The Rise and Fall of IQ: The Cognitive Divide | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of IQ: The Cognitive Divide

onepercentrule.substack.com

27 pointsdrcwpl63 comments

I've always thought the Flynn Effect was yet another Moore's Law, and both demonstrate Goodhart's Law. We didn't get transistor density doubling year over year because this was a natural tendency of some physical law, we got it because of mountains of money and engineering effort poured into doing that. Similarly, we didn't get rises in a measure of what society considers intelligence because of some genetic or uncorrelated environmental factor, we got it because what we're actually measuring with IQ, since it was invented by Binet, is education and selection of minds toward a particular category of reasoning tasks. I think Binet did something impressive when he distilled the priorities of the entire education system into a psychometrically-evaluable quantity that's relatively stable across individuals, but the way people overstate the generality and broad applicability of this metric baffles me. Like people will point out that IQ correlates with lifetime income and also SAT scores. But those two things not only correlate with each other for a much clearer reason (We gate educational outcomes with standardized tests that resemble IQ tests, and also gate economic outcomes with educational credentials), but that reason also is a causal explanation that mostly amounts to a decision made by human institutional policy, rather than some grand enduring fact about the nature of intelligence

Like look, I get how people get so attached to this stuff. I've got a high enough IQ score to be beyond the statistical sensitivity of Raven's Progressive Matrices which mostly seems to mean that I'm great at test-taking and puzzle-solving, and I get that IQ seems like this really powerful explanation of variance on vibes from an internal perspective. It feels like people above a certain point on the curve are just so much more vibrant and curious sometimes! But I've come to believe that this is more an artifact of how we shunt certain people within the education system than some deep difference between people on some generally-applicable measure of capability. Lots of social science theories about assortative mating and such seem to observe that people with brains that work similarly will also tend to like each other more, and we have vast edifices that determine other socialization-determining factors based on these kinds of heavily-correlated metrics.

Except that data says you're wrong. As a classic example, look at (1) the effects of adding iodine to salt and its impact on IQ, and (2) the withdrawal of leaded gasoline and it's impact on IQ.

And in general, IQ goes up as nutrition goes up (to a point). It's hard to be smart if you're calorie-reduced.

That said, is IQ important? To an extent, yes. In general a higher IQ means someone can hold more things in their head, which means they can handle more complexity.

Is it important? It depends. I would rather have a high-IQ doctor than a low-IQ doctor, for sure. I would rather have a high-IQ network engineer than a low-IQ network engineer.

Neither of your examples really contradict my point. If we are measuring a subset of things you need a brain for, of course factors that make your brain generally less effective are going to show up on them. Lead poisoning and inadequate nutrition also decrease libido for example, and I don't think it's reasonable to conclude that this provides strong evidentiary support that libido should be our proxy for people's general capabilities and declare it equivalent to "intelligence", though there are certainly those who would try to make that case too

Very well stated

I’d argue emotinal intelligence is at least as important. The most successful people in business I’ve met are exceptionally good in empathy and highly social. Hard IQ is just a piece of the puzzle.

Yea, like I'd rather have a doctor who actually listens to what I'm saying than one who got top marks in medical school, and honestly network engineers I've worked with who strike me as "higher IQ" often fall into the pitfall described by the adage "the perfect is the enemy of the good" (which I empathize with, because I am also a high-IQ person with this kind of bias, but it's actually quite counterproductive at times)

I would agree, but about 1/5th of CEOs are psycopaths, as opposed to the 1/100 in the general population[0]. While emotional intelligence may help in some fields, such as employee retention, it’s not universally related to success. Additionally, EI doesn’t map well to psychopaths and similar disorders due to EI being a measure of how well you conform rather than a measure of what you truly feel[1].

