[HN Gopher] IQ scores are falling and have been for decades (2018)
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IQ scores are falling and have been for decades (2018)
Author : SQL2219
Score : 209 points
Date : 2022-05-14 10:43 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| seydor wrote:
| There s no use to fret about it. I think nature is telling us
| that IQ (or intelligence) is not needed. sorry folks you ve been
| optimizing the wrong thing
|
| Is there a method to dumb yourself down? asking for my smart
| friends
| freahsteaksauce wrote:
| The book I'm reading Weapons of Mass Instruction explains this as
| being part of the goals of forced schooling as designed by
| Carnegie and other industrialist to make easier to manage
| laborers.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| You just created an account to say "education bad" ?
| mc4ndr3 wrote:
| PFAS
| kybernetyk wrote:
| Regression to the mean.
| seydor wrote:
| regression of the mean
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| Regression to the moron.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Interesting...could this explain secular stagnation?
| seydor wrote:
| I know mine has
| walkhour wrote:
| The article insists several times this is not due to genetics,
| because people with lower IQ don't have more children. This is
| not true[0]. What the article may want to say is that it's not
| due exclusively to genetics.
|
| Given fertility is negatively correlated with intelligence, and
| how hereditary IQ is, it's just a matter of time until IQ
| declines.
|
| This is not so shocking, how many kids does your typical college
| professor have before 35, is it 0 or 1?
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
| marcusverus wrote:
| You hint at this, but it's worth saying it explicitly--folks
| with lower IQ could out-produce folks with high IQ _even
| without having more kids per-person_ , as long as they're
| reproducing at a younger age. If, say, lower IQ people were to
| have kids at an average age of 23, and higher people have kids
| at an average age of 33, the lower IQ folks would have twice as
| many kids over a ~100 year span and 4x as many over ~150 years!
| dqpb wrote:
| It also begs the question, who's really more intelligent? The
| person who spent their prime years pontificating, or the person
| who won the evolution game?
| ralusek wrote:
| This statement is like saying "who's really the strongest,
| the strongmen or the lady who won the marathon?"
| dqpb wrote:
| It's more like saying "Whose more productive, the Engineer
| or the Farmer?".
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > It also begs the question, who's really more intelligent?
| The person who spent their prime years pontification, or the
| person who won the evolution game?
|
| You're right, who's smarter? The people who manage to
| reproduce thus pass on their genes or the ones that are "too
| smart" not to?
| [deleted]
| zo1 wrote:
| You could say they're winning, but they are essentially
| abusing the good-will of society by imposing the care of
| their offspring onto society instead of caring for them
| themselves. It may sound bad, but in my mind, purposefully
| bringing children into the world without security to care
| for them seems immensely evil and selfish.
| dqpb wrote:
| Don't hate the player, hate the game.
| walkhour wrote:
| What is the game in this context, democracy?
| dqpb wrote:
| Reproduction. It's THE game. It always has been.
| missedthecue wrote:
| The person who won the evolution game only has a more adept
| ability and grasping, retaining, and applying concepts,
| especially at high levels. I remember people at University
| who so easily managed to apprehend abstract concepts while I
| would struggle for hours. They weren't necessarily more or
| less intelligent, but they were wired differently and could
| clearly operate at a higher level.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| The article acknowledges this, and says that the major findings
| is:
|
| - IQ is not as strongly correlated to parents as believed
|
| - IQ is not negatively correlated with fertility
|
| When an article says "we've found evidence against current
| accepted knowledge" it is not a counter argument to say
| "Current accepted knowledge says otherwise, therefore you are
| wrong!"
|
| But we do need better access to the numbers behind both sides
| in order to participate in the discussion.
| walkhour wrote:
| I agree you're technically right, however I think the article
| does everything possible to obscure this fact, see some
| quotes:
|
| > The research suggests that genes aren't what's driving the
| decline in IQ scores, according to the study, published
| Monday.
|
| > The causes in IQ increases over time and now the decline is
| due to environmental factors
|
| > It's not that dumb people are having more kids than smart
| people, to put it crudely. It's something to do with the
| environment, because we're seeing the same differences within
| families
|
| But I agree we need numbers, which was the most important
| thing the article could've provided.
| hajile wrote:
| IQ builds on itself.
|
| You gain static intelligence (what you've learned) using
| fluid intelligence (IQ). But learning new things quickly
| relies on a large body of knowledge to draw from.
|
| Lots of poor people denigrate education. "Street Smart" is
| considered the only useful knowledge. Lots of these parents
| literally don't care if their kids fail out of school (after
| all, they did too and are "just fine"). These kids never
| build up that critical knowledge early which nullifies their
| IQ for life.
|
| Bad diet, abuse, crime, high stress, being raised by a single
| mother, etc also affect IQ. All these things are pervasive in
| most poor neighborhoods.
|
| Parents don't affect initial intelligence as much, but they
| certainly affect whether that intelligence is squandered.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is original research.
| nathias wrote:
| Decades is understating it. The beginning of civilization marks
| the start of the first downtrend in hominid brain to body ratio.
| There are a few different theories about why, but I find the
| systemic one the most plausible. The increase in the complexity
| of a system comes with a reduction in complexity of the parts.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| And aren't domesticated animals generally less intelligent than
| their wild relatives?
| nathias wrote:
| yea, that's the second theory, but the timings don't really
| match, we started self-domesticating a long time before
| civilization
| willmadden wrote:
| This is a garbage CNN article about a laughable iq study that's
| so bad it borders on propaganda.
|
| The study focuses on "two brothers" cohorts and makes the claim
| that iqs within families are on the decline, but fails to adjust
| for confounding factors, like the selection bias inherent in
| their cohort selection process.
|
| Other studies show that first borns have a higher iq than later
| siblings, and to a greater extent than what this study found!
|
| Iq isn't boosted by higher education. This isn't up for debate.
| Outside of malnourishment and sensory deprivation it it mostly
| heritable.
| thret wrote:
| Is this attributable to leaded gasoline?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. "Use of leaded
| gasoline, which he invented, released large quantities of lead
| into the atmosphere all over the world. High atmospheric lead
| levels have been linked with serious long-term health problems
| from childhood, including neurological impairment"
| staticassertion wrote:
| Lead poisoning disproportionately affected those born between
| 1950 to 1980 and have significantly dropped in the last 20-30
| years. So I don't think so.
| andrew_ wrote:
| I believe you're neglecting the cascade effect. If those
| people had children (they did) then their emphasis on
| education and the kind of rearing for children that
| encourages more intelligence was surely effected.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Sure, I'm willing to buy that it's related, but it's going
| to definitely be tertiary effects and not that the
| population is poisoned.
| juanani wrote:
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| I thought the effect was just localized to this website.
| dcx wrote:
| At the time of writing, much of this thread is centered around
| (a) dismissing the study based on considerations that were ruled
| out within the article, and (b) dismissing the format and value
| of IQ tests. Let's set these aside and discuss the open question:
|
| > What specific environmental factors cause changes in
| intelligence remains relatively unexplored.
|
| What might these factors possibly be? Some candidates I am aware
| of, that are known to affect IQ: heavy metals in infant formula
| [1], increases in baseline CO2 levels [2], stress [3],
| deficiencies caused by soil depletion [4]. Leaded gasoline seems
| to have been ruled out by timing.
|
| It's interesting to me that this started in 1975 and is observed
| across Europe. Do we know of any major changes in habits or
| industrial practices that started around that year?
|
| [1] https://www.legalexaminer.com/home-family/baby-food-
| lawsuits...
|
| [2] https://medium.com/wedonthavetime/co2-affects-our-
| thinking-9...
|
| [3] https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/31/science/study-ties-iq-
| sco...
|
| [4] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-
| an...
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| Is IQ connected to genetics somehow?
|
| That could maybe indicate that lower percentile IQ are just as
| - or more - successful at leaving descendants nowadays than
| before.
|
| If we consider the world spent half the century in large scale
| conflict, maybe that was an IQ "filter" (since, for example,
| academics wouldn't be drafted to the front lines), but now
| humanity doesn't face the same pressure?
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| > (b) dismissing the format and value of IQ tests. Let's set
| these aside and discuss the open question:
|
| >> What specific environmental factors cause changes in
| intelligence remains relatively unexplored.
|
| If IQ tests don't accurately measure intelligence, what's the
| worth of discussing those environmental factors?
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Plastics off-gassing in the home, car, and at work comes to
| mind. It would kind of bridge the gap between habit (shopping)
| and industrial practice. Though I'm not sure about health or IQ
| implications specifically.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I cannot speak about Europe, but in the US, mid-seventies is
| when one US Political Party started its war on Education, and
| that accelerated in the 80s and still on going. So I agree it
| is lack of quality of free education in the early years of
| childhood development.
|
| Too bad the study did not also look at IQ differences between
| private/public schools over the same period. By private, I mean
| the schools that only the very rich can send their children
| too.
|
| Also, I did read somewhere else, a study was also done on
| increased CO2 and intelligence and found higher CO2 could lower
| peoples intelligence level.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Spending (inflation-adjusted) per pupil in the US is up 50%
| since 1990 alone:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/203118/expenditures-
| per-...
| swasheck wrote:
| do they have more granular says that allows for nutrition
| programs, teacher salaries, physical plant, materials,
| transportation, admin overhead (it infrastructure,
| elearning platforms, superintendent salary, etc)? that
| breakdown would go more to help understand the educational
| endeavor over against the political or developmental
| endeavors
| mdp2021 wrote:
| I am afraid also Europe has seen debilitating attacks in more
| Countries. Parts of the attacks have been public - some
| intentional, some collateral - or exposed; results can be
| evident and documented.
|
| Nonetheless: scholarization is surely impactive but not
| necessitant on Intelligence.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Attacking education has been bipartisan. It was absurd to
| attack Amway princess DeVos for pushing the same dismantling
| of public education that was accelerated by Arne Duncan under
| Obama. Democratic Party darling and shooting-concealer Rahm
| Emanuel closed down half of Chicago's public schools, whose
| entire white enrollment had already left with their vouchers
| to charters and privates so it didn't affect anyone who
| mattered. Hell, you could sell the buildings to the charters.
|
| edit: _Former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
| endorses Kerr for state schools superintendent_
|
| https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2021/.
| ..
|
| _GOP-backed candidate for schools chief says she's a
| Democrat_
|
| https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-wisconsin-elections-
| deb...
| notahacker wrote:
| So two hypotheses: Generation X was a generation of unparalleled
| genius effortlessly surpassing their idiot ancestors before who
| merely built the modern world and their children who merely
| consumed and produced vastly more written content than ever
| before whilst playing with increasingly complex abstractions on
| computers, or IQ test comparisons between dissimilar populations
| don't really mean very much, because the "quotient" is a ranking
| mechanism for solving a certain type of paper puzzle, not an
| actual thing.
| qzbend wrote:
| jakobnissen wrote:
| Luckily, we can easily test how much IQ matters by looking at
| the relationship between IQ and health, wealth, educational
| achievement and so on.
|
| And it turns out that IQ mean quite a lot, no matter which way
| you believe the causality goes.
| notahacker wrote:
| The apparent peak IQ generation consistently scores lower
| than later generations on age-adjusted measures of health,
| wealth, educational achievement etc though.
|
| The fact that IQ test scores are somewhat useful as a ranking
| mechanism amongst a cohort is completely consistent with it
| being just being a collection of standardised tests
| calibrated to score in a particular way, not an actual
| "thing" where apparent subtle generational changes might
| represent genuine changes to our physiology or intellectual
| potential and not just inconsequential differences in our
| preparedness to solve paper puzzles.
| istinetz wrote:
| >the "quotient" is a ranking mechanism for solving a certain
| type of paper puzzle, not an actual thing.
|
| Sure, except it strongly correlates with pretty much every
| single measure of fluid intelligence you can think of. And with
| a billion real life outcomes, besides.
|
| It just so happens that the best statistical distillation of
| intelligence measures happens to take the form of "paper
| puzzles". We _can_ , I guess, do a 12 hour barrage of 50
| different intelligence tests, but what's the point, when one
| does the job.
|
| >So two hypotheses
|
| There are plenty of other hypotheses.
| notahacker wrote:
| > Sure, except it strongly correlates with pretty much every
| single measure of fluid intelligence you can think of. And
| with a billion real life outcomes, besides
|
| Sure, test scores correlate with other test scores
| (surprisingly badly) which correlate with other proxy
| measures of intelligence. Quelle surprise!
|
| There's a massive difference between acknowledging a test is
| somewhat useful in ranking peers and agonising over whether
| one cohort getting scores in a particular test a couple of
| points lower than another cohort from a completely different
| background represents some real world shortcoming of the
| latter cohort in anything other than that particular set of
| puzzles. The research establishing a lack of support for
| supposed "dysgenic" trends (though absence of evidence isn't
| necessarily evidence of absence) because the drop happens
| within families might be superficially interesting, but we're
| looking at tiny points of difference in a noisy series.
| There's typically more variation between Weschler and Raven
| tests adminstered to the same individuals than the measured
| generational "IQ decline" the headline is encouraging us to
| agonise over. When all the points of data other than IQ tests
| suggest that subsequent generations haven't struggled
| intellectually compared with their forebears, there's not
| much reason to suspect the trends in paper puzzle scores are
| a signal and not just noise.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| In france, kids in the 50s could write with a nib/ink by 6,
| before starting primary school. We are lowering our education
| requirements since the 70s. Basically since the rise of
| "international governing education", see failure modern maths and
| global reading.
|
| And while IQ is not too much related to education, we let kids do
| what ever, when ever for a so call peace of mind, so yeah a kid
| who is never challenged can't have broad skills. I would dare to
| say that video games are saving IQ scores but for all the wrong
| reasons (fast pattern recognition and spacial movement related
| tests).
