videos up publicly
Spending over a decade on actually writing the open source software, hiring people, creating jobs, without asking anything from any of you
And making it freely available as open source, with documentation, all without taking on VC funding or any of the actual profit-taking and extracting rents that goes on here with “software a service”
In literally every way I can, I try to contribute value without taking in return.
So you could not be more wrong, and if you’d click the links you’d see that. But you’d rather not even look, because in your capitalist mind, sharing the result of decades of work and over $1 million spent on free open source platforms for the world is “self-promotion”. You’d rather see another startup extract rents for a simple product built around tiny feature, funded by venture capitalists who want to have an exit by selling shares to the public, who will demand more rent extraction and wait for even further enshittification of platforms and society. It’s pretty amusing to me.
I currently enjoy staying relatively almost completely unknown, and seeing the reaction people have to the most straightforward application of the above solutions to their own problems. Because I think that even on HN, many people are acting very irrationally and groupthink dominates, and while millions of people actually use my software, 99.99% have no idea who I am, and I get to see how human groups react to form instead of substance. This is btw why we often can’t have nice things, at least not unless the solutions, like bitter medicines, are presented wrapped in candy for organizations. We are a generation of children living on an ecological credit card, one of the most spoiled in history, but think we know better than everyone else. So I kind of enjoy seeing the irrationality as a form of entertainment although on a global ecological scale, it’s sadly quite scary.
> But the education system still sucks, especially in many of the more underfunded public schools
The problems depend on where you live. (And also whether schools are underfunded or not, and what that even means.)
> PS: gotta love the massive wave of silent downvotes. Why? Not enough substance? Not enough effort spent solving a problem or documenting it? Something you don’t like? Speak up! Ahh nevermind.
It's best to ignore those.
Thinly veiled sales pitch.
Oh, it's also about startups. And about funding them. And building stuff people want.
I don't know man. Every time I put in a lot of work (a decade, say) and build something major and substantial to improve the world, and document it, linking to third party reputable sources for everything I'm claiming and saying, and give it away for free... if I share the link on HN, I often get downvoted. It's almost as if talking out of your ass and NOT doing anything to solve the problem, is far more appreciated.
Like how people regularly complain about everything related to extreme centralization of control, surveillance capitalism, etc, and I built open source and free software give you an alternative, attracted millions of people in over 100 countries, and give it away for free to you here if you only look::
Web2: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Web2 Documentation: https://community.qbix.com
Web3: https://github.com/Intercoin
Web3 Documentation: https://intercoin.org/applications
But it gets downvoted because "hey I saw the word web3!" or "hey you're selling me... um... something". This is the "TLDR" generation.
Don't like it? Don't use it. Or use the part you like. But how about the 99% of the useful, substantive information which doesn't involve selling anything at all?
Complaining about downvotes gets downvoted.
Pity parties get downvoted.
It’s not a mystery.
To me the cause seems simple: actively enforced groupthink
But do carry on!
Where’s your hemlock?
Rough start
Oh and groupthink against Web>2.
(A bit remiscent of bitcoin maximalists who claim nothing will ever improve upon Bitcoin and nothing is needed since an old 2009 technology solves it all).
That’s what’s I’m hearing from you. And my answer is no.
I prefer to see how far irrationality can go, on even the best forums. Because a lot of times this is exactly what people have to go through who have “built a better mousetrap” but the world doesn’t “beat a path to their door”, not even their peers care, depending entirely on how it is presented
> People who have done something successfully often had others disagree with them, ergo if others disagree with me it’s probably a sign that I’m on the right path. And also that they’re “irrational”.
Airtight my man
Ask yourself, for instance, what chance does a real Web3 solution have on HN? Even Jack Dorsey's bluesky, for instance, instantly lost HNers when Jack started branding it as "Web5". IPFS no longer generates much interest because of FileCoin. Just one example, of the "halo effect".
Perhaps this is because they’re near universally bad ideas. Web3 is a strong leading indicator of poorly thought out garbage.
Maybe you can find a way to make it work for something useful. But if your pitch starts out with “Web3!” Or worse “Web5!” It sure sounds like you’ve just tried to jam tech into something rather than solving an actual problem that happened to leverage the tech.
I hope you enjoy their upcoming session called Space, featuring a picture of a flying saucer
https://gbaglobal.org/events/space/#post_content
> Embark on a journey beyond the bounds of Earth’s atmosphere and delve into the mysteries of space and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) or Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).
You really think the Government Blockchain Association is primarily concerned with space and UFOs? If not, why highlight it? One word: strawman! A dishonest way to argue. I know HN members are biased against blockchains but I am always surprised more and more by the methods employed in argument. For a long time I thought HN members would avoid such tactics merely because they disagreed with something.
A straw man is an attacking a different argument, not focusing on one particularly noteworthy piece of evidence. Asserting that I’m saying space is their primary concern is, ironically, a straw man argument. Because I’m not saying that. I’m saying that it’s a red flag.
An organization focused on financial technology has no reason to be hosting a talk on UFOs. I don’t think their thing is UFOs. But I do think maybe their thing is trying to attract complete fucking morons that think they know better than the rest of society in the vein that “UFOs are aliens” is markedly compatible with “blockchain is the solution society needs”.
I actually feel very comfortable writing off any organization as idiots, crazies, or predatory snake oil salesmen for hosting a single event on the presence of aliens among us. I don’t require that to be their whole thing. That’s just a hilariously bright red flag.
At least I appreciate the explanation !