[0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/201... | https://archive.is/3jHZV [1] - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-els... | https://archive.is/Z2Oif

I think that statistic is a good indicator that we have significant broken incentives in the way liability can be shunted away from the people with decisionmaking power in businesses. The "corporate veil" for example is a deep loophole in the whole concept of rule of law, and I for one would prefer it not to exist

I haven’t seen you disagree anywhere with OP. You said they’re wrong, then you affirmed a cornerstone of OPs argument when you said “it’s hard to be smart if you’re calorie-reduced.”

In truth, the data is weak and nonsensical and it’s used to peddle mysticism-tier shit out on unsuspecting rubes under the guise of “Science.” But that’s a separate discussion.

All of this seems to be dancing around the actual question: are people getting dumber?

It's not possible to look at modern trends in the US and answer anything but, yes.

When a major portion of the US population can believe that space lasers are guiding hurricanes along the contrails, there has obviously been a major reduction in intelligence, regardless of IQ test results.

The pandemic led to a quantum leap, downward, in intelligence across the US. The rise of asocial media's viral influenzas are significantly to blame.

A person's imagined ideals are held to be more real than physical reality.

There is no doubt that across the breadth of the US population, intelligence has significantly declined.

That is not proof that people are getting dumber. For a start, believing stupid things is somewhat orthogonal to the number you get on an IQ test. It is not purely a test of logic and reasoning.

There have always been a large number of credulous folks. I would say that what we're seeing recently is a result of connecting those people together on the internet, which also exposes them en masse to those would would take advantage. Instead of local gossip, people are able to participate at a regional, national and global level. Before the internet, and social media in particular, the cost barrier to communicate this sort of ridiculousness was too high.

I agree "All of this seems to be dancing around the actual question: are people getting dumber? It's not possible to look at modern trends in the US and answer anything but, yes."

Same in Europe too

    When a major portion of the US population can believe 
    that space lasers are guiding hurricanes along the 
    contrails, there has obviously been a major reduction 
    in intelligence, regardless of IQ test results.

The trend you're talking about is a real problem, for sure. This society has some serious problems.

I'd absolutely not describe that as a sudden plunge in the sort of acute intelligence that is measured by IQ tests.

Think about the great misinformation campaigns and widespread delusions in history. To jump to the most obvious example: do you really think the German people became literally dumber during the rule of you-know-who in 1933-1945, when a significant portion of the population fervently supported his lies? And then suddenly became smarter again?

What you're describing is a social problem, not a biological one.

Believing obvious lies is orthogonal to IQ, as stated before. It‘s not that people are getting “dumb”, but that people are falling into politically-focused echo chambers and believe stupid things because “trusted” people say so. I mean just look at how many people, even doctors and researchers who should know better, believed the, often contradictory, statements Fauci made during Covid. I mean there was and still is genuine belief that face masks of any kind stop you from getting sick, when that’s simply not reality. Only surgical masks applied properly provide the right seal, but even those are meant to mostly prevent others from getting sick. Yet we still have people who believe they’re some holy barrier against illness.

Beliving stupid things can only happen when the person can't dismiss those things as impossible or at least very improbable.

That can happen:

1) due to IQ becoming more specialized (they can't reason to reach the logical conclusion) and

2) due to education becoming more and more specialized and lacking in the general all-domains knowledge and common sense (they don't have the basics to start any reasoning logic).

Thank you! What you are saying resonates with me and I really want to believe it. Though I wish I could find such a good argument to ward off the incoming people that cite publications that proves this wrong.

My education has equipped me quite adequately to fend off such critiques, and frankly I think it's a misuse of terminology to claim that studies "prove" anything, because the nature of empirical evidence even under the most generous assumptions is that a body of evidence can support or contradict conclusions, but "proof" as a concept comes from logical modes of inference, which only work within contexts where the conclusions drawn pertain to assumptions that are defined in a stricter sense than any of these fuzzy real-world questions permit

Very well put, I agree with you wholeheartedly that "It feels like people above a certain point on the curve are just so much more vibrant and curious sometimes!" It's unfortunate some measures are deemed to be necessary, but resilience, curiosity, tenacity and cooperation with others are essential traits, maybe even more important than test taking - and certainly difficult to measure..