| ddanv wrote:
| You don't play the correct video games. See puzzles and be
| puzzled :)
| FredPret wrote:
| Perhaps only the hackernews crowd plays the interesting games
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| The French education system has always been needlessly tough on
| kids. I went to a European school with many nationalities mixed
| in (each with their own section), and the poor French were
| overworked to hell and received lower grades than us anyway.
| Each teacher viewed this as normal and said that in France it
| would've been even harder. None of the French were especially
| smart because of it though, so I have no clue why they were
| doing it. Sadism?
|
| So in my mind it's a welcome change.
| xornox wrote:
| In Finland, everybody and your mum has "higher education".
| Requirements are surely decreasing. Old academic universities
| are now vocational schools.
| batch12 wrote:
| My suspicion is that having direct access to all information has
| offloaded some of our cognitive capabilities to our devices.
| Also, making _everything_ political-- and as such being told what
| to think about _every_ topic doesn 't really help us exercise our
| critical thinking skills. Maybe we need to "use your brain" more-
| as my dad would have said.
| everyone wrote:
| I thought IQ tests were pseudoscientific anyway?
|
| If the number doesnt have any rigorous meaning then who cares if
| it changes, up or down, could mean anything.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| People who score well on them are usually convinced they are
| scientific.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| IQ tests can be trained for and gamed, at the very least.
| ryan93 wrote:
| no one does. there are orders of magnitude more studying for
| the SAT and studying for the sat has a marginal benefit for
| many
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Europe doesn't use SAT.
|
| I concede most people don't actively train for IQ tests,
| especially not people who only have to do it once. But one
| can't exactly claim "IQ tests are flawless measures of IQ"
| when they can be trained and gamed, which is the point.
| xupybd wrote:
| They're a good proxy for abstract ability.
| jjgreen wrote:
| They're a great measure of intelligence -- if you believe in
| them, you're an idiot.
| annyeonghada wrote:
| >I thought IQ tests were pseudoscientific anyway?
|
| This is false. Look a this reddit post[1] for a summary of the
| scientific consensus.
|
| [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/oh6115/perf
| ...
| everyone wrote:
| You seem very certain. Several of the links in that wall o'
| text are merely to surveys where a number of psychologists
| are asked whether they think IQ is a valid measure or not.
|
| The reddit post just shows that some (maybe even a majority
| of) psychologists accept IQ. I could post an equal amount of
| links to psychology studies rejecting it. But that doesn't
| even matter. What's more important is that the field of
| psychology as a whole is still in it's infancy as a science.
| Up until about the 90's almost 100% of it was pure bunk.
| Psychologists were using the DSM up until only a couple of
| years ago! Recently there has been the revelation of the
| reproducibility crisis. In short, psychology has a long way
| to go before it's on the same level as other sciences, I
| wouldn't be so certain of something from psychology's dark
| past like IQ.
| ranprieur wrote:
| People are becoming smart in different ways and the tests aren't
| keeping up.
| lrvick wrote:
| I blame smartphones. Really I do. My overall ability to focus and
| consume longform content has gone up dramatically since ditching
| my phone several months ago.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I'm inching closer and closer to just deleting every app on my
| phone and tablet except what allows me to take calls, answer
| emails, and read books. I read so much when I was a kid, with a
| great deal of focus, but now I feel like I need constant
| shifting multisensory stimulation. I can hardly get through ten
| minutes of a movie without pausing to look at my phone. I can't
| listen to a podcast without playing a game or something at the
| same time.
|
| I absolutely feel that I've gotten dumber in the last fifteen
| years.
| hedora wrote:
| Do you know of a phone that lets you do that? In particular,
| how do you uninstall the web browser?
| mdp2021 wrote:
| If you cannot with your own, you could try with custom
| ROMs, or through rooting (check the security implications
| though).
|
| One thing, "to each its own", but I would like to /have/ a
| web browser on my mobile OS devices: no browser I know does
| text reflow since very many years, which implies, "there is
| no browser". Maybe you should really assess the quality of
| your practices: awareness (of the absurdities) will have
| you manage your actions differently and accordingly.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Technically you can remove Safari from an iPhone the same
| way you uninstall any app, though I've never tried it
| (yet). Apple added the ability to remove built-in apps a
| few versions ago.
|
| I suspect it leaves the guts in place, as Safari is used by
| the OS, but it should remove the ability to use it as an
| app.
|
| No idea about android.
| nottorp wrote:
| You don't need to ditch the phone. Just disable all
| notifications and maybe uninstall some content consumption
| feeds like FB or twitter.
|
| A phone is what you make of it.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Then I spend too much time on HN
| Snowworm wrote:
| Maybe set time limits then. Also have an alternative thing
| to do on your phone if you can't do anything else (like
| Duolingo or respond to important emails).
| carapace wrote:
| It can't be just smartphones, the downward trend started in the
| 1970's. My guess is television. The "idiot lamp" made idiots,
| QED.
| zo1 wrote:
| Also seems to coincide with the "War on Poverty".
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty
| carapace wrote:
| That is a USA policy, these studies are of Europeans:
|
| > Norwegian researchers analyzed the IQ scores of Norwegian
| men born between 1962 and 1991 and found that scores
| increased by almost 3 percentage points each decade for
| those born between 1962 to 1975 - but then saw a steady
| decline among those born after 1975.
|
| > Similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the
| Netherlands, Finland and Estonia have demonstrated a
| similar downward trend in IQ scores, said Ole Rogeberg, a
| senior research fellow at the Ragnar Frisch Center for
| Economic Research in Norway and co-author of the new study.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| As many are implicitly noting, there seems to have been an
| increase of passive consumption of addictive material. Still
| ongoing (read posts nearby who speak about smartphones as if
| it were nicotine...)
| joachim4 wrote:
| Greyscale and no social media did reduce my smartphone
| consumption a lot. And consulting Instagram / Reddit only on a
| computer is not a death in itself (plus I use Intention [1] to
| keep my time on those websites in a normal range.
|
| [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/intention-stop-
| min...
| Simon321 wrote:
| This is from 2018 to be clear.
| flint wrote:
| ^Should be top comment.
| sremani wrote:
| I think Taleb gets it right about IQ, lack of it is a dis-
| qualifier and beyond a point after certain IQ score it becomes
| noise.
| zone411 wrote:
| Covid won't help:
| https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5....
| tjpnz wrote:
| That study focuses on the severe end of the spectrum but I've
| also read that just getting it (even if asymptomatic) may have
| a longterm impact on the brain. That's grim, even more so given
| how many now consider infection to be an inevitable part of
| life.
| yarg wrote:
| No, they aren't - and by definition (IQ across the population has
| a fixed mean and standard deviation).
| fastball wrote:
| Idiocracy a documentary?
| SQL2219 wrote:
| Brawndo is the environmental factor at play.
| staticassertion wrote:
| > "It's not that dumb people are having more kids than smart
| people, to put it crudely. It's something to do with the
| environment, because we're seeing the same differences within
| families," he said.
|
| > The study not only showed IQ variance between children the
| same parents, but because the authors had the IQ scores of
| various parents, it demonstrated that parents with higher IQs
| tended to have more kids, ruling out the dysgenic fertility
| theory as a driver of falling IQ scores and highlighting the
| role of environmental factors instead.
| underwater wrote:
| That movie really missed the mark. It made out like the dumbing
| down would be a result of generations of poor breeding. Instead
| we see the dumbing down has been due to people willingly
| thumbing their nose at science and reason.
| andrew_ wrote:
| It was slapstick... it wasn't supposed to hit any mark. It
| was supposed to make you laugh. Just because some elements
| are used to mock the current state of things doesn't mean
| it's supposed to be a reference.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| The backlash against science is fairly reasonable, given how
| often science is misrepresented and how often preliminary
| findings are reported as facts, often in some misguided
| attempt to help make it easier for people to understand.
|
| People pick up on the discrepancies, and overstating our
| confidence early makes it look really bad when it turns out
| that the results were incorrect.
|
| The Covid pandemic is a great example of this, a lot of
| extremely sketchy and highly preliminary studies were
| misrepresented as certainties. It takes many months to
| produce a solid scientific study, sometimes even years. Yet
| here we were, a month into the pandemic inundated in studies
| that simply could not be solid. But they sounded scary, so
| they made the news. This created the appearance that science
| kept contradicting itself. One week the virus had a 40%
| mortality rate, and then next it had 0.1%. What gives,
| science?
|
| The basic posture of science is "I don't know". If you gloss
| over that fact because it's scary when science doesn't have
| answers yet, then what you are communicating isn't science,
| it's something else, speculation, the party line, I dunno.
|
| Overall the fundamental problem is a basic lack of faith in
| grown adults to make their own judgements, and a willingness
| to simplify the message so much that it no longer is good
| science. If you don't let people be adults, they will be
| children instead. That is exactly where we are right now.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > The backlash against science is fairly reasonable, given
| how often science is misrepresented and how often
| preliminary findings are reported as facts, often in some
| misguided attempt to help make it easier for people to
| understand.
|
| Oh, that's nothing. You should have seen the post-WWII era,
| when the backlash against Science was rooted about
| efficient new ways of killing people and destroying the
| environment (both with and without the atomic bomb), and
| against authoritarians touting Progress while demanding the
| regimentation of society and destruction of traditional
| values and ways of life.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| The position of science in society is a discussion worth
| having.
|
| Excessive optimism toward science has had fairly
| detrimental results in the past. Often the problem isn't
| science itself though.
|
| A trap is that you can't actually derive values from
| science, because it doesn't provide any -- whatever
| values you extract from science are those you put in
| yourself through hidden assumptions. That makes it very
| easy to lean on science to ostensibly support almost any
| action through some line of reasoning like "Science shows
| that if we kill the poor, we'll be able to reduce taxes
| by 90%. Therefore we should get our guns!" Science
| doesn't care if our taxes are high or low, it doesn't
| care if we live or die. Even if the premise about taxes
| is scientifically correct (I don't know), the conclusion
| isn't based on science alone.
|
| That's a bit of a parallel to the discussion of lockdowns
| and masks and so on, while science may be able to answer
| what effects these have, science can't say we _ought_ to
| do these things. That requires something else to be
| added, although sadly the discussion has almost entirely
| been about what the science says about these things, not
| the relative worth of saving lives versus individual
| freedom vs GDP, which is the real discussion.
| xvilka wrote:
| The science itself is good. It's scientism that's
| dangerous. Also malicious intents of some academia
| members to get grants or lifelong job based on the
| misleading research.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| >a lot of extremely sketchy and highly preliminary studies
| were misrepresented as certainties.
|
| Were they? I thought they were being represented as the
| best current understanding, and it was a given that it was
| a new disease.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| My point is we didn't _have_ an understanding. Science
| doesn 't move that fast, and whatever was published was
| highly speculative, but the it sounded scary so it got
| media coverage.
| [deleted]
| Bhurn00985 wrote:
| More like a prophesy or prediction ?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| "In a separate study that has not been released, he and his
| colleagues looked at existing research in an effort to
| demonstrate that staying in school longer directly equates to
| higher IQ scores."
|
| ...or maybe, it just improves your test-taking ability?
| marcusverus wrote:
| IMO the Idiocracy scenario[0] is a likely candidate for a Great
| Filter[1].
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
| karaterobot wrote:
| The article specifically dispenses with the Idiocracy scenario.
|
| > "The main exciting finding isn't that there was a decline in
| IQ," Ritchie said. "The interesting thing about this paper is
| that they were able to show a difference in IQ scores within
| the same families."
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| Aren't IQ tests basically BS?
|
| > TruTV's Adam Ruins Everything is known for debunking accepted
| wisdom. It took less than two minutes to demolish IQ tests:
|
| Quote: https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/charles-darwin-
| sp...
|
| Video: https://youtu.be/W3oUqKUx2o0
| gruez wrote:
| >Aren't IQ tests basically BS?
|
| Depends on what your starting premise is. If you start out with
| a strawman like "IQ fully captures a person's intelligence",
| then yeah it's "BS". At the same time, if you're arguing that
| IQ tests are "BS" (ie. no value whatsoever), then that's also
| false, see:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_c...
| kkfx wrote:
| Intellect need stimuli, education not stereotypical Ford-mode
| workers formation like neoliberal schools have planted ad any
| level of the society because is easier to govern Ford-model
| workers than acculturated Citizens.
|
| That's is. If we teach from the early childhood we nourish
| intelligence, if not we nurtured stupidity. The rest might matter
| to a certain extent but it's mostly background noise.
| tharne wrote:
| > Norwegian researchers analyzed the IQ scores of Norwegian men
| born between 1962 and 1991 and found that scores increased by
| almost 3 percentage points each decade for those born between
| 1962 to 1975
|
| Statements like this have always made me question these tests.
| Ten points in IQ represents a movement of one standard deviation
| in intelligence. To believe the quote above would mean that there
| was a _massive_ increase in intelligence between the 1960 's and
| the 1990's. But an increase of one standard deviation across any
| trait at a population level is very very unusual, and likely
| would have been noticed long before any studies were conducted.
|
| Put another way, do we really believe that someone with slightly
| below average intelligence in 1962, say an IQ of 85, is the
| intellectual equivalent of someone with a significantly below
| average IQ (e.g. 75) in 1990? An IQ of 75 typically means you're
| not in public school or if you are, you're in Special Ed.
| paulpauper wrote:
| the Flynn Effect is controversial for this reason. IQ tests are
| still useful of assessing and predicting individual differences
| of ability.
| [deleted]
| tls wrote:
| svantana wrote:
| The data from the study has a giant elephant in the room: war.
| The participants are 18 year old Norwegians who were forced to
| take a military examination. The reason they do an IQ test is to
| evaluate if they are suited for a more analytic role, such as
| radar and comms. The peak result is for the birth year 1975, i.e.
