[HN Gopher] American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the...
___________________________________________________________________
American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the 'Reverse Flynn
effect'
Author : hirundo
Score : 83 points
Date : 2023-04-10 13:00 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.popularmechanics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.popularmechanics.com)
| patrulek wrote:
| N?
| twobitshifter wrote:
| 400,000 over 12 year period
| runarberg wrote:
| Not quite. The data was scraped from an open source database.
| They used Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project
| (SAPA) which only gives the partial test to each participant,
| and than interpolates for the rest of the test.
|
| The full set of items in SAPA can be as high as 500. They
| supposedly found the reverse Flynn effect by only looking at
| results from 35 (over a 12 year period) and another set of 60
| (over a 7 years period). This should be a red flag, and raise
| suspicions of cherry-picking and p-hacking.
|
| This is not to mention anything about the validity of
| interpreting the combination of some items from SAPA as
| _intelligence_. The SAPA authors don't do that, neither did
| the researchers that originally collected the data, neither
| did the participants, that is only done by the researches of
| this particular paper. And to add another red flag, this
| paper was published in a pretty disgraced journal
| _Intelligence_ , which has been proven to publish plenty of
| pseudo-scientific results where they stretch the statistics
| with an agenda aligned with the eugenics movement.
| rickstanley wrote:
| All of America or just north America?
| runarberg wrote:
| IQ research is at its end of life as a scientific quest. I'm
| willing to declare all modern intelligence research pseudo-
| scientific at this point. This includes this research.
|
| There are number of red flags in this article. Most importantly,
| the journal it is published in _Intelligence_ is not a reputable
| journal at all. It has been linked to the eugenics movement, has
| been shown to publish a number of pseudo-scientific articles,
| kept disgraced pseudo-scientist and racist Richard Lynn on its
| board until 2018, etc. The current editor in chief Richard J.
| Haier was one of 52 signatories on _"Mainstream Science on
| Intelligence"_ which was a defense of the very racist and pseudo-
| science book _The Bell Curve_.
| l5ymep wrote:
| Apart from heresy, what is your counterargument to the bell
| curve?
| lambic2 wrote:
| Studying human athletic performance was also done by some
| eugenics movements, so by your logic we should stop all studies
| of human athletic performance?
| exogeny wrote:
| [flagged]
| beaned wrote:
| I haven't read the comments there but IQ differences among
| genetic groups is real and deeply studied, it is one of the
| least refutable things about homo sapiens that we know. Should
| we be able to talk about it?
| thebooktocome wrote:
| There's a razor's-edge between "why can't we talk about
| [racial difference X]" and "[racial difference X] means
| they're infrahuman."
|
| If you're interested in the contours of this debate, I
| recommend Paul Gilroy's "Postcolonial Melancholia".
| triggerw4rn wrote:
| [flagged]
| kepler1 wrote:
| The problem I see on this topic is that many people takes
| sides on the debate it as if it were an immutable story, to
| be used as a judgement for all time, fueling people's good or
| bad political purposes.
|
| But if anything, time and history has shown us that even if
| you adopt the proposition that IQ scores measure something
| meaningful and some groups score less than others -- _the
| situation is totally changeable and moveable_. People become
| more educated, more skilled, share more culturally over time.
|
| There is nothing _intrinsic_ about IQ that cannot change. So
| to use is as if it means someone is "inferior" is just a
| fallacy or at best a blinded snapshot in time.
|
| Don't use the concept this way.
| beaned wrote:
| I said nothing of the sort. I said that the difference
| exists and asked if we should be able to talk about it.
| triggerw4rn wrote:
| [flagged]
| jmclnx wrote:
| I read somewhere a couple of years ago, some scientists showed
| that as CO2 levels rise, IQ scores drop.
|
| But, me, I fully believe it is due to the war on public education
| by the US GOP. I wish these articles broke down these scores by
| school type the children go/went to.
|
| Kids sent to high end private schools by their ultra rich parents
| probably have seen no such decline. It is like the US is trying
| to move into a caste society, ruling class and serf class.
|
| edit: spelling
| sfblah wrote:
| I would like to believe this, but as someone with pretty
| privileged kids, it's not this. It's the phones.
| ravenstine wrote:
| There's not even close to enough CO2 in the atmosphere to have
| that profound of an effect on our IQ. If it was then our own
| breath would give us all brain damage and our species would
| have gone extinct millions of years ago. Pollution and poor air
| circulation indoors is one thing, but the ambient CO2 in the
| atmosphere outdoors is another.
| davorak wrote:
| I think it would be hard to directly study the ~1/3,
| ~320-420ppm increase in background CO2 levels over the last
| ~60 years: https://www.climate.gov/news-
| features/understanding-climate/...
|
| Maybe raising rats in different CO2 levels over several
| generations. I would be interested in the results of a study
| like that.