I'm surprised that the article talks about "specialization" without mentioning that many modern IQ tests have specialized subscores... but then again, this may not be common knowledge.

Back in the day I used to compile patient evaluation reports for a psychologist who specialized in Diagnosing Patients With Stuff. The point of the diagnoses (and the reports) was generally to help kids and adult students get educational accomodations: for example, if a kid's report proves that they struggle with written instructions due to dyslexia, they'd be able to request a verbal/auditory alternative for relevant assignments.

The psychologist would administer LOTS of tests and interviews for each patient, usually over the course of a few days, and those tests usually included one of the Wechsler IQ tests: either the WAIS-IV/V for adults or the WISC-V for kids.

Both of these tests include an "overall" score called full-scale IQ (FSIQ), but this wasn't the focus of patient reports—the different subtests were. Also noteworthy that FSIQ is just the average of the scores on those subtests, which measure things like verbal comprehension, working memory, and processing speed (and sub-sub-tests thereof). These are useful in a clinical context because they let you identify conditions that are marked by discrepancies in different areas: for example, that kid with dyslexia probably struggled with processing speed but did fine with verbal comprehension. So a patient's overall score was a lot less relevant than any subscores that seemed like outlier compared to other subscores.

(Today's Wechsler tests are aware of the Flynn effect and supposedly get recalibrated to account for it, but I can't speak to that personally.)

There is such a simpler explanation for this. You can get better at IQ tests by practicing and studying. For a long time IQ scores were seen as an important measure of your value as a human being, and more importantly, were used to gate access to jobs and other opportunities. So people learned how to get better at passing IQ tests.

Now IQ tests are no longer fashionable and we're drifting back to the scores you'd expect in a naive population.

A very simple explanation, indeed

Also stress can play a role, along with one’s ability to remain 100 % focused.

So you are saying that for example the first time generation X takes an IQ test at 15 and gets a 100 score on average but now my son generations takes the same test at 15 and gets 10 points lower, its probably because gen X had been "training" to take IQ tests?

Are you sure the IQ scores went out of fashion because people were able to train to get them higher, and not because one of:

1. There are only so many IQ tests, so people applying simply memorized the one job administered

2. IQ tests were so effective they prevented nepotism, and people just could not have it

Do you have any data to support you point?

That's possible. I'd be surprised though if enough people were studying and practicing IQ tests to drive this difference. Practice has some benefits but are fairly limited for IQ tests. And I doubt a high enough portion of the population was practicing IQ tests regularly enough to move the needle this much.

Regression to the mean?

An entire article about some data, without any chart or a number that isn't a date.

Also I thought that the average IQ was 100 by definition so what does it even mean by "IQ scores steadily climbed" ...?

Edit: Wikipedia article on the Flynn effect clarifies: "When the new test subjects take the older tests, in almost every case their average scores are significantly above 100." though, so ok I guess?

The score is tied to your age and is relative to the whole population of that age, IIRC. It’s been a long time since I took the paid test. So today’s 100 is, say, 130 fifty years ago. I think there were 4 age groups.

The article is ridiculous- an obviously non-existent problem (why are they expecting IQs to continue increasing- why would they?), with a completely absurd and implausible speculative explanation.

They expected IQ to continue increasing because it has been continuously increasing.

(I think it used to be a rule on HN to read the article before commenting).

Indeed, that was my criticism- it is absurd to expect something to keep increasing forever just because it did increase for a short duration previously, especially given what we do know about how human brains work. Even the hypothetical explanations they raise the article "better nutrition and healthcare" as well as the "positive manifold" idea would obviously be limited, basically one-time effects.

