19 ms·

IQ decline and Piaget: Does the rot start at the top? [pdf]

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• cblconfederate 5y ago
• bingohbangoh 5y ago
  There was a theory floating about on Twitter about apparent European noble practices regarding child birth. Basically, nobles that failed out of society for whatever reason (drunkards, second borns, etc.) would intermix with the lower classes. This would propagate out "superior" genes that may have aided increases in intelligence over time. This is quite controversial but it is thought provoking.
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    Highly doubtful considering their recessive traits. Evidently intelligence doesnt correlate with social dominance , its the same today or in roman times
  • zuminator 5y ago
    Why in the world would nobles have superior genes in the first place? Since being noble is merely hereditary by "blood," there's no genetic pressure that would select for intelligence. If anything due to intermarriage they'd be more likely to have birth defects leading to low intelligence, I would imagine.
    • jcadam 5y ago
      > If anything due to intermarriage they'd be more likely to have birth defects leading to low intelligence, I would imagine. It's widely speculated that the demise of the Hapsburg empire was due to centuries of inbreeding eventually producing rather... simple monarchs.
    • gumby 5y ago
      Yes, if they selected for anything at all it would be for a willingness to carry around a long sharp knife and push it into people who don't do what the knife-wielder says.
      • roywiggins 5y ago
        Or, to be fair, the ability to get other people with pointy sticks to do it for you. That's also an important skill for nobles.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
      • mc32 5y ago
        The implication I think is a missing a point. Before the advent of mechanization people were subject to the whims of nature. When nature ravaged them, they were forced to seek developed resources elsewhere and this’d who had those resources normally would not want to share them with others as all resources were meager and most people lived on the edge of existence where one bad summer meant winter was bare and people starved or died by disease taking advantage of weakened systems. Thus people had to fight of they’d die themselves. So it wasnt always, let’s make war so we can subjugate more; though that did happen too Vikings. Huns and Ottomans among others. Of course there were petty rivalries that also just produced unproductive wars.
      • AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
    • rory 5y ago
      If you cast out the "inferior," you don't have to start out superior to end up so.
    • bencollier49 5y ago
      Let's assume the opposite - that success is not correlated with fitness (intelligence amongst other things). Is that a rational position to take?
      • stonogo 5y ago
        Yes. Being second-born is not a heritable trait.
      • api 5y ago
        Either claim would be wrong if it assumed perfect correlation or lack thereof. Correlations are floats not booleans. There is going to be some correlation, but there are lots and lots of factors like luck, network effects, heritable wealth, etc.
        • actually_a_dog 5y ago
          Right, and it would seem to be silly to argue that all else being equal, someone more intelligent isn't more likely to be successful than someone less intelligent. It's more that in the real world, all else rarely is equal.
      • femiagbabiaka 5y ago
        We're talking royals here, not some entrepreneur. Unless of course what you're suggesting is that royal families gain and maintain power due to intelligence.
      • woodruffw 5y ago
        That's not the opposite; success can be correlated with fitness (i.e., success) in disparate social strata without necessitating the correctness of the strata themselves. The strata themselves can be the product of pressures unrelated to individual fitness, like our individual propensity for selfishness.
      • actually_a_dog 5y ago
        Perhaps not, but the most successful individuals are generally not the most talented. Rather, they tend to be the luckiest. See, e.g. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-role-of-luck-in-life-success-is-far-greater-than-we-realized/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol...
    • rowanG077 5y ago
      To become a noble you would generally have to have done something of great note. I'd think someone of higher intelligence would have a higher likelihood to do that.
      • lumost 5y ago
        Is there any backing to this? As I recall feudal societies in both Europe and Japan had the origin of "nobility" in land ownership/control. If you could successfully hold a piece of land as your own you were a noble. You can imagine this as a form of de facto rule.
        • pbalau 5y ago
          Holding into a piece of land is not a given. The fact that one could hold into that could mean that individual was smarter than the individuals that did not.
          • KittenInABox 5y ago
            It's pretty easy to hold onto a piece of land if you're the only one who is well-fed, literate, and capable of hiring and feeding personal guards.
