A couple of the things. The first is that if your explanation, which is the most convenient, to explain the Flynn effect was correct we'd expect to see a declin

A couple of the things. The first is that if your explanation, which is the most convenient, to explain the Flynn effect was correct we'd expect to see a decline approaching some asymptotic zero as we experienced diminishing returns from things like nutrition and education. But this is not what's happening. IQs are getting literally lower (not growing more slowly), and substantially so. 84% of people fall within the first standard deviation, which in IQ is normalized to 15 points, and we're seeing declines of multiple points that don't seem to be stopping. That's really something that I think should be extremely concerning, but socially we seem to have a bit of head-in-the-sand defense mechanism in play. On support. I'd say my hypothesis is just about as supported as the average view in social sciences. I could certainly formulate an experiment of passable merit to confirm my biases. Of course that by no means means the hypothesis is right, but rather that the notion of scientific support in social views is something I think we should take as a default to be practically meaningless. There are so many ways to quantify and qualify various aspects of society that near any hypothesis can be proven if you play with the data enough. This paper is evidence of such: "To date, however, research on the relationship between adherence to masculine norms and fathering has yielded mixed results, which may be due in part to the fact that many studies use measures of masculinity that do not fully capture hegemonic masculine norms. ...we address this question and extend the literature in three key ways. First, we use a multidimensional and more comprehensive indicator of masculinity than used in prior studies... we consider whether masculine norm adherence influences fathering in different way...." Or to put another way, 'previous research has not yielded the results we wanted to see, so we spun the data in a way such that we could get it.' It's really quite absurd.