| tests taken in 1993. During the cold war, a soviet attack was a
| real possibility, but that threat pretty much evaporated in the
| 90's. I did this exam in 1998 and the general vibe was pretty
| much: "why are we still doing this?" Few people took it
| seriously.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> During the cold war, a soviet attack was a real possibility,
| but that threat pretty much evaporated in the 90's_
|
| It didn't really evaporate, it's happening right now, except
| not in Norway.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| The Simpsons had it right again.
| brokencode wrote:
| At the very least, the perceived threat evaporated.
| _moof wrote:
| I'm guessing by your username that you were quite young at
| the time. But things actually were different thirty years
| ago.
| habibur wrote:
| It's not from one study. From 2nd paragraph of the article.
|
| > Similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands,
| Finland and Estonia have demonstrated a similar downward trend
| in IQ scores
| zdragnar wrote:
| Having multiple studies does not mean that obvious
| confounding factors found in one are irrelevant. If anything,
| it calls into question the other studies.
| speleding wrote:
| If the numbers from other countries also come from the
| military then the point is still valid. I got tested for
| conscription in the Netherlands in the 90s and a lot of
| people were wondering if there was any point to it
| (conscription was abolished soon after). So I can see an
| earlier generation of conscripts being much more motivated to
| do well.
| oriolid wrote:
| For military test it works the other way too: If you score
| high you're more likely to end up in officer training or
| some specialist troops so you have to serve longer. Shorter
| service is a strong incentive to get a lower score on
| purpose. (source: I live in Finland and have done the
| military service)
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Someone I know pretended to be a drug addicted idiot to
| get out of the mandatory service. It worked, he was
| classified not fit for service. I've heard of another
| case where they pretended to be gay, back in the day when
| they wouldn't draft gay people. It's absolutely plausible
| and highly likely if you ask me that people would
| purposefully perform badly given the right incentives.
| 6510 wrote:
| Right, when they asked me if I used drugs I replied: Are
| you asking this because of the urine test?
| oriolid wrote:
| I've understood that the army gives the not fit for
| service grade quite easily, because the people who are
| willing to go that far to avoid service could be serious
| trouble if they'd be forced to serve anyway. Back in the
| day many employers considered missing military service
| suspicious so serving and doing the bare minimum would be
| better than trying to avoid it completely.
| lordnacho wrote:
| But the same dynamic applies for all: "The Russians are kaput
| and aren't going to attack us. They might even be our friends
| now."
|
| It might be hard to find numerical evidence for it, but many
| people will tell you that conscription in their country
| basically became a joke (if it existed at all) and you could
| wriggle out of it easily, or get an easy ride.
|
| FWIW, I know people from all those countries who will verify
| this, plus South Korea and Israel, where it is not a small
| thing. I've heard of Isrealis even preparing themselves
| especially hard in order to do well on the conscription,
| something I'd never heard of since.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The technical/electronic military intelligence units in the
| IDF are very prestigious and often gateways to high tech
| startups
| FabHK wrote:
| But not all IQ data comes from military conscripts (and
| might therefore be tainted by people not taking it
| seriously nowadays).
| seydor wrote:
| And why would conscripts try harder in 1975? What difference
| did it make?
|
| Another suggestion is that it has to do with the fact that this
| test is taken at a specific age. My very scientific hunch is
| that in the past few generations, adolescence was extended by
| decades, and the real problems in life started way later, while
| in 1975 people still married young
| ramesh31 wrote:
| With a global average IQ hovering around 80, it really terrifies
| me what the future has in store given how manipulable the masses
| are via social media. The recent Phillipines presidential
| election is a perfect example. There's a sort of cutoff I've
| noticed around 85-90 IQ where at or below that, people can simply
| be spoon-fed whatever form of reality you wish for them to
| accept. The truth no longer matters when someone's entire reality
| is shaped by 30 second TikTok videos that are actually just
| performances masquerading as "POV real life". All of those absurd
| fake videos we see and laugh at only exist because they work.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Colonial powers (not just the US) pour cash and military
| support into dictators supported by dumb nationalists, with the
| overt intention of helping them marginalize or exterminate
| their intelligent populations. And I don't mean that it happens
| inadvertently, I mean that we actively search for the effective
| influencers within rising movements happening in countries that
| we're draining the natural resources from through friendly
| dictators, and we inform those dictators who we also arm.
|
| We're actually breeding for stupidity.
| lvass wrote:
| This is a very extraordinary claim and should have really
| strong evidence. At least I'd want to know exactly what is
| being done to exterminate some groups. The latest example I
| know of is Stalin's food redirections. Or are you talking of
| mass migrations and "replacement genocide"?
| jmpman wrote:
| Brawndo has electrolytes.
| bretpiatt wrote:
| The analytical side of me doesn't understand how scores on a test
| that baselines the average to X (in the case of IQ, it is
| baseline of 100), then distributes them around that baseline on a
| normal distribution curve can go down over time.
|
| The article didn't link data so I can't dig in further.
|
| https://personalityanalysistest.com/iq-score/what-is-the-sta...
| Frost1x wrote:
| The average can vary from a given sample set over time and be
| used as a comparison. For a statement like "IQs are going
| up/down" you could probably get away with simply monitoring the
| average over time.
|
| If you start digging around to see that you're fairly comparing
| the groups then you'll almost always be able to split hairs.
| Most statistics outside of a theoretical context are flawed if
| you poke them hard enough.
| sinenomine wrote:
| It is remarkably obvious if you look at Tryon's experiment[1],
| and remember the Nature Genetics meta-analysis[2] proving
| average 49% heritability among all measured human traits.
|
| 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryon%27s_Rat_Experiment
|
| 2. https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3285
| Naga wrote:
| The article linked the study though:
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718793115
| bretpiatt wrote:
| Thanks, missed the link, reading study.
|
| So many variables here including way the math portion was
| measured moving to multiple choice in the 1990s when the
| scores start dropping, hopping on a flight, still skeptical.
|
| Other quick one, all 95% confidence interval on data that
| moves less than +/- 2.5% either way. I understand confidence
| interval isn't a straight linear margin of error, it one I'd
| want to also look at further.
| zone411 wrote:
| The most of obvious way would be to use the same test as
| previously and just compare the scores.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| Isn't it possible that changes in education style or focus
| could bias scores?
| staticassertion wrote:
| > Access to education is currently the most conclusive
| factor explaining disparities in intelligence, according to
| Ritchie. In a separate study that has not been released, he
| and his colleagues looked at existing research in an effort
| to demonstrate that staying in school longer directly
| equates to higher IQ scores.
|
| > But more research is needed to better understand other
| environmental factors thought to be linked to intelligence.
| Robin Morris, a professor of psychology at Kings College in
| London who was not involved in Ritchie's research, suggests
| that traditional measures of intelligence, such as the IQ
| test, might be outmoded in today's fast-paced world of
| constant technological change.
|
| > "In my view, we need to recognize that as time changes
| and people are exposed to different intellectual
| experiences, such as changes in the use of technology, for
| example social media, the way intelligence is expressed
| also changes. Educational methods need to adapt to such
| changes," Morris said.
| esja wrote:
| The first step is to run the same test. The second step is
| to work out why the results are different (if they are),
| which might include teaching styles, focus issues,
| malnutrition, or many other things.
| RobertoG wrote:
| 20 years ago you would have understood! ;-)
| impossiblefork wrote:
| I've heard that statement from many but I've never understood
| how they've been able to make this conceptually difficult for
| themselves:
|
| IQ tests measure relative to a reference population. So we can
| speak of the IQ of a person aged 20 born in 1990 on a test
| where 100 is the average score at age 20 of the population of
| those born in 1960, etcetera.
|
| Changes in average IQ has been something that has been spoken
| of in the literature since Flynn was young, back when IQ scores
| were rising.
| bretpiatt wrote:
| Okay, I see what you're saying, so we take two sample groups,
| use one as a baseline, then lay the second group over that
| curve.
|
| So now we need to be really careful about bias in the sample
| groups.
|
| To say IQ scores are dropping and we don't know why then
| means to me we don't know what variables were the key drivers
| of the first groups results so we therefore cannot possibly
| create a consistent second group to measure against the
| baseline.
|
| I'm still stuck but I'm often dense and skeptical on these
| type of analysis.
| staticassertion wrote:
| The tracked increase year over year of IQ over the course
| of a few decades is largely attributed to wider access to
| education, I believe.
| pas wrote:
| wasn't the IQ of young kids also increasing? which is
| mostly attributed to better health [both physical and
| mental] (which is mostly due to better socioeconomic
| situation in developed countries, so basically the whole
| post-WW2 upward curve)
| prepend wrote:
| > don't know what variables were the key drivers of the
| first groups results so we therefore cannot possibly create
| a consistent second group to measure against the baseline.
|
| This is why there are practices around statistics sampling
| and confidence intervals and whatnot. Of course we can't
| exactly recreate, that's impossible, but we can create
| samples in a way that the results are generalizable in both
| the baseline and the comparison. And the results are
| useful.
|
| I have a friend who says that it's impossible to know if we
| can't sample 100% ("how can we know how it will work in 100
| million if we only test in 1000?") and it's frustrating how
| just basic concepts of math and statistics make it hard for
| them to accept any research.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| There are many ways of knowing the means objectively. In
| countries with mandatory military service and where IQ
| tests are administered in connection wit that service
| there is reliable data.
|
| Another source is the number of clinical cases of mild
| mental retardation. This will mostly depend on how large
| the population subgroups with lowest IQ are, but if they
| are approximately fixed and there's no explosion in
| assortative mating it would be possible to calculate the
| true mean from that.
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| > Another source is the number of clinical cases of mild
| mental retardation.
|
| This assumes both classification criteria and testing
| rates remain constant over time. Both are poor
| assumptions.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Maybe, but the first one is certainly a good source.
| thriftwy wrote:
| I'd like to say 'hi' to xkcd with his religious attitude towards
| Flynn effect and readiness to ridicule others over that.
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| I believe the effect of Tiktok will be unprecedented
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| I wonder whether we need to take another look at our modern
| school education system. Maybe some of the things we (rashly?)
| ditched had some importance that we didn't realise at the time.
| Like learning poetry by heart, learning multiplication tables,
| "old-school" teaching methods that have now fallen out of favour.
| steebo wrote:
| An environmental cause appears likely, since this trend is being
| observed in many countries. Both the increase in IQ to 1975 and
| the drop thereafter could have environmental causes.
|
| The increase could be due to improved nutrition following WW 2,
| such as better access to food overall and the iodization of salt.
|
| For the decline, my money is on PFAS
| (https://www.sixclasses.org/videos/PFAS) and organohalogens more
| generally. Iodine is also a halogen, and all the other
| halogenated compounds we are pumping in the environment could
| interfere with iodine metabolism. These compounds are in nearly
| everything, and we're using ever larger quantities of them.
|
| There is evidence this affects fetal development and cognitive
| functioning years later
| (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2799472/), which is
| also why jurisdictions are banning flame retardants
| (https://www.tuvsud.com/en/e-ssentials-newsletter/consumer-pr...
| https://www.sixclasses.org/videos/flame-retardants )
| deeg wrote:
| Wouldn't this be balanced out by the reduced lead in the
| environment? There is a fairly strong argument that removing
| lead has lead to the decrease in crime (due to less development
| damage).
| Mo3 wrote:
| I too believe it has to have environmental causes. I saw a
| phenomenal documentary a few years ago that went into great
| detail of how especially pesticides and flame retardants are
| the most likely cause.
| dcx wrote:
| This seems like a pretty good hypothesis. I believe the main
| source of exposure to PFAS for most people is food packaging
| (IIRC nonstick pans don't move the needle unless you heat way
| above the safe range, and you'll smell the coating melting).
| What is the main source of exposure to organohalogens? I'm
| seeing information about mattresses, flame retardants, and
| seafood.
| steebo wrote:
| PFAS is in so many common consumer products you might well
| say "it is in everything." That outdoor jacket you're
| wearing? Coated in PFAS. Your stain-resistant couch? PFAS.
|
| All textiles break and release fibres, and we inevitably end
| up eating them.
|
| And if you are cooking with a non-stick pan, it is a
| guarantee that you are ingesting them. It doesn't have to be
| the PTFE itself, the emulsifiers (such as PFOA
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid) are
| more volatile and have been measured in food cooked with non-
| stick pans.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Maybe we'll finally achieve equity, where everyone has the same
| (low) IQ. Wouldn't that be the most ideal situation?
| fedeb95 wrote:
| I always had a problem getting the point of IQ tests. It
| necessarily makes assumptions on what intelligence is, seems a
| bit self referencing. It measures how you conform to what a
| specific group of people think intelligence is...
|
| So I can't really take into high consideration inference based on
| average IQ test results. It could also mean that people are
| becoming intelligent in stuff not measured by the test. I really
| don't know.
|
| Another point to consider: even if we had the perfect way to
| measure intelligence, so what? Why waste an intelligent person
| time doing a test about intelligence? What does this accomplish?
| bena wrote:
| Intelligent people will learn faster. Sometimes without
| explicit instruction. Just like those with intellectual
| disabilities, hyper-intelligent children also need special
| resources.
|
| A lot of people want to keep the hyper-intelligent in the same
| classrooms as the normally-intelligent students as a form of
| child labor almost. The idea being that the hyper-intelligent
| children could inspire and help the normally-intelligent.
|
| I always like to ask if they would also be amenable to allowing
| those students with intellectual disabilities in the general
| classrooms. And the answer is always no, because those students
| would slow down the classroom. And I ask why can't the
| normally-intelligent inspire and help the intellectually
| disabled. And they still don't get it.