            • rowanG077 5y ago
              Isn't that the point? A person with superior genes is more likely to have those qualities.
      • api 5y ago
        Your ancestors were probably above average in either intelligence or physical ability. That doesn't mean you are after a century or two of noble inbreeding.
        • rowanG077 5y ago
          The point is that inbreeding while having some bad outcomes can also have the good outcome of the nobility having higher intelligence. You can't just argue when someone says: "this is A", with: "No this is B". At least put some substance behind it.
    • flenserboy 5y ago
      Quick speculation: It could simply come down to being better fed over time. There is evidence of negative multi-generational effects on descendants from malnourishment suffered by progenitors. If nobles had better access to food (which makes sense, given power differences), that could propagate down the generations (and promote increased reproduction) not due to a stronger gene pool, but rather through improved gene expression and general health.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • jimbob45 5y ago
      Nobles were far more likely to be healthy with better diets and less disease which would certainly be correlated with better offspring outcomes. We can discard better genetics (have fun proving that lol) entirely and still be somewhat on board with this theory.
    • AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
  • api 5y ago
    Why would you assume nobles have superior genes, especially the ones who "flunked out." If anything the inbreeding practices of the nobility were dysgenic. Unprecedented levels of outbreeding has been suggested as a possible source of IQ increase over the past 100-200 years. You can argue that today's somewhat-meritocracy is going to sort people by social class in a way that roughly overlaps with IQ if you zoom out very far. I don't see why this would be true at all in an autocratic caste system society. This sounds like a made up just-so theory that belongs on a neoreactionary Reddit group.
  • sitkack 5y ago
    That is plot of Starwars.
  • cmyr 5y ago
    Ignoring the other blatant problems with this interpretation (e.g. that social class was highly correlated with fitness) I suspect that the nobility were intermixing their genes quit successfully via coercion & violence. I am not a geneticist or a historian or even more than barely literate
    • JasonFruit 5y ago
      IANAGOAHOEMTBL
  • defen 5y ago
    You might be conflating nobility with Gregory Clark's thesis in "A Farewell to Alms". There never would have been enough nobles for their failsons to have any kind of measurable genetic impact on the wider society; plus nobles were never really selected for intelligence in the first place - they were the descendants of successful warlords.
    • scarmig 5y ago
      Are successful warlords likely comparable in intelligence to landless peasants?
      • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        Are VCs likely comparable in intelligence to competent engineers?
    • slibhb 5y ago
      If you believe in general intelligence, successful warlords are more likely to be intelligent.
    • PeterisP 5y ago
      > There never would have been enough nobles for their failsons to have any kind of measurable genetic impact on the wider society; I'm not sure if this is true - I seem to recall studies that can clearly see a genetic impact of just a single particular noble (Gengis Khan), so it seems plausible that the genetic impact of nobles would be oversized as high-status males can have many children from the society in which they have violent power, and their children (even if bastards) have less issues with childhood malnutrition and early death.
      • defen 5y ago
        The proposed hypothesis though is that unsuccessful nobles spread their "favorable genes" by descending into the lower classes. To fall that far you'd have to be deeply in debt and not particularly high status.
  • thatfrenchguy 5y ago
    I don't know if you're read a little bit about European aristocracy, but one can easily say they were pretty dumb.
  • wayoutthere 5y ago
    Be wary of any talk of “superior” genes. We have no way to judge one set of genes relative to another even if we did understand genetics a lot better than we do. A genetic trait’s advantage can change depending on environmental factors, so any attempt to do so is effectively retreading debunked eugenic theory (a favorite pastime among some reactionary groups, particularly on social media).
    • giantg2 5y ago
      This can be true of things like personality traits and beliefs too - useful in one situation but not another. Society still punishes people who don't conform or rewards those who do. I think society will accept, or even push for, some level of genetic discrimination. I believe there was a recent article on HN about fetal genetic defect testing being used to make abortion decisions. The question is where should the line be, as it seems to already exist.