Moreover, despite being a generalist myself, and not being a fan of specialization, I don't see any convincing evidence of an increase in specialization- which their argument is founded on. Humans have been highly specialized for most of modern history, yet it has only recently been popular to explore the downsides of that and push the other way. If anything this has been reducing, especially in the sciences with the advent of new broader interdisciplinary fields like systems biology. The examples in the article like "high schools now teach coding and advanced mathematics" also seem like evidence of a reduction in specialization that existed previously. Does this person really think people are getting dumber because high schools are teaching kids too much advanced mathematics?

> I think it used to be a rule on HN to read the article before commenting

No, HN has clear guidelines on this. There is no requirement to read an article before commenting, but it is not allowed to accuse someone of having not read an article or to comment in a way that questions or implies that they might not have. It is also required to assume good faith, and anyone criticizing an articles content is implicitly claiming to have read it.

> it is absurd to expect something to keep increasing forever just because it did increase for a short duration previously

The problem isn't that it stopped increasing. It's that it's steadily decreasing now. I made a comment about this recently with sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41844739

Not convinced by the blog author's theories, but it's a real problem worth discussing.

Here'a another article with an actual graph of the rise a slight fall off of IQ results in Norway https://check-iq.org/blog/reverse-flynn-effect-explained

My guess would be it's mostly down to schooling and practice. It went up 1950-1980 mostly due to better education, maybe down 1995 to now due to too much mucking about on the web/phone rather than maths homework?

That is my impression.

Broad spectrum problem solving, knowledge, critical thought have become less emphasized as society has become more streamlined and efficient.

In such an environment, attributes like conscientiousness are more emphasized.

This is highly evident in changes to our US education system

Something Awful: The Internet Makes You Stupid.

I think some things that were said about "training" for IQ tests in the past (which increased scores) are true , but in a different way than may be considered on the surface. I believe we WERE training, but in a different way. But I will get back to that. To me, an iq test is a simplified way to judge someone's intelligence in a narrow fashion. A bunch of questions, in a controlled environment, that you can practice for. Seems a bit simplified as a means of measuring intelligence. Especially when very little of our lives are spent in such an environment. With the world being full of so many variables it seems like it would be more beneficial to gauge how that intelligence responds not just to simple questions or problems but how it applies that knowledge in real world situations. I think that is why a high or low IQ score does not necessarily determine success. I said before that we were training in the past for IQ tests. The training we were doing wasn't anything we did in school. It was the way we grew up and lived our lives. Before technology "improved" our lives, we had much more interactive experiences with the world. We played investigators in a world that required more physical engagement & effort to answer your questions. At that time it wasn't as simple as just using Google, having answers at our finger tips. If you had questions & wanted answers, it was more of an undertaking. It took more effort. Before you even started, you understood that you would have to WORK to answer your questions. Research and information gathering was much more difficult and involved. You also often had to speak to many different people along the way because information and opinions werent always easy to come by. I can also say from personal eperience that the satisfaction I had in the past having to do all the work to get my answers was much more satisfying than simply pressing search. I think this applied not only to learning & information gathering, but to life in general. In today's world, while I wouldn't say life is easier (it has its own challenges), i would say a lot has been simplified. Most of our daily struggles have changed. Technology has changed us from being doers into being more thinkers. More specialized. Specialized because the level of our technology forces us to specialize. Even if I have a high IQ, the world isn't as open & accessible as it used to be. It takes many years of learning & often a degree from a very specialized field to be successful. The things in the past that fueled our IQ growth, like all of our wordly interactions and learning due to the lack of said technology, have been in many ways removed. I keep coming back to what I call worldly interactions. In our lives today much of our lives take place in a very limited environment. There is not the unknown factor of daily physical interaction out in a big world with endless experiences & possibilities. You are sitting there scrolling on a tablet or pc from the comfort & safety of your home or office. Being more of a digital society we have lost a lot of our interaction with the world. I believe it is this simplification, this lost interaction, that has lead to lower IQ scores. We learn through our myriad of experiences and interactions. Having a broad volume of past experiences to learn from is how we grow our intelligence and become wise. Not simply by having a high level of gathered information & facts. Intelligence is applied. The level of our current technology has unintentionally lead to this. By requiring us to specialize in today's world, the interactions gained through generalization that were facilitated by the lack of technology, have been lost. To help get my point across, i will use today's medical field as an example. A few years ago I started having seizures. I saw many different doctors specializing in their own fields. They all seemed very knowledgeable in their respective fields. But when it came to applying their knowledge across different fields, they were very limited. I was often told when asking questions "that is out of my area of expertise", even if they were related. I would have to be referred to another specialist. Whose knowledge was great but was again, narrowed only to their specialization. This leads to quite an issue. Todays specialization has lead to a doctors inability to be diagnosticians. By being unable to connect dots across different fields due to lack of general knowledge, it has lead to delayed and missed diagnosis. Not every case fits the books, some require thinking outside the lines and connecting dots that dont ordinarily connect. Specialization, by eliminating exposure to other fields has removed the idea of being a diagnostician due to their narrow scope. Its awfully hard to consider other conclusions if you don't have the breadth of knowledge to intelligently consider them. So....doctors seem more educated & know more about their specialty, but their usefulness has become very very narrow & something has been lost along the way. This connects back to worldliness and experiences. The same way doctors have been limited by specialization is the same way technology is limiting us as a whole. Many of the challenges that fueled our IQ growth have been removed. Since we have fewer real life experiences and & have less opportunity to apply that knowledge broadly due to specialization....we can see the results.