|
| The distance between the hyper-intelligent and the normally-
| intelligent is the same as that between the normally-
| intelligent and intellectually disabled. Any help the normally-
| intelligent may receive is undercut by the harm done to the
| hyper-intelligent.
|
| They need special resources just as the other side of the
| spectrum does. But they often get less. And we often have to
| stretch the definition because while one intellectually
| disabled child would be enough to allocate resources for
| special instruction, you need at least 5 to 10 hyper-
| intelligent children before you're allowed to split them off
| for special instruction.
|
| Intelligence is a trait, just like height. Some people are
| tall, some short, some average.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| I share your point on help across all the spectrum of
| abilities, and I don't think there aren't differences in
| intelligence. I just question this way of measuring it and
| that measurement is useful. The IQ test models results with a
| gaussian distribution, so this should mean you don't have to
| think about distributing people across classrooms by hand.
| It's pretty rare to only have a class of intellectually
| disabled or geniuses all banded together.
|
| And to measure height only takes a meter. Pretty
| straightforward and without biases. The creator of IQ tests
| seemed to have doubts about the validity of the test, so...
| (validity, not its reliability)
| bena wrote:
| Both Simon and Binet objected to misuse of their work, but
| they never doubted that it had use and actually measured
| something. But, who wouldn't object to the misuse of their
| own work.
|
| You do understand how the special education system works,
| right? They specifically place kids in the programs because
| those kids need the resources. It is not rare at all.
| Because we explicitly do it. In nearly every school
| district in America, you will find teachers who are
| specifically there to service special education children.
| o_m wrote:
| co2 levels is also getting higher which have negative impacts on
| learning and concentration.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Are there any credible / non scammy ways to take one of these
| tests online? I haven't looked much myself but it seemed like
| they would largely be garbage social media bait, or make you take
| a long test and ask for money at the end.
| aaron695 wrote:
| blululu wrote:
| The actual research comes from 2018:
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718793115
|
| The one thing that stands out is that the sample population comes
| from Norwegian Military conscripts. Since the end of the Cold War
| militaries have contracted across NATO and Western Europe. I
| would be curious anyone from Norway could comment on whether
| there might be a fundamental shift in the data. If a lot of smart
| kids avoid conscription by going to University somewhere then the
| results of these tests ought to trend downwards.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I'm not Norwegian but my guess is the system is much like in
| Denmark, where officially there is also conscription.
|
| The thing is though, it's not taken terribly seriously anymore,
| and this has probably been a trend since the cold war ended. If
| you want to avoid getting called up, just about any excuse will
| do just fine, there's no shame in it at all.
|
| My guess is the people who want to avoid it are the kinds of
| kids who would rather go and study than run around a field at
| night. Those kids will also tend to have the higher IQs, which
| will thus vanish from the test set.
| darthrupert wrote:
| It's because the highest IQ people of the previous generation
| were almost all hired to find out ways to capture everyone's
| attention as much as possible.
|
| Not surprising that they succeeded doing that.
| JaceLightning wrote:
| The article doesn't mention pollution which is a HUGE
| contributing factor to lower IQ.
|
| Leaded gas wiped nearly 10 IQ points off of everyone and is still
| used in general aviation.
| _moof wrote:
| I see this "GA still uses leaded gas" thing thrown around here
| a lot. And while it's technically true, what I never see
| accompanying it are any numbers. Things like how many gallons
| of avgas are burned over time compared to how many gallons of
| leaded mogas were burned prior to it being outlawed. Or the
| results of anyone's blood labs. The other day someone was
| complaining about lead exposure from being near a small
| airport. Had they been tested and found to have high levels of
| lead in their blood? Oddly enough, they didn't say. You'd think
| if they were that concerned, they'd have the numbers to back it
| up, but they didn't.
|
| I'm not saying leaded avgas is _good_ by any means, but I would
| very, very much like to see some actual quantification of its
| effects before we all decide it 's some kind of global
| catastrophe on par with having an active nuclear meltdown in
| every living room on Earth.
| andi999 wrote:
| I am too dumb to understand what they actually did. (or too lazy
| understanding the study on my mobile). Can anyonr explain? I mean
| the IQ tests were not the same for every batch, right? So how do
| you milk the result out of the data?
| dash2 wrote:
| This is a really interesting, simple and clever study design and
| I look forward to reading it. That said, I think there is strong
| evidence for selection against intelligence at genetic level. The
| question is more "does it explain the Flynn effect and its
| reversal", or "is it large enough to have an important effect?"
| See our paper: https://ideas.repec.org/p/uea/ueaeco/2021-02.html
| egberts1 wrote:
| It is probably how CNN works too, but with declining journalistic
| creedo.
| d0mine wrote:
| It is illuminating that the paper doesn't mention lead while
| discussing IQ decline in the recent decades.
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| IQ alone got us Skinner and H-bombs. If EQ has gone up, that's a
| win.
| seydor wrote:
| EQ is definitely up. It got us twitter
| andrew_ wrote:
| EQ is considered by some to be a bit of a cult
| https://www.inc.com/quora/its-time-to-stop-talking-about-eq-...
| 3qz wrote:
| It's because of changing demographics
| photochemsyn wrote:
| IQ tests seem woefully outdated and highly biased at best. As
| many note, the ability to do well on these tests is greatly
| increased by practice, as with most testing procedures. The
| notion that an IQ test is a standalone measure of innate
| intelligence is not well supported.
|
| Perhaps specific areas could be tested, such as memory - but even
| with such a basic concept, we know that the ability to memorize a
| long string of numbers is a highly trainable skill. If we go to
| 'higher level' mental processes, such as pattern recognition,
| symbolic interpretation, analytical capabilities (i.e. higher
| maths), and creative capabilities (inventiveness), again we see
| that these abilities are highly trainable.
|
| The only real way to sort this out would be to apply the same
| educational program to a large cohort of individuals, over the
| course of at least a year, involving intensive one-on-one
| tutoring, and administer the prospective IQ test both before and
| after this process takes place. This has come up before and such
| a study has never been done to my knowledge, nor has anyone ever
| pointed one out.
| qiskit wrote:
| > IQ tests seem woefully outdated and highly biased at best.
|
| Maybe in the early 1900s, but not today.
|
| > As many note, the ability to do well on these tests is
| greatly increased by practice, as with most testing procedures.
| The notion that an IQ test is a standalone measure of innate
| intelligence is not well supported.
|
| Then everyone would score 200+.
|
| > If we go to 'higher level' mental processes, such as pattern
| recognition, symbolic interpretation, analytical capabilities
| (i.e. higher maths), and creative capabilities (inventiveness),
| again we see that these abilities are highly trainable.
|
| Yes. Nutrition, education, etc can help you reach your
| potential. But there seems to be a natural limit. Not only
| that, some have a natural talent for it and people have
| different levels of potential.
|
| If you believe what you believe, then why haven't you used your
| revolutionary knowledge to increase the IQs of people with
| downs syndrome. All it takes is training right?
| asdffdsa wrote:
| If there was sufficient profit for it, I'd quit my job and
| take an iq test and score awfully low on it because I always
| do poorly on something the first time I try it (SAT test,
| tech interviews, etc.). Then, I'd study for iq tests, take
| ~1,000 practice ones, and score in the top 10%. The iq
| advocates would be flabbergasted! I managed to increase my iq
| by several standard deviations: what a revolutionary,
| miraculous result!
|
| Then, I would probably create a startup that would offer the
| same service to the children of wealthy families who wanted
| their child to be intellectually gifted. With an annual
| tuition of $10,000 over 10 years, their child could be
| catapulted for life into the top levels of life outcomes and
| live as part of the elite class in America. Enrolling a mere
| 1,000 students (200 in East bay, 200 south bay, 200 SF, 400
| in Northeast) would net a revenue of 100 million dollars.
|
| Wait a second, maybe I'm onto something here...
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| While causal factors are not identified, the study ([1])
| concludes that the decline is due to environmental factors, and
| neither to genetics nor to other family-related causes.
|
| [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718793115
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Why is the best source of IQ information we have "Norwegian
| military conscripts"? Maybe we should make all politicians take
| an IQ test, so we get a good sampling of the smartest people at
| any given point in time.
| robbiep wrote:
| IQ is mostly a genital measuring test for anyone who wants to
| talk about it, I don't think that's a great idea.
| lbj wrote:
| Great to finally have some data. The tendency has been pretty
| clear for some years now, with more and more crazy ideologies
| spawning among the young.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| "Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'. We, their sons,
| are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the
| world a progeny yet more corrupt."
|
| Book III of Odes, Horace circa 20 BC
|
| "Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased
| ... The ordinary spoken language has also steadily coarsened.
| People used to say 'raise the carriage shafts' or 'trim the
| lamp wick,' but people today say 'raise it' or 'trim it.' When
| they should say, 'Let the men of the palace staff stand forth!'
| they say, 'Torches! Let's have some light!'"
|
| Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness), Yoshida Kenko 1330 - 1332
| minihat wrote:
| >"The study looked at the IQ scores of brothers who were born in
| different years. Researchers found that, instead of being similar
| as suggested by a genetic explanation, IQ scores often differed
| significantly between the siblings."
|
| I can think of a multitude of reasons younger siblings should, on
| average, have a lower IQ than their older brothers. Could this
| independently account for the 'decline' that researchers are
| measuring?
| skozharinov wrote:
| Isn't IQ designed to average at 100?
| kube-system wrote:
| Yes, after it is adjusted. But the average performance of the
| test groups have changed over time.
| rightbyte wrote:
| The test is graded to a curve with 100 as middle and usually 15
| points SD. Size of the SD might vary.
| xupybd wrote:
| Yeah I'm pretty sure that's the definition of the test.
| Arun2009 wrote:
| There are three strong factors that come to mind:
|
| (1) Physical fitness. These same years have seen the explosive
| growth of obesity and related lifestyle diseases. A greater
| percentage of people in first world countries (and increasingly
| elsewhere) are either obese or overweight. I recall reading that
| one way to keep your mind sharp is to be physically fit (cf:
| "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain"
| by Ratey and Hagerman). The corollary could be that if you are
| not physically fit, your IQ will suffer.
|
| (2) Pollution. Air pollution has been shown to affect IQ scores
| (https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/air-pollution-
| li...). It could be that greater pollution has been causing lower
| IQ scores.
|
| (3) Sleep. I recall reading that people get lesser high quality
| sleep than they used to. It has very clearly become easier to
| stay up late today. Poor sleep is really bad for you for a number
| of reasons, including your cognitive performance and brain
| health.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Higher education has never been a worse investment. There's so
| little time or incentive to read, and it's hard to sit down and
| say "I'm going to read a book". It's hard to read a book and also
| watch tv and also talk to friends etc etc, but that's how we
| spend all day - constantly interacting with media or socially.
|
| I've had increasing trouble reading books for years. It stresses
| me out, I can't just sit for hours reading, I have things to do.
| It takes real... something - focus, mindfullness - to actually
| sit down and think in an explorative way that isn't strictly
| driven by work.
|
| This isn't that surprising. IQ tests a specific type of
| intelligence, and we probably don't leverage that sort of
| intelligence day to day. Instead, we create hyperfocused
| individuals and build structure and process around them so that
| they can collaborate. Being _generally_ intelligent and having
| general problem solving skills is less and less important, or at
| least we treat it that way.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It 's hard to read a book and also watch tv and also talk to
| friends etc_
|
| Some of my favourite time with two of my friends is going to a
| bar or restaurant in the afternoon and reading together. The
| tradeoff is I watch less TV and have basically disengaged from
| social media. But that's more than worth it to me.
| pojzon wrote:
| > Being generally intelligent and having general problem
| solving skills is less and less important.
|
| TBH looking at how the future is going to look like (no not
| utopia), those general skills seem to be more and more
| important on the contrary.
|
| Being "too specialized" will hurt society in the end.
| antihero wrote:
| Division of labour has been a tool to make us dependent on
| the system and our overlords. People like Kropotkin have been
| saying this for quite some time.
| tomrod wrote:
| Darn that eusocial evolutionary pressure!
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| nso95 wrote:
| Quit social media..... learn to do just one thing at a time, it
| doesn't have to be like this.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >Instead, we create hyperfocused individuals and build
| structure and process around them so that they can collaborate.
|
| I agree and disagree. There are arguments in favor of both
| sides. Look at what happened in software development alone.
| Where you were only expected to push basic code before, many
| employers now expect you to be a flexible mini-IT department on
| top of having the social skills to communicate with customers
| and managers. At the same time, they specialized other things
| to a degree you're now a "dotnet developer", "java developer"
| etc., as if specializing in that direction was ever the goal of
| software development / computer science.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I see this as just more hyper focusing in a way. Now I have
| even less time for exploratory pursuits, my "role" has
| expanded and thus takes more of my focus. So I have to think
| about more things, but it's all confined to the expectations
| placed on me by my job.
| nathias wrote:
| Thinking about higher education as an 'investment' is part of
| this problem. In Europe, we had the Humbold system of higher
| education, but sadly that was now eradicated in favor of the
| more utalitarian anglo style education. At least Italy still
| has the fairly classical approach.
| dahart wrote:
| I'm also not sure what you mean. What is Anglo style
| education? I feel like my university experience in the US is
| heavily Humboldtian [1] in two specific ways: the general
| education requirements which explicitly stated goals of
| producing world citizens and teaching broad non-vocational
| reasoning skills and history lessons, and second, doing
| research as an undergraduate and later as a graduate, in
| research universities.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher
| _ed...
|
| Also curious what you mean by thinking of education as an
| investment being part of the problem. What is the problem,
| and why does framing education as investment contribute? Are
| you talking about purely financial forms of investment?
| Education is widely viewed as social, cultural investment by
| society, as well as economic investment, and this is widely
| agreed to be a good thing, isn't it? At the personal level,
| education is also viewed as a career & future financial
| security investment, and this also seems reasonable, no? I
| feel like the most important investment my education bought
| me was the freedom to choose my career path over time. Had I
| not gone to university, I do believe my choices would be more
| constrained than they are today.
| est31 wrote:
| What do you mean? Italy has applied the Bologna reforms, that
| were even named after an Italian university, no?
| nathias wrote:
| Yea, but for them at least the lower levels remain fairly
| classical, right?
| pas wrote:
| that would be surprising.
|
| ther are a usually few general courses (civics,
| economics, etc) at every undergrad, but these are usually
| low quality, mostly useless, and absolutely dwarfed by
| the usual introductory classes (usual STEM for STEM, etc)
|
| for example https://offertaformativa-unitn-
| it.translate.goog/it/l/inform...