| pcurve wrote:
| Drop in: 1. logic and vocabulary. 2. visual problem solving and
| analogies 3. computational and mathematical abilities
|
| Increase in: 1. scores in spatial reasoning (known as 3D
| rotation)
|
| "And, it should be said, there has long been debate over how
| accurately IQ tests are able to gauge overall intelligence and
| potential for success in society in the first place."
|
| That's not what this psychologist concluded:
|
| "Top psychologist: IQ is the No. 1 predictor of work success"
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-...
|
| Anyway, I don't think it's bad to just admit that people
| intelligence is declining. The world has evolved such that you
| need less of it to get by.
| staunton wrote:
| > The world has evolved such that you need less of it to get
| by.
|
| Not so sure about that. Do you need more intelligence for
| "working the fields with basic tools" or for an average job in
| your country?
|
| This might change when AI becomes economically relevant and the
| "value of intelligence" plummets.
| slashdev wrote:
| > Anyway, I don't think it's bad to just admit that people
| intelligence is declining.
|
| I think that couldn't be more serious or important. I can't
| tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
| vannevar wrote:
| It's not mentioned in the article, but this could also be a
| sampling issue. Samples from previous decades might've been more
| limited or self-selected. The internet may mean that a broader,
| more representative sample of the population is being tested, and
| you're just seeing regression to the mean.
| dragontamer wrote:
| IQ tests weren't designed to determine good vs better humans. It
| was designed to determine mentally deficient vs below-average
| humans.
|
| Consider a weightlifting competition where the weight-limit were
| 20lbs (10-kilograms). You'd be able to determine those with
| severe injuries or deficiencies vs a typical human, but you
| wouldn't be able to determine a peak-athlete from an average
| person.
|
| ---------
|
| Now sure, we can increase the reps to absurd levels, like "200
| reps of 20lbs", which will start to separate out the athletes
| from the typical humans. And that's roughly what the upper-end of
| the IQ test does: you need to be more-and-more accurate / fewer
| mistakes to reach 115, 120, 125 IQ or above. But we've have
| pushed the test far beyond its intended purpose.
|
| IQ itself partially depends on a somewhat unproven concept of
| "general intelligence", which IIRC no one is even sure if it
| applies to average (or smarter) humans.
| BigCryo wrote:
| Hmmm... Apparently IQ's did drop sharply when I was away
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| This blog post asserts that IQ scores didn't drop for the
| population as a whole, and that the drop for each individual
| group is due to changing composition of that group:
|
| https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/03/new-study-didnt-really-...
|
| For example, if the % of people who do a postgraduate degree goes
| doubles, it's no longer such a select group, so you'd expect the
| average IQ of postgraduate degree holders to go down. This
| doesn't mean IQ scores are going down for the population as a
| whole.
|
| One more thing: why do so many papers that present charts that
| show how a mean or median changes over time, without also
| presenting charts that show how the distribution has changed over
| time?
| tptacek wrote:
| It's worth looking up whose blog this is before trusting any of
| its analysis.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I'd never heard of this person before finding this blog post
| via Google. So I trust the post as much as I trust any random
| blog post that seems to make a reasonable argument :)
| tedivm wrote:
| You trust one of these random people enough to promote it.
| It's not unreasonable for people to point out that the
| author is quite infamous for his viewpoints.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I didn't mean to imply I didn't appreciate people telling
| me more about this guy. I apologise if that's how my
| comment came across.
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's an ad-hominem (in the original sense of the word: an
| ad-hominem fallacy is one where the truth or falsity of
| an argument is determined by the trustworthiness of its
| proponent rather than by the content of the argument
| itself).
|
| Is he right? The argument is plausible: the study
| measures _online_ IQ tests. Certainly in my experience
| the average person online has gotten dumber in the 30
| years I 've been on the Internet, because Internet access
| has expanded and it's now the general population rather
| than just upper-middle-class academics. But we'd need to
| see comparisons vs. _offline_ IQ tests, given to a
| randomly-sampled selection of the population, to be sure.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's not a fallacy to attack someone's historical
| reliability in making arguments.
| tptacek wrote:
| Now you have. Adjust accordingly. I'm not telling you how
| to adjust, only that you're likely to want to.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Yup. 100% agree :)
| graycat wrote:
| Naw!!! "trust ... analysis"??? How does it go, "trust none of
| what you hear and only half of what you read and still will
| trust twice too much??? Not entirely a joke!
|
| Lately been trying to get some summary, intuitive
| _understanding_ of a lot of Internet _content_ and have begun
| to conclude that there is something can _trust_ (also not
| entirely a joke): The authors of the content want readers,
| and their content is something the authors want those readers
| to believe!!!
|
| When I wanted something I could _trust_ , ended up as a math
| major. But: Can't answer enough questions with just math. So,
| one resulting lesson from being a math major is, need to
| learn to work with _content_ can 't completely trust. E.g.,
| in part, might keep in mind the advice "(1) Always look for
| the hidden agenda. (2) Follow the money."