I guess in short what I'm saying is that we are using our brains less & as a byproduct we are just not as smart. We aren't challenged as much with our easy access to...well everything. Heck we don't even have to come to our own conclusions anymore. With the internet & social media its much easier to simply find someone who has already done the research & work already & will eagerly tell your their thoughts. I think one of the intangible things that has been lost is the challenge. It is different learning on your own. Doing research, gathering facts & information. Coming to your own conclusions. I dont just mean on an intellectual level either. The processes & interactions have value in of themselves. Experience & knowledge gained on the side while learning other things can't be measured. It is this learning through personal experience & the interactions during this process that fuels our intelligence. Our simplified lives have limited our exposure to this "extra" knowledge we miss due to fewer experiences & easy REMOTE access to everything.

Agree-- The satisfaction from uncovering something by effortful research helps the subject stay in our memory, and build our IQ. I agree to a poin that "Technology has changed us from being doers into being more thinkers." However, there is a darker side too, which you also share, - when we get all of the answers do we think? You have a point about the lost contact with others, in the past, people regularly met for intellectual discussions with colleagues, think of CS Lewis and Tolkein, Churchills "Other Club" with Wells and many more, Ramon Cajal and his weekly meeting. Yes, specialization is limiting our generalizability's for sure.

Hmmm. "When we get all the answers do we think?" Good question. If we consider what we have said, then has thinking on your own become such an inferred CHORE? I dont mean independent thought, I mean using your own intelligence as a means to learn & understand the world. But somehow having all the answers has thinking as the second best option when compared to finding others' ready made solutions.

...and that is a terrible thought for me.. 'thinking as the second best option." I guess we need to think through carefully many processes, and then allow the 'tools' to do the jobs for us... but then are we simply adopting these tools and losing the ability to think? As a simple example - Smartphones have many advantages, but we used to have to hold a host of telephone numbers in our heads and then think as we dialled the numbers (or read them from our little address book), GPS has helped in so many ways, but also hinedred our ability to think of routes, as I said simple examples. Some tools are dosed out to us without our thought, we adapt rapidly. As you said about search - library research at uni's is dwindling dramatically. We do give up a lot for the convenience of tools - and it will continue as we 'automate' more. So, we need to use the time we gain wisely and become discoverers... seeking new knowledge, rather than letting, mindless screen time become our daily norm!