    • natded 5y ago
      [flagged]
      • wayoutthere 5y ago
        Suggest you read Guns, Germs and Steel if you want a more plausible explanation for that.
      • dang 5y ago
        You can't do this here. Since it's already a pattern, we've banned this account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • fristechill 5y ago
      It's not so much 'superior genes' as an absence of deleterious mutations. The brain requires the cooperation of the greatest number of genes (compared with other organs) in order in the develop in embryo. Since the industrial revolution infant death has thankfully dropped but it seems likely this improvement has had the side-effect of increasing the number of deleterious mutations and therefore also of decreasing the average IQ in Western populations.
  • jcranmer 5y ago
    There are a number of literally insane monarchs who didn't "fail out of society." In general, nobility tended to select not for intelligence or strength but political connections.
  • throwaway5590 5y ago
    I think many people are confused about this post. There is no need to believe that nobles were initially "superior", and that their initial superiority was the reason they became nobles in the first place. The increase in "gene quality" at the top, and its diffusion to the bottom, can be understood as the simple result of Malthusian constraints, and high survival rates for nobles (as compared to the harsh conditions of the lower classes). Imagine you start a society where nobles have the same "gene quality" as everyone else. Some nobles are pretty smart, others not so much. As nobles would have more children surviving into adulthood (due to better nutrition and living standards) compared to the amount of land/titles they could distribute, some of the children of the nobility would be cast aside. The assumption, and I agree it's an assumption (although a rational one in my opinion), is that the smarter children would tend to inherit, and the less capable children would be dispossessed. Over time, this constant churn would lead to a concentration of "good genes" among the aristocracy, which would trickle down into the lower classes when every generation some of the nobility lost their position. I believe that this "trickling down" phenomenon has been proven to have occurred in England during the second millennia by Gregory Clark using census data, although I'll admit I've only heard of his work, not read it.
• yhorawu8 5y ago
• byproxy 5y ago
  Related, Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf
  • OtomotO 5y ago
    Nature always wins
• rory 5y ago
  Fairly startling stuff, in my opinion. > Over several generations, there is no doubt that dysgenic selection lowered the quality of genes for intelligence and increased migration had an adverse effect. > Looming over all is their message that the pool of those who reach the top level of cognitive performance is being decimated: fewer and fewer people attain the formal level at which they can think in terms of abstractions and develop their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning. So, as often as we hear the joke, is Idiocracy actually happening?
  • kryptonomist 5y ago
    Someone told that Idiocracy was actually a documentary.
  • Retric 5y ago
    Idiocracy ignores what happens at the other end of the intelligence scale. Being 4 standard deviations above the norm may be detrimental, but being 4 standard deviations below the norm is a much larger hindrance. On top of this the ratios change as the environment changes. Studies after WWII found a positive correlation between reproduction and intelligence though that seems to have swapped more recently.
  • all2 5y ago
    Yes. Some sectors of society argue that this is on purpose. The Coddling of the American Mind talks about a sliver of this. You can find articles [0] that talk about infiltration of ideologies that destroy people's reasoning capabilities. You can find quotes from those in the US education's past [1], [2] that talk about their vision for students of the future. All that to say, there's a sector of the conservative right that sees something sinister and they've been shouting about it for a half century. [0] https://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldviewpedia/transcript/john-dewey-1859-1952-father-modern-education https://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldviewpedia/transcript/j... [1] https://steelonsteel.com/quotes-from-progressive-elites/ https://steelonsteel.com/quotes-from-progressive-elites/ [2] https://nwvstore.com/product/weapons-of-mass-instruction/ https://nwvstore.com/product/weapons-of-mass-instruction/ --- Some quotes for the curious: From [0]: John Dewey, Karl Marx, Aldous Huxley, B. F. Skinner, and Benjamin Bloom were interested in a student’s academic achievement only if it would in some way benefit the State. Before a student's cognitive knowledge could be used to its full potential, however, the student's attitudes, values, feelings, and beliefs must conform to that of the State. In his book, My Pedagogic Creed, John Dewey explains: "I believe the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's social activities. . . . I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. . . . The teacher's business is simply to determine, on the basis of the larger experience and riper wisdom, how the discipline of life shall come to the child. . . . All these questions of the grading of the child and his promotion should be determined by reference to the same standard. Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child's fitness for social life." From [1]: Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching? -Charles.F. Potter: (1930) In the New Order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society… -Antonio Gramsci (1915) From [2]: John Taylor Gatto’s Weapons of Mass Instruction focuses on mechanisms of familiar schooling which cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as a by-product of rote-memorization drills. Gatto’s earlier book, Dumbing Us Down, put the now-famous expression of the title in common use worldwide. Weapons of Mass Instruction promises to add another chilling metaphor to the brief against schooling.