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| Italian universities still fail students liberally and
| repeatedly.
| d0mine wrote:
| "There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be
| of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain
| cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford
| to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers,
| merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of
| their occupation, they are good, upstanding and - according
| to their condition - well-informed human beings and citizens.
| If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills
| are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to
| move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in
| life." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_h
| igher_...
| bazzert wrote:
| > I've had increasing trouble reading books for years.
|
| I've experienced this as well, and the only solution I have
| found is to take periodic breaks from my phone and all social
| media. Within a day or two of minimizing phone use that natural
| curiosity and desire to learn and motivation to read reemerges.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Yes, IQ tests spacial intelligence, a very European and male
| specific thing. But that is an actual form of intelligence,
| it's not a waste of time.
|
| Reading books. So at Stanford nobody watched TV. I think later
| Netflix, a bit. The only time I knew a peer was watching
| television was some girls in my dorm getting together to watch
| Gossip Girl, and only that. Just that show. And it was a very
| abnormal thing, nobody else anything at all. Keep in mind you
| can play eg Super Smash Bros at the library, there's a video
| game section in the library and you can play video games if you
| want. You can try out new titles. I did that.
|
| If you watch TV, you won't get into Stanford, basically.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| I gather why it's male, but is spatial intelligence
| particularly European? IIRC, East Asians overall score
| noticeably higher than Europeans overall, all else held
| equal. And their relative underrepresentation in the US
| elides the fact that this is a huge proportion of the global
| population.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Well right. That's a great point, Asians do a lot better.
| And Jews. Although don't be categorical about it, I'm
| European-descendant and don't feel the slightest
| disadvantage compared to those groups. Though I did once,
| when I was changing schools, I was going to a school with
| Asian students, and I felt scared of competing with them
| academically, what if I couldn't compete? Whereas I had
| already competed against Jewish students, and them I could
| outscore. It turned out I could compete with Asians too, it
| was work but it was neck-and-neck. And neck-and-neck with
| the Jews in that school, different specific Jews, different
| story.
|
| The ideas and ideals of Asian academics produced very
| strong results, but were not unassailable. And in this case
| there was adherence to tradition, sticking to what works,
| so the ideas and ideals were similar to other East Asian
| cultures. So generalization was possible, at a first
| approximation.
|
| Well there's differences but they are hidden from first
| view, so for instance there's differences in study habits
| between North and South Choson Korea, the North students
| were systematically were scored adversarially but passed
| the Confucian Exam all the more. Those Koreans from the
| North (especially in the most mountainous regions) were
| doing exactly what Asian students are doing now in American
| Universities: "the more you push us down, the stronger
| we'll be, and the more success we will attain, the tighter
| the quota the more we'll fuck the quota."
|
| Same goes for Jews before the Holocaust. Hard, hardcore,
| especially with medical schools, I heard a story of
| Columbia (or NYU?) medical school refusing their own
| college valedictorian just because he was a Jew. Simple as
| that.
|
| But then...it got watered down, unconstitutional, I don't
| know, things just ain't the same. Still work like fuck,
| but...just not the same desperation. The muse that helped
| me most.
|
| The best muse.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > Although don't be categorical about it, I'm European-
| descendant and don't feel the slightest disadvantage
| compared to those groups.
|
| Yes, I thought it was explicit in the conversation that
| we're talking about averages. The claim that spatial
| intelligence is European also doesn't mean an eg
| individual black person should feel disadvantaged in the
| realm of spatial intelligence.
| akomtu wrote:
| What are the other types of intelligence?
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Hertz. Clock speed, and in that respect Africans have the
| advantage in most cases. They call it "being frosty" or
| sometimes "being cool" but it means having more time to
| react to everything, "having the perfect words at lightning
| tap," which has a psychiatric definition. Helps at sports
| and at crime (on both sides, criminals and police, police
| references ask for that in terms of "being very
| assertive"). At music and performance, particularly
| improvising. At fighting and warfare.
|
| So it sounds like these are things that make no money but
| Africans can be good at but that's just a glitch in the
| economy. For instance an American President really has to
| be very very frosty. 10 Hertz at least. In that capacity
| Barack Obama Jr. was among the best presidents, perhaps the
| best in clock speed. Yeah his policy persecuted me from the
| first month to the absolute end of his term, but I can
| still look at the bigger picture. Trump also, look at him
| in the Ali G show DVD, that's how frosty he is. Steve Jobs,
| and Ross Perot. Ross Perot outclocking Steve Jobs, Perot
| would have made a great president. I would say faster than
| Obama or Trump.
|
| There's other forms of intelligence too. Like tied to the
| senses. Intuition. Having beautiful dreams, doesn't matter
| if they're forgotten when awaking. Autism obviously, but
| that's too easy. Mental retardation, in particular in how
| dead on it makes them on the straight and narrow, that's a
| priceless blessing.
|
| Because the only real worth of a person is if they're good,
| and not bad. There is nothing else.
| ddanv wrote:
| Maybe this is an education availability problem? What are you
| doing to teach the young generation? I think the article is
| wrong. Kids if thought today are more intelligent than past
| generations.
| pas wrote:
| it might be important to separate the hardware and software
| parts of intelligence.
|
| IQ tests mostly measure the hardware part (pattern
| recognition, working memory, spatial reasoning, attention to
| detail, speed, focus, reasoning about abstract rules)
|
| the software part is mostly about applied epistemological
| rationality, how good one's life strategy is, and how well
| one can execute that. (of course there's a hardware component
| to this too. someone with good emotional resilience, low
| neuroticism, high self-motivation achieves things with
| relative ease given the opportunities)
|
| then there's a measurement problem. if someone is taught the
| importance of attention to detail since they were very
| little, taught to control their emotions better (eg.
| boredom), then they will likely score better on the hardware
| test too.
|
| that said our collective knowledge is much greater than
| decades ago, our teaching methods are better too, but alas
| not everyone received the same top quality teaching.
|
| plus there is a big issue with the curriculum. most people
| are tragicomically underskilled in dealing with themselves
| and other people, hence they are bad at recognizing and
| solving problems that brutally impact their lives (and the
| lives of those around them).
|
| aaand of course there's the plain old resource availability
| problem (everyone inherits, the question is what. advantaged
| people get advantages with very high probability,
| disadvantaged people get disadvantages...)
| nottorp wrote:
| > It's hard to read a book and also watch tv and also talk to
| friends etc
|
| My hypothesis is the availability of low quality passive
| entertainment 24/7 - namely tv - is what leads to iq scores
| declining.
|
| When did tvs become affordable for everyone, 1970s perhaps?
| sva_ wrote:
| I'd go even further: I think people have a hard time dealing
| with abundance in many areas of our society. Take for example
| the abundance of food: Some people have a hard time dealing
| with the constant availability of anything you could wish
| for, and get fat.
|
| We've now come into an era where there is also an abundance
| of information: Pretty much anything you can imagine is just
| a button-click away.
|
| Young people in particular have to carefully select what
| information to consume, and there's a whole attention-economy
| built around wasting people's time, trying to manipulate them
| into buying shit they don't need.
|
| Humans didn't evolve in such conditions - everything was
| always scarce. So I think that's why a lot of people have a
| hard time dealing with it. I believe there's a huge potential
| market for software that acts in the interest of the user,
| helping to deal with this abundance of information (pretty
| much all software that currently exists mainly works to the
| benefit of the company, in particular ads/data collection).
| But it doesn't need to be that way. So let's build solutions.
| oriolid wrote:
| From Finnish perspective, it's just not availability of TVs
| but the content too. Until 90s we had just two channels that
| were mostly showing content from public broadcasting
| corporation (Yleisradio) with some segments of commercial
| programming. Cable and satellite TV did exist but they were
| really quite uncommon (and kids had to learn English in order
| to watch them). I've understood that Norway where the paper
| is from was similar.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| No IQ test ever got me a good paying job, but my degree, the
| professors' contacts, and the experience of working in research
| absolutely did.
|
| The 10 years and many loans it took to get through bachelor's
| and PhD were the best and most important investment I made in
| myself to get out of the factories and warehouses and into an
| office with great pay, and oh incidentally an amazing job.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| College education is treated as a litmus test for whether
| someone can figure out abstract things and produce useful
| output. Which is all fine and dandy, except that "having a
| degree" is not really a pure measurement: it's always
| confounded with a certain amount of wading-through-the-
| bullwhip tenacity (useless but mandatory curriculum -> non-
| questioning serf mentality) and a hefty slice of affluenza
| (outright bribery).
| dan-robertson wrote:
| It sounds like you are arguing that college degrees are
| poor signals for one's intelligence but then you write:
|
| > a certain amount of wading-through-the-bullwhip tenacity
| (useless but mandatory curriculum -> non-questioning serf
| mentality)
|
| And I think a lot of people (though not me and maybe not
| you) would find that that is a good description of
| attributes employers would like. And for many people the
| point of a college degree is appealing to employers rather
| than proving oneself to be intelligent.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I agree, but stated another way, college is also a test of
| 'can this person adapt and meet demands to excel in a new
| system', a skill which I believe is underrated, under
| measured, and hugely valuable.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| Nah, so far as I can tell: it's compliance. It asks the
| question "Will you do what it takes, even when it's
| irrational, to pattern yourself after _our_ model? "
|
| Moreover it's painfully easy to exploit your way through
| especially if you're already rich. Just go doctor
| shopping with Mommy so you can get a 504 and
| accomodations and stimulant medications.
|
| If it selected for adaptation the curriculum would be
| different, things like figuring out the area of a circle
| using given materials, _not_ abstract shit. If it
| selected for intelligence there would br a huge battery
| of exceptions, handicaps for the working class kids,
| because they have to put in _way_ more effort than the
| kids living with their parents who are unemployed,
| likewise with non-traditionals.
| docandrew wrote:
| The term "504" was new to me - doctor-prescribed academic
| assistance, apparently.
|
| https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/504faq.html
|
| Is this being abused?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You're repeating what I said: adapting to an existing
| process and finding success within a system is exactly
| what college teaches and filters on. That's usually a
| good thing for most job seekers.
|
| I cannot fathom a successful professional that does not
| balance 'I must innovate the sysyem even if it hurts me'
| against 'I will work within this system for my own
| personal benefit by providing exactly what is requested
| of me'
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Both these can be true:
|
| - Rich people can painfully easily exploit something to
| make their ROI much higher
|
| - That something can be an immensely valuable investment
| for the non-rich
| cinntaile wrote:
| But how do you know you wouldn't have escaped the factories
| and warehouses without a degree? In 10 years people can make
| huge pay jumps.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Maybe, but the road from high school dropout to NASA JPL
| seems a bit more tenuous when you don't include an
| education.
|
| bls.gov tells a more complete story, in that machine
| operators make significantly less and job openings grow at
| a significantly lower rate than software, aerospace,
| robotics, and AI specialists, many of which require a
| degree, (and the siccessful outliers are not worth pushing
| as a good model for the 90%)
|
| I can't say there wasn't a different, even a better road to
| some measure of success and an enjoyable career, but I can
| say this path was a miracle of positive life changes for me
| and every penny of debt I pay back to the fed is absolutely
| a victory lap.
| [deleted]
| jrheckt wrote:
| This is a looking vs. leaping exercise. Do you continue
| "looking" around for 10 years or do you "leap" at an
| opportunity to make a change?
|
| While I see your point - a whole lot of people do have
| salary increases over a 10 year span - a whole lot of jobs
| people want require "X piece of paper for Y years of
| experience" and you cannot get that experience to begin
| with without either 1) the piece of paper or 2) knowing
| someone.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I spent two years in college and never finished. I'm largely
| self-taught in my field. I also have a great office job.
| Getting there didn't require an IQ test or a degree, it
| required consistently providing something of value.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Is higher education the issue here? I know people with higher
| education that are willing to mute people with different
| opinions, I know people with higher education who fail to
| understand basic things, I think higher education gives you the
| expertise in a certain field, as you said, higher education
| creates machines that can help shareholders get rich, as
| italian I've read a lot about italian universities being ranked
| 1/1000th lower than US universities, but then I've lived with
| US people from Harvard in Berlin, it's of course just two
| example, but I was even questioning how the hell they survived
| that much, in sense that I had a flatmate asking how the trash
| bin worked, how the microwave worked or how the oven worked,
| with little to no awareness of the world, it's weird but yeah I
| think education from top universities is good for money but it
| has little to do with daily needed intelligence
| TimPC wrote:
| Seeing as most the studies mentioned Norway which has a
| perfectly healthy and functional university system that
| doesn't leave people in debt, I doubt it.
|
| Going to University doesn't affect IQ much, IQ is not
| learned.
| fishnchips wrote:
| IQ may or may not be learned but IQ tests are very much a
| skill. The difference between my first test and the second
| one was almost 30 points. These were not too far apart but
| the second time I simply knew what to expect.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| this is so under appreciated.
|
| I consider myself a person of average intelligence who
| learned very early on that preparation can set me ahead
| of the group.
|
| I practiced interviewing, public speaking, coding,
| writing, test taking, etc, and it's helped immensely. I
| mean, most tests tip their hand later, which allows you
| to go back and revise earlier answers. most writing is
| formulaic, you just have to find a good example. any
| system that you are evaluated by can be learned.
|
| To prep for grad entrance exams, I wroke up early every
| Friday, got ready, drove around, sat down and took a
| timed practice exam at 930 sharp. all to emulate my
| Friday 900am exam appointment. I got the score I wanted.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| None of those things are IQ tests. You just listed a
| bunch of things that explicitly are possible to study
| for. Well designed IQ tests can not be studied for,
| they're just measuring your pattern recognition ability,
| not any knowledge you have.
| kergonath wrote:
| This. I cannot understand why people seem to think that
| IQ test results are an objective measure of anything. Of
| course we all make mistakes sometimes or have bad days or
| brain fog for whatever reason. Even the time of day
| affects cognition. How would any kind of test compensate
| for this? A particularly good or bad score can very well
| be just a fluke.
|
| I have never seen anyone I would consider really smart
| who took these tests seriously.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Those are reasons to doubt a single test but wouldn't
| affect bigger statistics.
| kergonath wrote:
| Sure, unless there is some sampling bias like more tests
| being done at a given time of day, or a given day of the
| week. Or tests probing particular aspects of cognition
| that get emphasised or de-emphasised in the education
| system.
|
| Even so, most of the discussions about IQ are about
| individual scores and a lot of pseudoscience.
