American IQs Are Dropping. Here's Why It Might Not Be a Bad Thing | Hacker News Reader

American IQs Are Dropping. Here's Why It Might Not Be a Bad Thing

fatherly.com

5 pointsxiaodai11 comments

Previous IQ posts:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Why would this be? I see the reference in article to social media but the Flynn effect didn't seem to be impacted by TV or other changes like that. Is smartphone use/social media really that uniquely bad? Is it just nutrition and pollution? I don't know what impact physical health has on IQ but I struggle to believe it's positive

Nutrition, pollution, exercise, and education are strong factors. Beyond them, I wish I could ascribe it to low-IQ immigration, but I can't because it seems to be down across the board. I blame it on grifter culture whereby most jobs don't require a demonstration of actual competence, either because they're bs jobs or because they're for bs companies or because they have no enforced obligation to perform reasonably. Grifter jobs lead to a web of grift which will end only when the currency collapses, and can no longer pay such individuals or organizations that don't bring sufficient real value to offset their paycheck.

No prior media, before the "smartphone", allowed continuous consumption.

You had to be in front of the TV, or even the computer for the internet, before the arm attached computer.

The effect is proportional to the percentage of waking hours spent in the activity.

And let's face it, as vacuous as broadcast TV was, there was never the ability of so many people to spread so much patently false info for self benefit as there is now, and people are "influenced" by this mis-information. Especially because it's fashionable to be so...

One aspect could be overall lower attention attention span, where people start zoning out in the middle of the test and don't try that hard.

IQ is measured as your 'intelligence' against whatever the average is in that population.

That's why 140 IQ people nowadays are much smarter than 140 IQ people from 100 years ago. The overall average intelligence of a population tends to rise due to better education, access, etc.

Fascinating. Can I have a response to that article that the article cannot be used to ironically counterpoint

The best idea is to change scores so that we can be intelligent again.

It's always frustrating when a headline says exactly the opposite of what the article itself does:

Headline:

> American IQs Are Dropping

Article:

> Dworak stressed that the decline in scores doesn't necessarily mean Americans aren't as intelligent as their grandparents or great-grandparents were. "It doesn’t mean their mental ability is lower or higher; it's just a difference in scores that are favoring older or newer samples," she said in a press release. "It could just be that they're getting worse at taking tests or specifically worse at taking these kinds of tests."

The headline is accurate, it says "IQ" is dropping. If it said "intelligence" was dropping it would be less accurate. (But still probably accurate. IQ and intelligence have a good but not perfect correlation.)

FWIW, i already regret my above comment. In common, everyday English there is an undeniably strong correlation between IQ and intelligence, to the point that the two are often used as synonyms. The article's author certainly knows that and needlessly provokes the reader with the assumption that the average reader (myself included!) will _not_ know that the two terms are _not_ interchangeable.

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