Hacker News Reader

Comment by 64e23275635e | Hacker News Reader

it's already happening. IQ is already stagnating or even going down

What's even more worrying is that I've heared plenty of people defend it as, "Younger generations are just intelligent in different ways compared to older generations."

I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.

To add, less articulate and somewhat overtly anti-intellectual. Why even learn something when you can ask the slot machine?

The anti-intellectualism is so weird to me, it feels like people get overly defensive and angry (a secondary emotional response to shame) when confronted with their own lack of knowledge / intelligence or when asked or challenged to use their own brain.

The benefits are increased productivity, consumer satisfaction, and shareholder profits

Halfway through 30's means you were born in the 90's though, but other than that you're right, the advent of the internet, google, and rapid fire short form content has messed with our attention spans; the following generation grew up on the internet and saw the advent of high intensity videos and then short-form mobile-only infinite-stream short-form dashed-words videos.

You should point out then that "border collies are just intelligent in different ways, too"

IQ is calibrated so that the average IQ is 100. If the average IQ is going down, something has gone very wrong somewhere

IQ gets manually recalibrated downwards when people get stupider so it's mean 100 by construction.

Hmm, who does the calibration, and how scientific are they about it? Can we check their work?

I am not too deep into the science of it, but this video gives a good outline about IQ in general.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkKPsLxgpuY

IQ is a relative measure not an absolute one. 100 IQ in 2026 can be massively different in absolute terms to 100 IQ in 1956.

If you look at old test papers - the lack of intelligence in modern times is very stark.

Yes, but the comment was about IQ, not absolute intelligence. The median intelligence is, by definition, 100 IQ, so the median IQ cannot be decreasing

There's always a lag, you calibrate the test based on previous results, not future ones. If intelligence is decreasing I'd expect every IQ test to keep scoring a median lower than 100 unless taken immediately after calibration. Once it stops decreasing they'd converge again.

The median IQ of successive generations may absolutely be falling

Look up the Flynn effect. You're right in the first paragraph, but wrong about the direction.

The Flynn effect ended several years ago and started reversing.

Even if that turns out to be true, rather than it starting to hit a ceiling where we can expect it to not consistently go in a single direction it does not alter anything I wrote, which addressed a comparison between 1956 and 2026.

The claim of a "lack of intelligence in modern times" is flat out contradicted by the data. It'd take a lot of regression to get back to 1956 levels.

I feel like this post unironically proves the point.

I wonder why is that, what the point of having a score that you can not compare them without external context (the day of taking exam)

IQ is a measure that tests how well people can do IQ tests, I don't think it's an objective measure at all.

People love to say this, but the whole point of IQ is that it happens to correlate well with many other, more practical measures of cognitive capability. That’s why it is used.

Other things also correlate well with many practical measures of cognitive ability, but you wouldn't be so quick to say that they're privileged the way IQ is, so there must be more to the explanation.

IQ is privileged because it's easily quantifiable by definition, testable with minimal setup and (assuming a modern test) more or less universal without cultural biases.

I mean it's certainly convenient! But that's a weak epistemic claim. Obviously, the cultural loading of g and of IQ tests is a complicated subject; I certainly wouldn't summarize it as "universal without cultural biases".

i’m not doubting this, but do you know if there are any studies on this already?

https://phys.org/news/2023-03-online-iq-scores-century.html https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2023.101734

that's a study published in 2023, analyzing data that ended in 2018.

Right but the question was:

"Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?"

Not LLMs specifically.

Insofar as I believe there is value in IQ tests, this is a technology-driven effect, most likely due to the impact of distraction and search result immediacy on sustained thinking.

IQs used to just rise, year on year, because living in the world required more and more of the thinking that IQ tests measure. And now they don't.

Hard not to see what you’ve just done here as an analogue of what the article is arguing against

US centric data, absolutely useless. This is just measuring american decline, not civilisation changes.

It's also a first time decline afterany decades of steady increases. We have no basis for determining causality - it might just be that we've finally maxed out the possible gains from the causes underlying the Flynn effect.

I am the lazy human today, but this one is listing a few references:

https://www.pressenza.com/2025/07/the-decline-of-the-intelli...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com