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| In a foreign country asking your flatmate how to operate the
| foreign appliances instead of wasting your time on trial and
| error or looking it up, likely also in a foreign language, is
| an example of not being intelligent?
| est31 wrote:
| Yeah i'm in a foreign country now, and despite the
| laundromat was made by a German company, where I'm
| originally from, I had to ask locals to explain to me what
| the buttons meant, because there was no manual on the
| internet, and it was different to German ones (there's a
| phpbb forum where one guy DMs u pdfs for your model, but I
| didn't want to bother signing up). Haven't went to Harvard
| tho.
| staticassertion wrote:
| > Access to education is currently the most conclusive factor
| explaining disparities in intelligence, according to Ritchie.
| In a separate study that has not been released, he and his
| colleagues looked at existing research in an effort to
| demonstrate that staying in school longer directly equates to
| higher IQ scores.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Yes, I see, there is a study with some conclusions, but
| that doesn't mean that one has to ignore his life
| experiences, also because I would like to see what were the
| parameters of the tests, I have also other examples of
| people with higher education failing to understand how
| democracy basically works and wishing people with different
| ideas wouldn't vote, so yeah probably the study is right,
| and the parameters were general, I just find people with
| higher education more specialised but less functional in
| day to day stuff
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Is higher education the issue here?_
|
| His premise is that higher education offers little to no
| value. What theoretical value a higher education might
| provide is squandered because people are too busy living
| their lives, namely working to make ends meet, in order to
| leverage it. This certainly has proven true economically as
| we can see that incomes held stagnant through the rise of
| post-secondary attainment, contrary to assumptions of the
| past that speculated that college graduates would be able to
| earn more as a result of having a higher education.
| Similarly, and perhaps related to, he posits the features
| tested by IQ are not being practiced because people are too
| busy to carry out that practice.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| I think top schools like Harvard, Stanford, Oxford etc. can
| serve as excellent environments for people to reach their
| full potential, but due to cultural reasons and funding, they
| are willing to make large compromises on who can get a degree
| there. Going to Harvard doesn't mean you are intelligent, but
| I've seldomly seen such high density of super clever people
| as at these top schools.
| Mandelmus wrote:
| > italian universities being ranked 1/1000th lower than US
| universities
|
| I don't even know what that means. That sounds like they'd be
| ranked only a tenth of a percent lower than US universities,
| which doesn't jive with the rest of your point.
| torginus wrote:
| University rankings are mainly driven by their research
| impact which does not directly correlate with the quality of
| their undergrads.
| [deleted]
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Would be great if this was true but they are using many
| factors. When I actually sorted by research impact I got a
| quite different ranking the last time I checked
| torginus wrote:
| https://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-
| rankings...
|
| QS World University rankings assigns 40% to Academic
| reputation, and 20% to Citations per faculty, so it's
| pretty dominant.
| mateo1 wrote:
| Going on a tangent, when did people stop citing
| misguided, erroneous and outright wrong publications as
| part of their own research into the subject?
| scotty79 wrote:
| > I've had increasing trouble reading books for years.
|
| Me too. But I read way more than I read when I devoured scores
| of books. I just do it in the web browser.
|
| I always had very short temper with books. If the book didn't
| captivate me with first few pages it never got read by me. I
| just moved to another one.
|
| I always really liked anthologies of short stories, because
| amount of the ideas to amount of text was the best there. Way
| better than when the author stretched just a handful ideas into
| a novel.
|
| So now, with internet filled with so many interesting texts I
| have real trouble with books, because my short temper got even
| shorter. I also know a lot more of the ideas than I did when I
| was younger so it's hard to encounter something novel to me. So
| a book, that's captivating, dense and novel is really a hard
| find. And others get ditched by me at some, usually very early,
| stage. I just have even less patience for them than I had ever
| before.
| icedchai wrote:
| I've found it more difficult to sit and focus in recent years.
| I blame pandemic-related anxiety for some of it, but not all.
| It's mostly all the instant-on distractions available now, like
| the media you describe. The web in general discourages focus.
| candlemas wrote:
| Tabs were a mistake.
| elijahwright wrote:
| You are referring to browser tabs?
| candlemas wrote:
| Yes.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| I put the blame on my kids.
| loonster wrote:
| Since my kids were born, I feel dumber. I do not think it
| is just due to aging. Maybe caused from years of lack of
| sleep.
| lliamander wrote:
| > This isn't that surprising. IQ tests a specific type of
| intelligence...
|
| That's literally the opposite of what any empirical research on
| IQ shows.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| > I can't just sit for hours reading
|
| So don't. Read little bits here and there as you get a chance.
| I frequently read a few pages while I'm waiting for people to
| get ready, stuck in waiting rooms or sometimes in a slow moving
| queue.
|
| Paperbacks travel just fine.
| dahart wrote:
| There's a bit of misconception here. IQ tests don't require
| higher education, nor book reading.
|
| > Higher education has never been a worse investment.
|
| While I realize you're talking about social investment here,
| the idea that TV and media are better investments of your time
| than earning a degree seems problematic at best. TV & media
| will, generally speaking, not help you get a better career,
| right?
|
| The Fed has published very recent stats in the US that people
| with a 4 year degree on _average_ earn 2x the income of people
| without a degree. I previously suspected it was slightly
| higher, like maybe 10 or 20 percent, and I felt like that would
| be a big number, but the fact that it's double across everyone
| in America is massive, and a bit mind blowing to me. The income
| gap is 3x if you get an advanced degree. That seems like a
| pretty good investment, doesn't it?
| mistersquid wrote:
| dahart, you are absolutely owning this thread!
|
| Thank you for providing measured, balanced, and considered
| explanations, expansions, and clarifications.
|
| First rate.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| The debt part of the equation also needs to be considered for
| the investment. ROI is a huge factor. If it takes you 15
| years to break even, the person who never saddled themselves
| with debt is now 15 years ahead of you income-wise and it
| will take you another 10 years to catch up to them as far as
| cumulative income goes. So what is being offered as a "great
| investment" is not quite as obvious to me.
| dahart wrote:
| That cuts pretty hard the other direction though. Going
| into debt on a house with half the income of other people
| around you is a huge reason why foreclosures happen.
|
| Worrying about 15 years is short-sighted too, that's not
| very long. If you pay it off in 15 years, and then you have
| 2x the income of someone who didn't go to school, you're 35
| making great money and in a job with better prospects and
| mobility than if you didn't have debt but took a job that
| didn't require a degree. This is, of course, statistically
| speaking. Some people do manage to do very well without a
| degree, but it's pretty important to understand that it's
| not even close to the average outcome.
|
| My personal experience with student debt was that it got me
| a job out of college that paid well enough that I paid off
| my student loans much faster than I'd anticipated. I
| thought it was going to be 10 years, but it was more like
| 3. (To be fair I didn't borrow that much, and cost of
| college has been rising faster than inflation ever since I
| graduated.)
| prometheus76 wrote:
| I agree that it's a very nuanced situation that probably
| requires a lot of analysis on a situation by situation
| basis. But it's not as obvious or plain that higher
| education is a worthwhile investment as you painted
| before. I wanted to push on that a bit.
| dahart wrote:
| There is no guarantee of success for any given
| individual, that's always true. However, if someone you
| know is 18 and deciding whether to go to college, what
| would you recommend instead? What steps would you advise
| taking to be successful without more education, knowing
| that most high paying jobs require a degree just to get
| in the door for an interview? It just happens to also be
| compelling to me to know that, causal or not, degree
| holders on _average_ have 2x higher salary and hold most
| of the patents and managerial spots are held by degree
| holders. The Fed data isn't just a sampling of a few
| people, it's accounting for everyone in the US. Don't
| take my word for it, do a little searching and see how
| many research results conclude that there is enough
| causal relationship between degrees and income that the
| investment potential appears to be a pretty clear win.
|
| I don't see a lot of reason not to invest in education.
| The fear that it might not pay off doesn't (for me
| anyway) push back that much on the strength of the
| nationwide correlation between degrees and high income.
|
| I'm a little sad about reducing it just to money too,
| education is an investment in other ways too. When done
| well, it can be time spent gaining knowledge,
| investigating history, helping people understand more of
| the context of what's happening here and now. Education
| provides freedom to explore, both now while you're
| studying, and in the future with your career. I don't
| have a lot of belief in the idea that the opportunity
| cost is too high.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| I think a major part of the problem in America (I can't
| speak for other parts of the world) is that it's become
| solely a monetary equation. Tuition is, quite simply, a
| non-starter for a larger portion of American families,
| these days. While military spending goes unchecked,
| America shows its priorities by not spending that money
| in establishing 4 year community colleges at low cost or
| free tuition for the betterment of society at large and
| to be more competitive on a world theater as a whole.
| This wouldn't replace the need for private, more
| expensive universities, just as public schools haven't
| eradicated private schools. A rising tide raises all
| boats, as it were... and with a future of increased
| automation or offshoring, a more educated workforce would
| do well for us.
| dahart wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. In fact, one thing I don't
| understand from the Fed's data is why the IRS (for
| example) or the government itself doesn't instantly see
| the benefits of educating everyone at their expense,
| because it would immediately pay for itself many times
| over with the increase in tax income.
| Sholmesy wrote:
| Isn't that relatively confounding information? A person who
| would succeed, might succeed with or without a degree.
|
| The way the information is presented implies causation. Get a
| degree, earn twice as much.
| 6510 wrote:
| Not intelligence but insecurity is the formula for success.
| Truly intelligent people are comfortable figuring stuff out
| along the road. Success is accidental and might even be
| worth avoiding.
| dahart wrote:
| Yes! To some level that's absolutely true and a good point.
|
| There's been a ton of study of the question of whether
| people succeed because of the skills they gained working on
| the degree versus the credentialism of just having a
| degree. The answer across many papers is that it's a
| healthy mix of both, that there is a large component of
| causality (getting a degree leads to success) as well as a
| large component in the other direction (being smart &
| driven leads to getting a degree).
|
| Do note that a wide swath of our economy is based on jobs
| that require a degree, and are not based on being
| "successful" with or without. It's not a fair playing field
| where there's equal opportunity to people without degrees.
| A big part of the income gap happens because our system is
| setup to reward degree earners, and so it's guaranteed to
| be at least partly causal.
|
| Also really important to pay more attention to what
| actually happens as opposed to what _could_ happen
| theoretically. Yes people might succeed with or without
| degrees, but how often does that actually happen? There are
| some amazing and compelling anecdotes, but ignoring the
| stats is a bad idea if you're trying to decide whether to
| go to college or not.
|
| Look at patents in the US as an example of how people
| _might_ succeed with or without a degree. There is no
| degree requirement and nothing stopping people from
| inventing without a higher education, nonetheless the
| overwhelming majority of patent holders have degrees, the
| majority are advanced degrees beyond bachelor.
|
| https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/most_inventors_have_
| g...
| akira2501 wrote:
| > people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income
| of people without a degree
|
| I feel like the better measure would be comparing their
| productivity, rather than the base rate at which society, on
| average, appears to value degrees.
| bawolff wrote:
| Why? I can't eat productivity.
| dahart wrote:
| The question was whether education is a good investment,
| which poses the idea of some kind of return on an initial
| cost. The investment question was posed in the form of
| personal cost and personal return. In that sense,
| productivity is not a measure of the personal return of an
| education. I mean a few people might see it that way, and
| it could be associated indirectly with success, but by and
| large productivity on it's own is not a benefit.
|
| Productivity could be seen as the social return for a
| social (tax based) investment in education, and indeed we
| do measure things like GDP and compare nations on a global
| scale. In that sense, education appears to be a good
| investment socially. Countries that have high rates of
| education also have high GDP.
|
| Aside from that, unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to
| measure "productivity". You might want to take a stab at
| trying to define what that even means for people in various
| careers. It's easy to measure the productivity of factory
| workers, but insanely hard to measure productivity for
| doctors or writers or advertisers or nearly any white
| collar job. Is productivity measured by how much output
| there is, regardless of quality? Is productivity measured
| by how much money exchanges hands? These things could be
| even worse than valuing education, no?