| [deleted]
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| [flagged]
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| A summary:
|
| https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard
| strken wrote:
| I have very low trust in RationalWiki, so here's a related
| Wikipedia article instead:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPsych
| itronitron wrote:
| What does it mean for a % of something to 'goes doubles' ?
| ParksNet wrote:
| [flagged]
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| Yet again we play "Hacker News: satire or not?"
| polski-g wrote:
| By just comparing TFR across income (read: IQ) groups, you can
| know that IQ is dropping.
| greenhearth wrote:
| Is there anyone surprised, really?
| GalenErso wrote:
| > interestingly, scores in spatial reasoning went up
|
| Wild guess: video games. More Americans play or used to play
| video games than ever. And 3D games require players to understand
| an environment to navigate it.
| thriftwy wrote:
| The prevalence of maps in our lifes via handheld devices could
| also contribute.
| gantron wrote:
| How does an article like this get published without summarizing
| the specific results or quantifying the drop?
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Seriously. A few time series plots would be far more
| informative than all that blather.
| carabiner wrote:
| Low IQ scores.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Could this have to so with smart people increasing pursuing
| hedonism over reproduction? Maybe Idiocracy was right all along.
|
| From a strict evolutionary perspective I have doubts that a high
| IQ is useful anymore.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The point of the original Flynn effect being a big deal was
| that the changes were faster than was possible with genetics
| alone.
|
| A big part of "The Bell Curve" was arguing that no
| interventions could change IQ except genetics and so any money
| spent on low IQ people (African-Americans in the book, but the
| author followed up by attacking poor people more generally) was
| a pointless waste.
|
| It turns out he wasn't just an asshole, he was also wrong.
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| I've never read the "Bell Curve", and I'm not a huge fan of
| Charles Murray's work in general, but, from the first line in
| Wikpedia:
|
| "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American
| Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and
| political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors
| argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by
| both inherited and environmental factors."
|
| That statement completely contradicts what your claim about
| the book, and now I am disinclined to trust you.. Later on
| another statement also completely contradicts what you are
| saying:
|
| "According to Herrnstein and Murray, the high heritability of
| IQ within races does not necessarily mean that the cause of
| differences between races is genetic. On the other hand, they
| discuss lines of evidence that have been used to support the
| thesis that the black-white gap is at least partly genetic,
| such as Spearman's hypothesis. They also discuss possible
| environmental explanations of the gap, such as the observed
| generational increases in IQ, for which they coin the term
| Flynn effect"
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I agree it probably isn't genetics alone, notably the
| increase in visual spatial skills I would suspect to have
| more to do with video games than genetics.
|
| I have yet to read "the bell curve" said, but did they really
| use an argument that flew in the face of the abundant
| evidence of IQ increases unlinked to genetics as a result of
| better nutrition and education? Hell America gained a few IQ
| points nationwide from banning leaded gasoline alone so we
| also knew of environmental means to affect IQ levels. This
| was all known about and very well established at the time of
| authorship. Is there an excerpt?
| Izkata wrote:
| I haven't read it either, but even just a quick look at
| Wikipedia shows the other responders don't know what
| they're talking about:
|
| > According to Herrnstein and Murray, the high heritability
| of IQ within races does not necessarily mean that the cause
| of differences between races is genetic. On the other hand,
| they discuss lines of evidence that have been used to
| support the thesis that the black-white gap is at least
| partly genetic, such as Spearman's hypothesis. They also
| discuss possible environmental explanations of the gap,
| such as the observed generational increases in IQ, for
| which they coin the term Flynn effect. At the close of this
| discussion, they write:
|
| > > If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic
| or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion
| of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of
| presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to
| us that both genes and environment have something to do
| with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are
| resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can
| determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Part_III._The_
| N...
|
| The part I find especially amusing is how often the Flynn
| effect is used to refute The Bell Curve, even though the
| term "Flynn effect" comes from The Bell Curve.
| runarberg wrote:
| There are many ways to refute _The Bell Curve_. In
| addition to the Flynn effect, the science in it are plain
| bad, the policy proposals they enlist don't necessarily
| follow their scientifically flawed results, it repeatedly
| cites a disgraced eugenicist as source, it was never peer
| reviewed etc. At this point, nothing in this book should
| be accepted as nothing more than a poor attempt at
| scientific racism. Let alone should anyone take any sort
| of scientific consensus. Other than the fact that it was
| wrong.
|
| This YouTube video[1] does a fair job of summarizing the
| bulk of what is wrong with this book. But IMO very fact
| that the book is an apologia for eugenicists should be
| enough of a critique, you shouldn't need any more.