I agree, especially with the term "discoverers". I think a key part of what steers us towards the easy answer, and leads us away from thinking on our own is the fact that most questions do in fact have answers readily accessible online. The mystery is gone. The zest for learning & applying knowledge loses a little something when you believe there not much else to be gained on your own. So I agree, breaking new boundaries and making new discoveries is a vital part to maintaining high intelligence levels. But there we have a catch 22. Technology has progressed to the point that in order to consider new boundaries the knowledge required is enormous. This prerequisite severely limits access to these boundaries on a large scale. Only a small percent will have the means (financial, intellectual, ect) to acquire the knowledge necessary. This of course would lead to a larger perceived IQ divide among the masses.

Just to see what kind of responses I can get....

If i were a crazy conspiracy theorist...what better way to control a population than to propagate a culture where thinking becomes the second best option? And our technological advances have raised the bar intellectually so high that the perceived divide is real as shown through declining IQ scores. And that divide is a means of societal separation, cultivated to allow aristocracy. But I'm just talking crazy.

Zero consideration of the obvious question: what if IQ just isn’t a good measurement?

Isn't a good measurement by what measure?

There's been 1000's of studies on it. It might be one of the most robust findings in all of psychology and psychometrics (Big 5 is in the same ballpark). You can predict all sorts of things from it. If IQ is a bad measurement, than there are no good measurements in psychology.

What does it measure?

Something called g. Which is basically rounds to our intuition of how smart you are. It is one the best predictors of job performance (up there with a work sample test), income, reaction time, how much schooling you'll get, how likely you are to commit crime, how long you'll live.

Imagine it like this, if we give someone a history test, a math test, a physics test, and english test. We'll notice how good you are at any given tests predicts how good you are at other tests. Even though math and history don't have any real overlap in terms of skills. They also found that doing well on some of these tests will better predict how well you'll do at others. For instance math and physics are typically more g-loaded so if someone does well on a math or physics test they are more likely to do well on an english test than the reverse. We call this quality of that predicts how well you're going to do at intellectual tasks g. And then we built a test to try to measure G and that's an IQ test, with IQ being the measurement of g.

> It is one the best predictors of job performance (up there with a work sample test), income, reaction time, how much schooling you'll get, how likely you are to commit crime, how long you'll live.

People say stuff like this all the time as if it's an uncontroversial fact, and it's much less supported by the literature than you're implying. So much of this is a matter of interpretation and the people interpreting it are generally people personally vested in the concept of IQ

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4557354/

I do agree that an IQ test can help measure severe intellectual impairment, or a change in an individual's ability because of illness or injury. I have a lot of doubts about it's meaningfulness beyond that.

> It is one the best predictors of job performance (up there with a work sample test), income, reaction time, how much schooling you'll get, how likely you are to commit crime, how long you'll live.

Almost all of which can also be predicted pretty well using your zip code. Are you sure IQ is measuring something internal?

Agreed - the UK longitudinal study showed a 24% difference in IQ between job professions https://onepercentrule.substack.com/p/intelligence-and-the-o...

I still wonder if there's merit to this comment critiquing the state of the field of psychometrics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887

If ChatGPT takes over SWE's jobs, will Google just administer IQ tests to determine applicant suitability?

Suitability to do what?

If coding is done by AI that will mean humans will be hired to do something else and whatever that something else is, the interview process will try to measure how good a candidate is at doing that thing the candidate is being hired for, whatever that thing is

For those of us born at the zenith, the arc is quite clear: the counter-culture won and we’re now producing generations of morons and imbeciles.

Unlike every person born before me and every person born after me—all of whom insist their childhood was the zenith—my childhood was actually the zenith

That’s sort of what the data says.

Thank you for this clear demonstration of your imbecility.

("The data" says nothing about your own personal intelligence.)

Is this a reference I’m not getting?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com