• VictorPath 5y ago
  Douglas Adams made jokes in his fiction about boiling complex systems down to a number. Stephen Jay Gould pointed out how unscientific the idea of IQ is - it's akin to astrological charts. Boiling brains down to one number and ranking them, and saying it comes from genes, nutty. When scientists have no idea why a nematode with 302 neurons turns left or right. You can tell it's religious or political or whatever by how people defend it - no one gets that agitated by how many light years away some star is.
  • zzt123 5y ago
    I don’t know if Jeff Hawkins would agree, but it seems to me that if his ideas involving cortical columns are true, intelligence is indeed capable of being compressed to a single number with statistical significance, due to underlying efficiency differences in the base components which are replicated across the whole neocortex.
    • nonameiguess 5y ago
      That seems easily testable. Strength sports and fine motor skills have a huge neural component. You can look at people at the top of their fields in lifting in lower weight classes, gymnastics, MLB pitchers, anything that isn't being totally confounded by sheer muscle mass, and see if their success in any way correlates with IQ. Something that makes the entire brain more efficient should have a positive impact on both purely cognitive tasks as well as motor tasks with a large neural component.
      • AlanYx 5y ago
        A decent amount of work has already been done in this area. One common experimental apparatus is a "Jensen box" which is basically a whack-a-mole game, and it turns out that performance does correlate with common general psychometric measures of intelligence, even though it's really not the sort of task you'd think of as requiring intellect.
        • zzt123 5y ago
• kryptonomist 5y ago
  All IQ research should be taken with a grain of salt: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
  • sanxiyn 5y ago
    The article tries to discredit IQ hard without saying things that are outright false, but for that reason had to admit IQ's reliability and validity. > Correlation is 80% between test and retest, meaning you being you explains less than 64% of your test results. As if that's bad? 80% is a very good reliability. > If you renamed IQ, from "Intelligent Quotient" to FQ "Functionary Quotient" or SQ "Salaryperson Quotient", then some of the stuff will be true. It measures best the ability to be a good slave confined to linear tasks. "IQ" is good for @davidgraeber's "BS jobs". I get it, you have negative valence towards IQ. Still, even if IQ measures "the ability to be a good slave" (it doesn't, but let's assume it does), that's an outcome we care about, proving IQ's validity. It dismisses IQ's correlation with academic success as "just another test", but no, it doesn't work that way. IQ also correlates with research success and research is not test.
    • sitkack 5y ago
      > IQ also correlates with research success and research is not test. We should define research success and test. Research is definitely a fitness function that is intertwined with lots of dependent and independent variables no? Most of the Taleb argument is that you can't compress a high dimensional space down to one dimension is it not?
      • sanxiyn 5y ago
        Yes, but dimensionality reduction is a thing. IQ is just PCA. Intelligence is multidimensional, but it happens to have one large principal component. It could have been otherwise, but it is just not so, here on Earth with Homo sapiens.
        • 5y ago
• Jyaif 5y ago
  I'd love to see the distribution of IQs over time, instead of just the average. For example, a distribution that becomes increasingly bimodal tells a very different story than a distribution shifting to the left.
  • all2 5y ago
    We would need to normalize the number against changes in standard IQ tests. I have no idea how to do that, but we would need to account for test result drift due to changes in the tests.