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
|
| PS. Regarding the naming of the Flynn effect:
|
| > Flynn stated that, if asked, he would have named the
| effect after Read D. Tuddenham who "was the first to
| present convincing evidence of massive gains on mental
| tests using a nationwide sample" in a 1948 article
| runarberg wrote:
| > did they really use an argument that flew in the face of
| the abundant evidence of IQ increases unlinked to genetics
| as a result of better nutrition and education?
|
| Yes they did, and they did a lot worse than that. And that
| is the reason why the scientific community was very fast to
| discredit this book. The science in it were bad, to say the
| least. It wasn't even peer reviewed. I think the decline in
| IQ research is in large part thanks to the pushback this
| book rightfully got.
|
| It is actually nice that this books is raised here, because
| the journal this study was published in _Intelligence_ has
| its ties to true believers of _The Bell Curve_. Richard J.
| Haier is the editor in chief signed an editorial defending
| this book back in 1994. And the board included disgraced
| eugenicist Richard Lynn (whos discredited pseudo-scientific
| work cited throughout the book) was on the editorial board
| until 2018.
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| > Yes they did, and they did a lot worse than that
|
| See above reply. Wikepedia completely contradicts what
| you are saying. I also know what you're saying about AEI
| is mostly garbage, too.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| You are being overly charitable.
|
| He worked at the American Enterprise Institute, so if you
| just imagine their attitude to the scientific facts of
| climate change, transposed onto genetics, you'll have a
| good idea of what they were saying. So it's not so much as
| not being aware of the science, but of not liking the
| obvious policy conclusions it leads to and so having to
| work really hard to counter it.
|
| https://www.desmog.com/american-enterprise-institute/
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Absolutely not what Murray said in the bell curve. It's not a
| very hard book to attack, so I'm not sure why people always
| go for strawmen. Please post anything from the book that
| comes anywhere close to saying IQ is 100% genetic.
| runarberg wrote:
| What is going on with _Bell Curve_ apologists all of a sudden
| replying to this post. I thought the debate was slowly fading
| out and than I count 5 different account replying within an
| hour.
| moonchrome wrote:
| > A big part of "The Bell Curve" was arguing that no
| interventions could change IQ except genetics and so any
| money spent on low IQ people (African-Americans in the book,
| but the author followed up by attacking poor people more
| generally) was a pointless waste.
|
| It should be self-evident that you can lower IQ through
| environment (injury, developmental issues, malnourishment,
| etc.). So even if you believe there's a genetic ceiling to
| IQ, Flynn effect (and reverse) don't contradict that.
| polski-g wrote:
| IQ hasn't been beneficial to evolution for over 100 years. Once
| means-tested welfare came into existence, being low-IQ became
| more advantageous. The reason Europe was able to take over the
| world is that they taxed the poor (low-IQ) more than the rich
| in the dark ages and the rich out-bred the poor for at least 2
| generations.
| [deleted]
| majormajor wrote:
| One of the first European world powers after the dark ages,
| Portugal, was not more advanced than many of the areas it
| attacked _except for in weaponry_ since Europe had been
| infighting while other math and science was being pursued in
| eastern parts of the world. Regardless of what percentage of
| motivation you ascribe to "we want their shit" vs "we want
| them to take our religion," I don't think you can say it was
| an advantage or motivation driven by intelligence.
|
| ("The rich outbred the poor" also seems very dubious, labor
| was still very manual, so you gotta have someone to do it.)
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Very arguably social welfare resulted in the biggest increase
| in IQ levels in history as general health, nutrition, and
| education improved. Also social welfare improved social
| mobility which should cause IQ to have more of an impact
| rather than less of one.
|
| I am not rejecting this point but I have a hard time
| accepting it Carte Blanche. If anything if IQ is lowering for
| generic reasons I would suspect birth control as a cause
| especially since it's a more recent phenomenon than means
| tested welfare.
| laverya wrote:
| Social welfare could do BOTH things - dramatically increase
| IQ for the next generation (that grows up with proper
| nutrition etc) while also remove the selective pressure
| that increased IQ over the course of centuries.
| notch898b wrote:
| [flagged]
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| From a strict evolutionary perspective it probably hasn't been
| for a long time and likely never was as significant on an
| individual level as people like to believe.
|
| The only things being selected for in modern humans, _if
| anything_ , are going to be things like disease resistance,
| maybe tolerance to some chemical contaminants in food & water,
| air pollution. And even then only in some parts of the world.
| armatav wrote:
| Nope - sexual selection still takes place regardless of
| environmental survival factors.
|
| And sexual selection takes place faster and can lead
| populations to scenarios that induce natural selection.
| yucky wrote:
| [flagged]
| triggerwarn wrote:
| [dead]
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Funny, because I believe the argument of the alt-right is
| that the elitists are also brainwashed and controlled to be
| puppets of the socialist secret Nanny deep state
| localplume wrote:
| [dead]
| iamerroragent wrote:
| They say scores in spatial reasoning went up while analogies,
| vocabulary, and numerical reasoning declined.
|
| Hmmm I wonder if an increase use of videogames paired with a
| decrease in the amount of time parents can spend communicating
| with their children might be related.