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Not to mention the selection effect: if you took the cohort
| that would finish four year degrees and didn't send them to
| college, they would still be making more money.
| dahart wrote:
| This has been studied. It's true but only with caveats
| and qualifications. Yes they'd be making "more", but the
| only important question is how much more, and the answer
| is that it's not nearly as much as the degree holders.
| One really big reason for this is that income is partly
| based on having the degree, not some kind of objective
| idea of skill or intelligence or determination.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Of course, there's a dramatic premium on college degrees,
| no question about that. But the selection effect in that
| statistic is disproportionately important to understand,
| even if at this moment in time its magnitude is low. It
| helps understand the counterfactuals necessary to think
| about how the credentialist dynamic can or may change. Eg
| if you can cleanly extract the signal that employers are
| getting from it, you can decouple it from the corrupt,
| extractive institutions that are currently squatting over
| the credential.
| dahart wrote:
| I'd be careful not to jump to the conclusion that
| credentials are bad or requiring them amounts to anything
| corrupt, extractive or squatting.
|
| There's nothing inherently wrong with requiring that a
| job applicant meet minimum standards, in fact most people
| are wildly in favor of requirements when it comes to,
| say, doctors & lawyers, not to mention our infrastructure
| designers and safety inspectors, etc.. It's certainly
| within the purview of the employer to define those
| requirements, and okay for them to require some well
| rounded ness and non-vocational skills, right?
|
| The selection effect has, like I mentioned earlier, been
| studied extensively, and many researchers have come to
| the conclusion that despite the credentialism, college
| degrees also do impart useful knowledge and skills on the
| degree holders, even when attempting to adjust for many
| possible confounding factors such as family income,
| family education, and the filtering weight of the
| credential system. It's not that hard to accept that the
| majority of people who spend 4 or more years trying to
| learn actually do learn something and achieve some
| general skills, right?
|
| It's complicated, but I don't necessarily see it as a bad
| thing that society & business widely agree to allow the
| bachelor's degree to represent a certain level of
| preparedness. Yes, it's a wildly blunt measure, often
| inaccurate, and it may be commonly misinterpreted too,
| since we're really talking about minimum standards, and
| not a measure of skill, but I see reasons why the state
| of things might have evolved this way and might not
| necessarily be broken to a first approximation.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > I'd be careful not to jump to the conclusion that
| credentials are bad or requiring them amounts to anything
| corrupt, extractive or squatting.
|
| I'm not assuming this. I have independent reason to
| consider universities to be corrupt, extractive
| institutions. This is downstream of their oligopolistic
| position wrt the labor market, but a hypothetical set of
| less-evil institutions than our current universities
| would still be an efficiency problem to be solved.
|
| The early steps places like Google have taken towards
| accepting certification programs are an example of
| (attempting to) cleanly separate the value that a degree
| confers, without cutting off access to large swathes of
| the population or condemning them to mountains of debt.
|
| Ie, there's a lot of signal in degrees, but there's a LOT
| of noise, and there's a massive amount of economic and
| moral value in finding better-quality signal.
|
| > I see reasons why the state of things might have
| evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a
| first approximation
|
| Yes, I hope this comment makes it clear that I'm not
| assuming that degrees are literally useless for hiring.
| But that is an extremely low bar, and I think it's
| similarly difficult to justify the claim that degrees are
| a remotely efficient bar for a big chunk of what they're
| currently used for.
|
| I grew up rich enough that I was able to deeply enjoy
| four years of intellectual exploration and partying, but
| that's cold comfort for the people locked out from being
| a firefighter or starting medical school or a thousand
| other productive pursuits, because they couldn't surmount
| the barrier of an additional tens to hundreds of
| thousands of dollars that the inefficient degree
| requirement confers.
|
| This isn't just theoretical: the choking-off of
| opportunity is IMO a massive tragedy relative to a world
| that was less enamored with the degree. That doesn't
| suggest we can simply burn the job market's credentialism
| down, but we can be clear-eyed about the current system's
| flaws and set our headings correctly for incremental
| change.
| dahart wrote:
| I see; and I pretty much completely agree. It is indeed a
| shame that we allow citizens to bear the cost of
| education personally, and that it even has to be a choice
| or justified as investment. You're right that the cost
| acts as a pre-filter for income just to get in, and that
| the university system has flaws and is inefficient. I
| like the way you summarized it at the end and aspire to
| stay clear-eyed and oriented towards incremental
| improvement. Thanks for clarifying!
| tharne wrote:
| Also, this doesn't take into account the fact that people
| who get a 4 year degree are more likely to have parents who
| are well off. In a lot of ways a college degree is just a
| measure of your parent's socioeconomic status.
| RappingBoomer wrote:
| I grew up back in the days when many more people read
| books...there were used book stores everywhere...men sometimes
| carried a paperback book stuck in their back pocket...but
| that's not to say that everyone read a lot...but there was more
| reading in general...and one reason why we read more was that
| television was just not as good as it is today...
|
| and reading does develop a certain sort of intelligence that is
| important and is very useful...I saw my own youthful reading
| and its good effects in the computer science classes that I
| passed and where 80% of the class just could not do the
| work...intelligence counts....when you spend your youth reading
| books for hours a time, year in and year out, your brain grows
| "smart muscles"...and that makes it easier to focus on
| difficult problems...
|
| I saw a lack of that sort of intelligence when I worked for a
| large government agency and when people lacking in that sort of
| intelligence made a huge mess of designing the business
| processes for that agency...intelligence counts...
|
| society at large and especially those at the top pretend that
| intelligence no longer matters...but they are wrong...
| hackingthelema wrote:
| > sometimes carried a paperback book stuck in their back
| pocket
|
| > and one reason why we read more was that television was
| just not as good as it is today...
|
| I feel like there's a little disconnect between these two
| statements. It's not that television is taking priority, it's
| that the times when people used to break out a book -- that
| they carried in their back pocket or purse! -- now break out
| their phones and engage with social media, or they check
| their work email, or respond to slack messages, or they get
| involved in texting, or they play some video game just to
| make the time go faster. I suppose some of them put in
| headphones and watch Netflix, but I don't see that often, to
| be honest.
|
| The world has gotten so busy and defaulting to 'on' that no
| one feels they can default to reading a book, _but you can_.
| You just have to decide to carry a book and, instead of
| breaking out a phone at those times to stay connected, you
| _just let yourself be disconnected_ , and you read a book. Or
| meditate.
|
| That's how I go about my life, and frankly I don't understand
| why more people don't. I never use my phone unless it's an
| emergency. I get a lot more out of life meditating and
| reading books than checking my email, playing candy crush,
| and engaging with twitter.
| [deleted]
| torginus wrote:
| I wonder if there is a negative impact produced by people having
| kids later in life - the reduced sperm and egg quality must play
| some role in this.
| ausbah wrote:
| as you get older its harder to have kids, but that doesn't make
| the kids worse off
| hedora wrote:
| It definitely makes the kids worse off. The reason it's
| "harder" is because the number of complications/birth defects
| increase exponentially over time. In a few years after age
| 40, the odds cross from "negligible" to "don't have kids".
| contravariant wrote:
| Anyone with some domain knowledge willing to pitch in whether
| it's correct people are equating IQ with education in this
| thread?
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| I just read this passage from the short story "Flowers For
| Algernon":
|
| _" I'm not sure what an I.Q. is. Dr. Nemur said it was
| something that measured how intelligent you were--like a scale
| in the drugstore weighs pounds. But Dr. Strauss had a big
| argument with him and said an I.Q. didn't weigh intelligence at
| all. He said an I.Q. showed how much intelligence you could
| get, like the numbers on the outside of a measuring cup. You
| still had to fill the cup up with stuff."_
|
| Maybe that stuff is education.
| annyeonghada wrote:
| Here[1] there's a summary of the evidence for and against IQ.
|
| [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/oh6115/perf
| ...
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| All that verbiage and the best he can do with respect to
| establishing causality is an offhand remark that causality is
| "heavily implie(d)". Controlling for confounders won't
| necessarily recover estimates of causal impact.
|
| At the least I'd like to see something like an instrumental
| variables analysis.
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| From what I've read is that IQ is largely genetically
| determined, With all the complexities that genes bring with
| them. And its very hard to increase intelligence in a
| meaningfull way. But whats important is that its very easy to
| make someone really really dumb. Like the disaster that was
| leaded gasoline causing an estimated loss of 2 to 8 iq points
| on a test.
|
| Education absolutely increases IQ test scores but wether its an
| increase in intelligence itself whatever that may be is
| questionable.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| A guess is that quality education, like encouraging the
| curiosity to read and tinker, has a bootstrapping effect.
| kazinator wrote:
| An IQ test cannot distinguish between a subject who
| originally came up with a problem-solving technique due to
| innate intelligence, and one who has already seen that type
| of problem and learned the problem solving trick from someone
| else (possibly from having challenged numerous IQ tests).
|
| There is some alignment between IQ tests and academic work;
| an academic background gives you a few tricks for solving
| those kinds of problems.
| amusedcyclist wrote:
| It all depends on how define intelligence, If by intelligence
| you mean the ability to reason about and solve complex
| problems then education definitely improves intelligence.
| However, if you choose to define it as something innate then
| by definition education does not change that. I think the
| former is a far more useful definition, its more important
| what a person can actually do as opposed what they could do
| in some hypothetical world
| derbOac wrote:
| So the Flynn effect (rises in IQ to a certain point in time)
| has been demonstrated in many many many cultures with many
| tests, many of which are difficult to explain in terms of
| formal western education. Like nonverbal pattern recognition
| tests given to traditional tribes in jungle areas. It's one of
| the mysteries about the Flynn effect and why it's so difficult
| to explain.
|
| It's also not just the case that the "bottom is being raised",
| but also that the whole distribution was shifting.
|
| I think these kinds of things make it unlikely education is
| explaining at least the rise part of the curve. To the extent
| the fall is in a subset of these types of measures of settings
| it also might not be (but it could be).
|
| The more recent decline has been less well-documented although
| there are multiple studies using multiple measures that have
| shown this, so I believe it is a trend at least in some regions
| of the world (developed, western). I have a fuzzy memory that
| the decline is stronger with verbal measures (as opposed to
| nonverbal) but I might be misremembering that.
|
| Education is strongly related to IQ/g/general cognitive ability
| but they're not perfectly correlated. I think when I looked
| this up a week ago or so, the best estimates were like 0.50 in
| a general population sample.
|
| Clinically a discrepancy between IQ and educational achievement
| is important, as it points to someone not getting resources
| they need etc.
|
| So yes, they're related, and yes, education could explain
| general population trends over time, but no they're not the
| same.
| Starlevel001 wrote:
| ITT one step away from "IQ is correlated to genetics (and also
| your race)"
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| Of course there is a genetic factor to cognitive abilities.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition
| kurofune wrote:
| Who would struggle to be smart in a society that rewards idiocy
| and blind alignment to asinine political discourses, a society
| where the loudest opinion is the only one that matters. Enjoy the
| permanent state of frustration that being "smart" or "rational"
| will bring you.
|
| Most politicians are exasperatingly dumb, most celebrities are
| witless mannequins and the richest man in the world is a simple
| minded moron that acts like a 16yo in the middle of a sugar rush.
| Don't blame the youth for not wanting to be "smart" when they can
| see that plenty of mediocre adult content creators can earn more
| in a week than your average office worker in a month and when
| their role models are dudes vlogging about getting rich gambling
| on JPG monkeys and shilling for crypto rug pulls.
| ralusek wrote:
| I'm not sure that you understand what an IQ test is.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Was 1975 much different?
| Supermancho wrote:
| Airborn Carbon Dioxide increases are diving the ongoing trend
| for the foreseeable future.
|
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200421090556.h.
| .. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328781907_Are_inc
| re...
| bmitc wrote:
| I often wonder about this, but there is certainly an argument
| to be made that yes, I think it was different. It was at
| least calmer.
|
| There was so much more long form content. And instead of
| going online to bitch and moan about things, the only option
| was to speak, phone, or write each other.
|
| I am often struck by watching media from prior decades. One
| much source are the presidential debates. There early ones
| and even as recent as Dole vs Clinton were educated, cordial,
| and calm, a far cry from the circus and superficial debates
| we have in the past few.
|
| Where are the long form interviews or speeches? Were can I
| find speeches like those done by prior presidents,
| intellectuals, and activists? Is there anyone who comes close
| to someone like Martin Luther King, Jr.? One could argue that
| some of these historical figures are diamonds in the rough.
| Indeed, it is probably true. But one can question if our
| modern society allows a breeding ground for these people to
| thrive.
|
| I think basically anything prior to the pervasiveness of the
| Internet was different. The promises of the Internet came
| true. It has connected us, in ways never thought possible,
| but it's connected the deepest of our primal emotions. We
| simply cannot ingest the amount of information we're
| bombarded with. It doesn't promote an environment for deep,
| considerate, and rational thought and discourse.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| There is a fair amount of long form calm intellectual
| content, whether speeches, interviews, or spoken essays, on
| YouTube. But it's still pretty fringe.
| Bhurn00985 wrote:
| There is, though I believe improvements in the discovery
| of such content would definitely be welcome.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > Most politicians are exasperatingly dumb
|
| Maybe the ones in your country.
|
| In other countries there's been plenty of politicians that had
| teaching positions in universities in their past, published in
| academic journals and so on... and yet know how to act stupid
| when useful.