|
| Note that over the last 30 years it's vastly transitioned from
| one parent staying home raising children to both parents working.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Not sure where you got your data, but from what I can find, the
| rate of stay at home parents has mostly stayed unchanged
| between 1989 and 2018: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
| tank/2018/09/24/stay-at-hom...
| count wrote:
| '30 years ago' is 1970 to 2000 I bet :)
| iamerroragent wrote:
| Hahaha you raise a good point. I'm thinking in the
| perspective of 90s view on stay-home parents shrinking
| where as since 2000's that trend has changed:
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/08/7-key-
| findi...
|
| Nearly 50% of households in the 70s had a stay-at-home
| parent. So a larger number of parents today grew up with
| working parents than 5 decades ago.
| iamerroragent wrote:
| Huh that is interesting.
|
| https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-
| releases/2020/estimate...
|
| Here is a pretty clear indication that people are just not
| having children.
|
| Maybe the percentage of stay at home parents has stayed the
| same but the number of stay at home parents has shrunk
| because the number of all parents has just shrunk as well.
|
| None of that really helps indicate why IQ in certain metrics
| related to communication would be in decline. Since the
| percentages are the same you would think outcomes would be
| similar then.
|
| So are kids getting dumber or are parents just getting worse?
|
| Or other factors in our environment are contributing to this.
| An increase in smart devices autocorrecting and doing 'math'
| for us for example.
| notch898b wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| elhudy wrote:
| Humans are incredibly adaptive. Is there much reason to have an
| expansive vocabulary nowadays? We are taught to speak and write
| as concisely and understandably as possible. We can look up the
| definition of any word at our fingertips. "[I do not] carry
| such information in my mind since it is readily available in
| books." - Einstein.
|
| Maybe these tests are declining because they are measuring
| skills that are decreasingly relevant? I'm not certain I
| believe this myself but it's an interesting thought.
| burnished wrote:
| Your vocabulary is tied to your expressive power and your
| ability to form coherent and compelling arguments. I'd argue
| that without an expansive vocabulary you would struggle to
| write with precision let alone brevity.
|
| Not that its wrong to question, I just think you'd need to do
| more work supporting the idea that language skills are less
| important today for some reason.
| dist1ll wrote:
| > Your vocabulary is tied to your expressive power and your
| ability to form coherent and compelling arguments
|
| It goes way further. A restricted language limits your
| thinking, perception and even _imagination_.
|
| One mind-blowing example of this are experiments done on
| color perception. It turns out that the categories for
| colors in your particular language (green, blue, red for
| English) are strongly tied to your ability to perceive them
| as different. If your language is less granular, you'll
| have more trouble distinguishing categories of color that
| don't map cleanly to your language.
|
| It's not a big leap to think that the same applies for
| creativity, artistic expression or mathematical and
| scientific ingenuity.
| riversflow wrote:
| * * *
| staunton wrote:
| > We are taught to speak and write as concisely and
| understandably as possible.
|
| One day... I believe.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| If the Norwegians are to be believed then no.
|
| > A study of Norwegian military conscripts' test records found
| that IQ scores have been falling for generations born after the
| year 1975, and that the underlying cause of both initial
| increasing and subsequent falling trends appears to be
| environmental rather than genetic.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Reminds me of this "The humble pocket calculator should have
| taken Sociology by storm half a century ago." post criticizing
| how psychometrics has become bunk as it hasn't kept up with the
| times:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| Intelligence can't be generalised.
| throwawayterror wrote:
| [flagged]
| graycat wrote:
| > "... with many attributing the change to various environmental
| factors."
|
| How 'bout _social_ factors?
| squokko wrote:
| Fewer than half of the hypereducated peers I know have kids,
| while my gardener has 8 kids, so I expect that this trend will
| continue
| Havoc wrote:
| Education is not IQ
| Clubber wrote:
| >Education is not IQ
|
| This is true but I suspect people with higher IQs tend to
| have more education. Probably because they are "good" at
| learning while someone with a lower IQ struggles more and
| doesn't like it because of that.
| squokko wrote:
| My gardener is not high IQ. Good guy and hard worker but
| there has got to be some correlation between IQ and
| education.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Chris Langan was a bouncer for twenty years
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
| squokko wrote:
| What do you think this proves, and why?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| [flagged]
| sainez wrote:
| > My gardener is not high IQ.
|
| Wow! You must have ran a battery of IQ tests to assert this
| with such absolute certainty.
|
| My father used to be a gardener to make ends meet. Because
| of a lack of education and a language barrier, I'm sure he
| would appear low IQ as well. Now he works in electronics
| manufacturing and the efficiency by which he debugs
| production problems and reasons from first principles would
| put many of my educated peers to shame. What can be easily
| dismissed as a lack of ability can be more reasonably
| explained by a lack of opportunity and resources. But it is
| easier for privileged people to look down on others and
| believe that everyone is in a position they deserve.
| dqft wrote:
| The gardener is still not high IQ.
| squokko wrote:
| I don't look down on him. I'd rather live next to him
| than my existing neighbors. But do you think that maybe I
| have a better read on him than you do, given that I see
| him every 2 weeks and you have no idea who he is?
| davorak wrote:
| In my experience claims of knowing the intelligence of
| another person are often wrong. Enough so that I reserve
| judgement much more often than not.
|
| I think the above is part of the doubt you are running
| into with your claim. You might be able to come up with
| evidence/stores that would lend credence to you
| conclusions about your gardener, but I do not think it
| would move your main point "there has got to be some
| correlation between IQ and education." forward.
| kube-system wrote:
| There's a correlation but there's at least a few
| intermediary variables. And it isn't linear -- people with
| very high IQs often have a difficult time with their
| educations.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Brother of a friend of mine has five children -- apparently
| success in Darwinian terms.
|
| Two of them were born addicted to heroin.
|
| Currently residing in a "sober living facility" last I heard,
| confidently talking about launching a career in retail
| management. The field looks attractive because he can "just
| tell people what to do".
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I take full credit for this, mostly though my HN comments. You're
| welcome.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I do not understand what it is I have the honor of you trying
| to tell me
| oblio wrote:
| He's joking that his comments lower IQs.
| tedk-42 wrote:
| [flagged]
| chuankl wrote:
| And readthenotes1 is just playing along by pretending to be
| stupid (due to reduction of IQ that kelseyfrog jokingly
| took credit for).
| usefulcat wrote:
| > He's joking
|
| I think you meant 'she': about: Just a
| frog on the internet. she/her
| chikitabanana wrote:
| [flagged]
| siliconsorcerer wrote:
| I love you
| [deleted]
| dmn322 wrote:
| Bet it's related to income inequality and the reduction of wages
| wrt productivity.
|
| Stress is known to reduce short term memory, which affects IQ.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| When IQ tests were invented folks didn't know about tests, at
| least in the US. They were rural immigrants who could maybe read.
| So when asked logic questions, they would answer pragmatically
| and be 'wrong'. That had some impact on perceived early low
| results.
|
| As folks became better-read and educated they began to understand
| that IQ test questions were a sort of puzzle, not a real honest
| question. The answer was expected to solve the puzzle, not be
| right in any way.
|
| E.g. There are no Elephants in Germany. Munich is in Germany. How
| many elephants are there in Munich? A) 0 B) 1 C)2
|
| Folks back then might answer B or C, because they figure hey
| there's probably a zoo in Munich, bet they have an elephant or
| two there. And be marked wrong.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| That theory could be plausible, except Flynn used results from
| Raven's Progressive Matrices, which is just pattern
| recognition. There are no questions about elephants or text-
| based questions that could introduce cultural bias. It's simply
| picking the shape that matches the pattern presented in a grid.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices
| globalreset wrote:
| Honest question that keeps bothering me.
|
| In the absence of reasonably strong natural selection pressure to
| select for IQ, how could IQ not be falling over time?
| Havoc wrote:
| Why would it fall? Steady seems just as fair an expectation in
| absence of pressure either way
| globalreset wrote:
| Because the chance of random mutation to increase an IQ (or
| improve anything whatsoever) is far smaller than to lower it
| (or degrade anything).
|
| Change randomly a random line of code in any source code, and
| tell me how often it happens to work better than before.
| robocat wrote:
| Some guesses for why there may be hidden selection pressure:
|
| Academics often stereotype "jocks" and high social status
| seekers as stupid. However, it often requires brains to succeed
| in sports and social interactions. But it is technically
| difficult to measure high "intuition". I know some very very
| smart people that fail academically (I know they are smart
| because I see them achieve seemingly impossible outcomes, not
| because I have their skills). I strongly suspect that selecting
| for high non-academic skills will select for general
| intelligence. If one lacks skill X (e.g. the stereotypical
| nerd[1] with low social skills) then one usually lacks the
| ability to recognise people that are highly skilled in skill X
| (and worse often assumes the skill is useless or denigrates
| those with the skill or thinks they could be highly skilled if
| they wanted to).
|
| There could be bubbles of selection pressure - subgroups where
| high IQ leads to having more kids. So long as the subgroup
| intermingles, then there is a population level pressure for
| higher intellect.
|
| It is possible that unsmart people remove themselves from the
| gene pool before reproduction, or unsmart people reproduce
| less.
|
| One or two outlier smart men that have thousands of children
| could have a massive selection pressure. Are we not all
| descended from Ghengis Khan?
|
| Smartness has thousands of factors, and selection pressure on
| some hidden factors could easily have an outcome on general
| intelligence.