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| Yeah, some good picks but let's not put everyone in the same
| basket ... the richest man in the world has revolutionized the
| automotive industry along the airspace industry. That's more
| than any human has accomplished within the modern time, and
| that guy is still working harder than 99% of us, while he could
| just enjoy the rest of his life, like many other "retired"
| billionaires. As for NFTs, it's new and time will tell, many
| seemingly pointless inventions turned out to be great products
| when used differently
|
| thinking outside the box is not easy in a society where
| thinking differently is not socially acceptable
| 0des wrote:
| Try not to be the guy shoe-horning NFTs into discussion
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| Maybe, you shall read the comment to which I'm replying?
| Maybe :-)
| [deleted]
| sameOld88 wrote:
| FrenchDevRemote wrote:
| wanting to be smart won't change your IQ
| Tao332 wrote:
| Not wanting to be will, so the numbers might be distorted
| from what ones true potential is.
| option wrote:
| You think you are smart but you aren't
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| At Stanford no less. As long as you obey the dogmas, you can be
| a moron who lied and cheated her way in and be fine. I think
| that's enshrined by admissions, one of the edge cases is being
| extremely left-wing politically active, that'll get you in
| easy. That's how 10% of the undergraduates are like that, and
| they're the worst students studying political majors. College
| admissions is political speech.
| yehBut0 wrote:
| bobthechef wrote:
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Well smart generally means "good without cheating" whereas
| you're talking about betrayal which is "only good at cheating."
| missedthecue wrote:
| I don't think kids are faced with a fork in the road, with a
| path toward intellect and a path toward stupidity, and I don't
| think they choose stupidity because Elon Musk shitposts on
| Twitter.
|
| In fact I don't agree with basically any of this analysis at
| all. Sort of the fundamental idea behind IQ is that it's
| innate, not acquired.
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| IQ is not entirely a measure of genetic intelligence. The
| environmental component of IQ is huge, so calling it "innate"
| is wrong.
| seneca wrote:
| This is an open debate, and claiming that there's a
| conclusive answer isn't really accurate. As usual, there's
| more nuance.
|
| Further, the heritability of potential for high IQ isn't
| really in question. Put another way, it looks like
| environment can severely diminish the IQ of a potential
| high IQ child, but it can't probably can't severely raise
| the IQ of a child born to low IQ parents.
|
| What is heritable is the potential. Environment determines,
| to an extent, how fulfilled that potential ends up being.
| This is why smart kids can study and increase their IQ test
| scores.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It's not arguable at all that IQ has a significant
| environmental component.
| seneca wrote:
| Sorry, I should have phrased this better. I don't mean to
| say environment has no impact. What I intended to say is
| that the degree to which IQ is genetic vs environmentally
| influenced is unclear and the subject of debate. Calling
| environment "huge" and innate intelligence wrong is more
| an article of faith than a reflection of some scientific
| truth.
| yehBut0 wrote:
| planarhobbit wrote:
| Intelligence gives you a choice. You can choose to walk away
| from this as best as you can and go about your life on your own
| terms. You aren't guaranteed or given anything else.
|
| You may also participate, if you choose.
|
| This seems to be a sticking point among high achievers, but you
| really need to dial back any societal expectations you may
| have. You're here for a short time, and you're given the option
| of watching the spectacle at your leisure. Enjoy it while it
| lasts.
| kurofune wrote:
| I would like to stress that "high achiever != intelligent".
|
| And the choice to "walk away from this as best as you can and
| go about your life on your own terms" is mainly a money issue
| and not one defined or solved by intelligence.
| fao_ wrote:
| Yep. A significant fraction of MENSA are in fact
| "underachievers" -- due to mental illness or poverty or
| something else.
|
| source: several relatives are members
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I'd imagine there's also a strong selection bias there.
| It's not like being intelligent automatically makes you a
| member of MENSA. You also have to want to be a member of
| a society that uses IQ tests as a selection criteria. I'd
| imagine that self-selects for people who are intelligent
| but insecure about other facets of their life.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > You're here for a short time, and you're given the option
| of watching the spectacle at your leisure. Enjoy it while it
| lasts.
|
| To quote one of Jim Morrison's stage rants from one of the
| Doors live albums, "I'm just here to get my kicks in before
| the whole shithouse goes up flames"
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| Don't forget that everything you see online is a facade. 15+
| years ago, I fell in love with the internet because it's
| somewhere I could go to be something that I'm not. I could be
| LOUD, or I could say things I would normally never say away
| from the keyboard, and I think everyone bonded together online
| with this fact in mind. The internet _was_ an escape.
|
| Soon, people began to view the internet as a reality due to the
| rapid homogenization into 3-4 major websites which are
| controlled mostly by advertisers. But what I've noticed is that
| most of the opinions you read online aren't very honest.
|
| Commenters on reddit will grift in the comment section for
| upvotes. Some commenters on HN will purposely avoid certain
| topics because their account is tied to their reputation in
| certain very partisan circles in California. Both of these
| examples are often the loudest and MOST SEEN (or unseen...)
| replies due to the low effort alignment with the popular
| opinion at the time.
|
| Although the internet seems more real everyday, I truly believe
| it's never been further from reality. No one is truly able to
| say what they want due to the (seemingly) dire consequences of
| saying "F*ck it" and stating your true opinion (which isn't all
| the time, but the option no longer exists). And this even
| applies in the short term. If you aren't banned, you're
| downvoted (HN, reddit, Lobste.rs, every website with a comment
| section...) or filtered by an algorithm tuned to keep corporate
| sponsors and advertisers happy (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube).
|
| Inb4 "If you have opinions that are reprehensible enough to
| need silenced, you aren't worth being heard" - Give me a break.
| No one is perfect. Not to put you on trial or put words in your
| mouth, I just wanted to include that bit.
|
| > Who would struggle to be smart in a society that rewards
| idiocy and blind alignment to asinine political discourses
|
| I agree with this to a point. A lot of this happens online
| first, and companies will do whatever they can to align
| themselves with what's popular online at the time. These
| companies align to whatever the most virtuous opinion is at the
| time. To touch on your original point, these few dozen
| companies can almost be viewed as a microcosm of society as a
| whole. None of their alignments are real. Maybe that's why you
| roll your eyes when a big company suddenly aligns to some
| virtuous "cause" very soon after a viral movement online?
|
| >a society where the loudest opinion is the only one that
| matters
|
| I agree, but only on the internet. Conversations in real life
| don't contain upvotes or retweets. Even if people seem to
| behave this way in real life, everyone has their own thoughts
| and opinions. This will always be true, because those thoughts
| and opinions are one of the few things that define a person.
|
| > the richest man in the world is a simple minded moron that
| acts like a 16yo in the middle of a sugar rush
|
| There seems to be a lack of self awareness in this statement...
| Do you really believe this? This isn't a snarky post at an
| attempt to seem condescending either - I'm genuinely
| interested.
|
| > when they can see that plenty of mediocre adult content
| creators can earn more in a week than your average office
| worker in a month
|
| Content creation is NOT easy. Have you ever tried to do it? I
| know it seems like I'm nitpicking your post, but you seem
| extremely jaded. If you made a strong effort to take an
| objective look at the world at large, I promise you would
| reconsider some of these claims. Or not. But what matters is
| that you are honest with yourself.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >I truly believe it's never been further from reality
|
| The joke is that of all sites, imageboards are probably the
| only places you'll see real stories called out as fake more
| than the other way around. Those are also the few places you
| can be about as real as legally possible, if you're willing
| to give up your sanity for it.
|
| >I agree, but only on the internet. Conversations in real
| life don't contain upvotes or retweets
|
| I believe GP is more alluding to how the world overvalues
| charisma, which is absolutely true. So much importance is put
| on presentation, social skills and the likes, it's hard to
| argue we're all saints willing to filter based on information
| alone. Even democratic voting has surprisingly many
| similarities to upvote culture, when you think about it.
|
| If it was just conversations we'd have to care about, that'd
| be one thing. But in a way, this charisma requirement has
| seeped through the entirety of the world. Partially because
| even in real life, you're still competing with whatever is
| available in the other party's hand with a few swipes.
| Partially because the interconnectivity of today has
| absolutely exploded options, and humans are brutal enough to
| filter lesser options.
| Tao332 wrote:
| Those first couple paragraphs offer a good explanation for
| why I feel disgust every time someone refers to some part of
| the internet as a place. People stating that they feel unsafe
| on Twitter makes about as much sense to me as saying they
| feel unsafe holding a newspaper.
| Tao332 wrote:
| Yeah, I feel like we were just starting to make some progress
| towards a generation of kids that might not bully its nerds,
| but everything kinda went to shit.
|
| Children make the selection. They have an impulse to inflict
| lasting psychological trauma on kids who are smarter than they
| are. Like bright feathers in the wrong forest, IQ is a
| detriment in an environment that's hostile to it.
| dahart wrote:
| It sucks things seem this bad, but there is hope! You do have
| the ability to make your own life better, and to help others.
| The truly smart people don't confuse TV politics with life, and
| they know how to take stock of what's _good and right_ with the
| world in addition to what's wrong. Seriously. Starting making a
| list of things that are good, do it today and don't stop til
| you've listed all good things. Smart people know that there are
| ways to fix things, and spend their time fixing things.
|
| It has always been true in politics that loud and obnoxious
| narratives sometimes beat out more reasoned and better ideas.
| Studying history might interest you to see how bad this was a
| hundred or a thousand years ago. It is very important to stand
| back and notice that over time, the better ideas are actually
| winning. We no longer burn witches or drill holes in the skull
| to release evil spirits. We no longer believe the earth is flat
| or allow people to keep slaves. You can rest assured that
| eventually racism and sexism and wasting all the oil on earth
| to make a quick buck and other dumb things we're doing today
| will go away, even if things seem to be getting worse at this
| very moment.
|
| The sciences and the arts will continue to move forward like
| they have for millennia, and many people, both smart and not
| smart by IQ metrics, will contribute to progress. If you care
| about being an opinion that matters, consider getting involved.
|
| As far as politicians go, please stop watching TV and start
| reading more of what the government actually publishes.
| Governments globally are granting trillions of dollars to fund
| good science and good art and good public works projects. The
| government is made of people and can be made better or worse by
| people. If you believe it's hopeless and you allow it to be
| overrun by perceived grift, then that will continue to happen.
| If you take control and realize that the bad actually hasn't
| infected everything and there are good people trying to help
| and that spending time working on it does make a difference,
| then your opinion and your effort can make a dent in the very
| problems you're talking about.
| yehBut0 wrote:
| dionidium wrote:
| This rant seems to be premised on the idea that IQ measures how
| badly one desires to be smart, but there's no evidence that
| "[struggling] to be smart" can affect your score.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _evidence_
|
| There is a logical evidence: those attracted to that area
| will invest more in it. Exercise of natural Intelligence also
| involves avoiding "early stopping": there a determined
| personality, facilitated by an interested personality, will
| push forward.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Do you have any reliable data backing this "politicians dumb"
| claim up? It would be ironic if some of them had you fooled,
| that wouldn't make them the "simple minded morons" but rather
| those giving the same parties votes again and again, no matter
| the results.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _Most politicians are exasperatingly dumb, most celebrities
| are witless mannequins and the richest man in the world is a
| simple minded moron_
|
| The fact that you believe this only shows you to be gullible.
| [deleted]
| kurofune wrote:
| >The fact that you believe this only shows you to be
| gullible.
|
| The fact that you choose to believe this only shows you how
| little you have been around them IRL. Keep finding solace
| inside your own narratives and consider yourself lucky, most
| of them are the dumbest bunch of crooks you could ever find.
| FrenchDevRemote wrote:
| it takes more than sheer evilness to stay in power
| amusedcyclist wrote:
| That fact that you don't shows you to be bootlicker to power
| swasheck wrote:
| both of you are speaking in absolutes and are failing to
| see the middle. in the us the "exasperatingly dumb" are in
| power because they cater to the base emotions of their
| electorate. it's a hard truth of representative democratic
| democracy/republics. once in power, those who are able to
| manipulate the human psyche are able to take those
| exasperatingly dumb and give them a voice. I'd assert that
| the ability to manipulate complex systems including people)
| into the favor of person or party requires a level of
| intelligence that is not easily dismissed. that doesn't
| mean i agree with the goals or means, usually i do not. but
| the ability to know your audience, and to know how to
| mollify them to maintain your own power is a sort of
| intelligence.
| amusedcyclist wrote:
| Sure Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump share
| similar personality traits that make them very successful
| in the internet dominated world. Its not something that I
| dismiss, but I don't think of them as being master
| manipulators or geniuses, mostly narcissists with right
| type of mass market appeal who were in the right place at
| the right time.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| "A single new study shows something scary and/or surprising" is a
| near certain sign that the conclusion is wrong.
| justinclift wrote:
| > Access to education is currently the most conclusive factor
| explaining disparities > in intelligence, according to Ritchie.
|
| That sounds weird. Doesn't that mean they're "measuring
| intelligence" wrongly, as plenty of people without extensive
| formal education are extremely intelligent?
|
| eg those same people getting further formal education may indeed
| score higher on these IQ tests, but the education is in no way
| changing the persons IQ
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Imagine two people own farms. One has very rich soil, full of
| nutrients, ready to grow amazing crops. The other has thin
| depleted soil, barely able to support plant life.
|
| The farmer with rich soil has the opportunity to out-produce
| the other one, but only if he works the land. And the harder he
| works it, the more productive he will be (up to a point).
|
| Or think of top athletes. Only a few people have the inborn
| talent to become Olympic champions. But no one becomes an
| Olympic champion unless they work hard--no matter how talented.
|
| Heritable intelligence is best thought of as a potential.
| Education can increase a person's IQ scores for the same reason
| that working out can increase a person's athletic performance.
|
| We don't have a way to directly measure inherited potential in
| people; we can only measure what they do. Even an IQ test is
| based on what people do as they take the test.
|
| But also the idea that intelligence is fixed at birth does not
| align with what we know about brain development. We know the
| brain develops through early adulthood, and that different life
| experiences result in physically different brains. While
| inheritance may put a top-end limit on how intelligent someone
| can become, it does not necessarily fix intelligence precisely
| on the IQ scale at birth.
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