|
| [1] Counterpoint "Being smart seems to make you unpopular"
| implies popular people are not smart:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
| scarmig wrote:
| Conscientiousness and having long-term time horizons is
| dysgenic. People afflicted with those traits tend to reproduce
| less, and, to the extent that they're heritable, the genes
| coding them will gradually decrease in prevalence in the gene
| pool.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I've floated this idea before especially in the context of
| ADHD being framed as a disease because it has social costs,
| personal costs, and causes disruptive behavior. That may all
| be true but people with ADHD also have more unprotected sex
| and the vast majority of western society is wiping themselves
| out on account of not having enough unprotected sex to
| sustain themselves. It's just that anything which interferes
| with utilitarianism and hedonism is framed as a disease.
| runarberg wrote:
| It is not. IQ doesn't measure a kind of intelligence which
| inherits, and is subject to natural selection (there is even a
| debate whether such intelligence exists; or at least is of any
| significant between individuals).
|
| IQ at best measures something that correlates with SAT. And
| with better education, less exposure to damaging pollutants,
| etc. it should always be on the rise (as demonstrated by the
| Flynn effect; an effect which this poor paper desperately tries
| to refute).
|
| IQ research has always been about proving the superiority of
| one race over others, this superiority doesn't exist, but that
| doesn't stop these pseudo-scientist from trying. They bend the
| definition of "intelligence" and device test batteries (and in
| this case, interpret test battery) in skewed and bias ways to
| manipulate results like these. Regrettably media outlets like
| the Popular Mechanics and lifestyle journalists like Tim
| Newcomb take these researchers at their words and publish their
| results, despite their results pretty much being lies.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| The heritability of IQ is very well established, usually
| estimated in the 50-80% range. You are fighting an uphill
| battle here because even if people haven't seen the
| scientific evidence this effect is so strong that virtually
| everybody has seen anecdotal evidence of high IQ parents
| having high IQ children, but just seem to assert a very
| heterodox and counter-intuitive position without further
| elaboration.
|
| It is incredibly arguable if during an obesity crisis if
| population wide health is actually improving and if
| population wide health isn't improving that could certainly
| contribute to lower IQ. We're also seeing population wide
| declines of health in other ways like sperm count. Food is
| becoming less nutritious as soil depletes. Our fish stocks
| being about to collapse is going to be another hit against
| brain health as omega 3s will become rarer in the diet.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Thoughts on this post on the accuracy of IQ?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I find it interesting because I did REALLY badly on oral
| tests. On the WISC-III I was doing extremely badly on the
| test until the examiner allowed me to write down my
| answers instead of giving them verbally and my measured
| IQ shot up like two standard deviations. I've been as far
| as 3 standard deviations apart in psychiatrist
| administered IQ tests, and my best and worst results in
| any given IQ test have also been about 3 standard
| deviations apart. My biggest theory is that I'm
| bottlenecked by how I both take in and communicate the
| information, I'm not very good at listening orally nor am
| I very good at communicating with my voice nor can I
| write very fast with a pencil. Not shockingly I was
| diagnosed with multiple learning disabilities and it's my
| opinion and the opinion of one psychologist I had that IQ
| testing is neither a reliable nor valid means of testing
| my intelligence.
|
| I think the point being made more generally about IQ
| tests testing the wrong things is very valid and I do
| agree with it, but it extends beyond just IQ testing, it
| also raises questions about standardised academic
| testing. What I will point out though that any
| rebalancing of IQ tests or standardised tests at this
| point is likely to become an intensely political affair
| because these tests are used to justify gatekeeping
| access to status and societal resources, and any new
| tests would necessarily be far worse researched than
| existing tests, so I wouldn't expect current IQ testing
| methodology to be upended any time soon.
| runarberg wrote:
| I'm not fighting an uphill battle. Ever since _The Bell
| Curve_ came out, there has been a slow but steady
| distancing of both psychological research and policy makers
| from the whole field of IQ research. Modern psychology
| couldn't care less about on the heritability factor of IQ,
| and most policy makers don't want to touch it with a 10
| foot pole. Heck the SAT has even been renamed as they don't
| want to be affiliated with anything resembling IQ any more.
|
| The heritability of IQ is only well established within true
| believers of a pseudo-science tightly linked with the
| eugenics movement. Most psychologists today believe that
| the supposed heritability was observed because of bias
| within the research. And given the people who were doing
| these research in the 1970s and the 1980s, and their
| motivation for doing those, there is no question on what
| these biases were. Some of the researchers went so went
| quite far in bending the data such that it would fit their
| narrow--and racist--world view. They tried really hard to
| define intelligence such that it would make rich white
| people smarter, they were regrettably successful for far to
| long, but ultimately failed.
|
| Your anecdotal evidence of high IQ parents (ugh!) having
| high IQ children is the same anecdotal evidence that
| sociologists have been describing for decades that high SES
| parents have high SES children, and is the main reason for
| why parents with high SAT scores are likely to have
| children with high SAT scores.
|
| What IQ researchers discovered was basically the same thing
| that Marx described in 1867, class, however the eugenics
| were no communists, and instead of providing the simpler
| explanation, that society rewards the ruling elite, and
| wealth inherits, the eugenics went all conspiratorial and
| blamed other races for their perceived decline in society.
| [deleted]
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Twin studies are hard to explain through any means other
| than genetics I've seen an analysis of them as recently
| as 2015, not just in the 70s and 80s.
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270739/
|
| >Your anecdotal evidence of high IQ parents (ugh!) having
| high IQ children is the same anecdotal evidence that
| sociologists have been describing for decades that high
| SES parents have high SES children
|
| No, I've seen people who grew up with low SES but had
| parents/grandparents who were consistently A students or
| were employed in prestigious intellectual jobs, and lo
| and behold, they ended up doing better in things like
| school than you would expect for somebody of their SES.
|
| >Bias, racism
|
| I'm just going to turn this around on you. Why should I
| not believe you're bias and racist and simply want to
| disprove IQ testing so as to undermine the social
| position and access to societal resources certain groups
| have as a result of IQ testing and things like it such as
| standardised testing? There's plenty of profit in
| painting certain groups as oppressors whose success is
| actually just robbery, and not an accident of genetic
| difference, since this consequently justifies racist
| measures to correct this inequity. People can benefit
| from such notions both directly and socially through
| association with a popular movement.
|
| I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea of IQ lacking validity
| because I can't make strongly convincing arguments that
| IQ predicts anything besides academic success and it's
| hard to then argue our measures of academic success
| aren't themselves arbitrary and disconnected from
| practical utility. It's arguably too hard and too
| arbitrary to distill "intelligence" down to a few
| standardised tests and prove those tests have cross-
| domain validity.
|
| I don't have much sympathy to the idea that IQ is not
| heritable based on nothing but ad hominem and the idea
| this position is anti-racist because it's not what I read
| from the evidence.
| pkaye wrote:
| Have these heritability studies been done in other
| countries where some of these biases might not exist?
| sfblah wrote:
| There aren't that many, but here's one:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01
| 602...
|
| It's a twin study. Here's a quote: "Mean IQ scores were
| modestly higher among those from higher SES backgrounds,
| but the magnitude of genetic influences on IQ was
| uniformly high across the range of SES." SES means
| "socio-economic status".
|
| Honestly, the evidence for heritability of IQ is very
| strong. Arguing against it, in my opinion, borders on
| arguing that vaccines don't work. I actually understand
| why people do it (there's a lot of very bad history in
| how IQ data has been used). But I just think it's more
| important in the long run to tell the truth and find
| solutions based on the truth.
| sfblah wrote:
| The following is my opinion, based on my research:
|
| * IQ is real, measurable and heritable. The evidence for
| this is overwhelming.
|
| * Nobody argues about the broad heritability of other
| human traits such as hair/eye color, height, athletic
| ability and the like.
|
| * The argument over IQ is a consequence of terrible
| historical experiences with eugenics and racial
| discrimination. Many have adopted the quasi-religious
| viewpoint that IQ is not heritable to sidestep the
| discussion.
|
| * As a consequence, social policy resembles the cycles
| and epicycles of Ptolemy's cosmology. Namely, all manner
| of social, economic and historical outcomes which are
| explained parsimoniously by understanding IQ as heritable
| are instead attributed to a Rube-Goldberg machine of
| racism, class warfare and the like.
|
| * Accepting IQ as heritable does not, in an enlightened
| society, require acceptance of racism or classism, any
| more than people are forced to discriminate against those
| who, say, are genetically weaker athletes due to low
| relative VO2 levels.
|
| * Social policy could be enhanced and better targeted by
| targeting those at the lower end of the IQ curve with
| subsidies such as basic income.
|
| * Accepting IQ as real, heritable and measurable
| represents one of the only paths out of the present
| morass of corrupt political patronage programs around
| specific groups, just as rejection of Ptolemy's worldview
| enabled turning away from the demon-haunted world of
| religion.
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| As a young kid I scored ok for my age, very high for 2 years
| older. Now I don't think I'm better at simple pattern tests then
| my peers.Im sure it means something, but especially with kids
| I've seen wildly different scores for the same kids on different
| moments and tests.
| pg938hkd wrote:
| The iq test can drop its standardized at 100 meaning average
| person scores 100. You have to standardize it for different
| population groups which cases issues when you test non
| represented populations
| swalling wrote:
| Link to the study:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| The politicization of everything and the rise of ideologic
| overtake of universities, contaminated thinking accurately about
| the models of reality reducing every intelligence based and
| genuine debate to banal disputes of privileges and subjective
| preferences militarizing discourse with false accusations and
| mining the victimhood mindset.
|
| PS: most of the population can't read that sentence and are blind
| to that trick.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| If it's true that most of the population can't read that
| sentence, it's because it's both contrivedly complex and also
| syntactically incorrect.
| regularjack wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised that most of the population can't
| indeed understand that sentence, as it's a badly written one,
| IMHO.
|
| What's the trick?
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