• sitkack 5y ago
  The title of this post and the opacity of the abstract is how you start a tire fire on HN. My recommendation would be to post some quoted passages from the text to add some momentum to a productive discussion. I think one of the interesting passages is > From 1990 to 2012: the “working class” share of jobs has steadily de- clined from 31.4% to 20.5%; the “creative class” share has been pretty stable, rising from 29.3 to 32.0; the “service class” has risen sharply from 39.3 to 48.5. He calls the latter “low-skill jobs”, seeing increases in occupations like nursing assistants, personal care aids (whether at home or in nursing homes), retail sales, and food prep workers (McDonalds). Note that the ratio between low skill and creative has risen in favor of the former: 1.35 to one in 1990; and 1.57 to one in 2012. I'd really be interested in changes in the resulting economies for where those working class jobs ended up. Reading a paper is hard, having a discussion about a paper is even harder. And especially when it has aspects of class and intelligence. Everyone is an expert in their own opinions on those two subjects.
  • jcranmer 5y ago
    My first thought when I see those statistics is where do jobs such as writing software or approving engineering plans fall into. I suspect that they are both considered "service class" jobs (since neither is attached to manufacturing, nor are they anything that would conventionally be considered creative)--yet they are very much not "low-skill jobs".
    • throwawaygh 5y ago
      It's a good gut reaction since software is often lumped in with "services", but in the context of the quoted article most software jobs are probably in the "creative" bucket. But the author of the quoted article doesn't bother to share their methodology or data, so who the hell really knows shrugs. Par for the course in sociology, really :)
    • DaveExeter 5y ago
      Writing software I think would certainly be considered "creative class". Even when it is just a lot of cut and pasting from Stack Overflow.
• lbriner 5y ago
  The interesting part for me was the suggestion that over time, the lower demands of school, family and workplaces can lead to lower IQ although the time frame seems pretty short to be genetically significant. My own experience (in the UK) is that younger people perhaps seem less bothered about grammar, history, philosophy (the classics?) perhaps because they have learned that all information is on the internet and have subconciously assumed therefore that they do not need to learn the application of such knowledge. When I was young I remember my schoolmates lamenting that learning maths was pointless because "calculators", maybe that is coming home to roost now.
• stefan_ 5y ago
  IQ is supposed to be a measure of inherent intelligence. This study has studies going a mere 40 years back, an utterly insignificant evolutionary time. What they are measuring seems to be mostly changes in pseudoscience IQ tests.
  • CheezeIt 5y ago
    Have you even looked at the number of kids had by people with college degrees and people who dropped out of high school?
    • Apocryphon 5y ago
      That sounds like a decision that is shaped by an immense number of socioeconomic and cultural factors rather than inherent intelligence.
• codekansas 5y ago
  In the modern world, is there any evolutionary selection for intelligence? I can think of at least a few which are against Anecdotally, my wife is applying for surgical medical residencies, a field which generally attracts intelligent, ambitious individuals. The whole system seems downright hostile to having children. It obviously wasn't designed with women in mind, and the entire system has been intentionally ossified to prevent it from responding to the desires of residents, for the benefit of attending physicians. I imagine there are a large number of similar industries. This has definitely impacted our plans for children, and it wouldn't be an issue if she were considering a less competitive specialty. In fact, it seems that the very selectivity which ensures that the program is filled with intelligent people is used as justification for intense hours and lack of maternal support. In my opinion this is the sort of externality that would benefit from government intervention in some way. However, I don't think financial support would be very good at targeting such cases. I think the reason that tech companies have done a better job of providing child care support is that the field doesn't have the same sorts of institutional barriers to responding to employee demands that medicine does - specifically demand by employees in their prime child-rearing ages.
  • sandstrom 5y ago
    I think most will agree that there is an evolutionary selection against intelligence (I think the term is "dysgenic mating"). For example, highly educated people (reasonable proxy for intelligence, at least it used to be) have fewer children. Agree, from a society's point of view (if you believe that intelligence is positive and at least partly hereditary, which I guess is pretty indisputable), one would want to provide incentives to correct this. Tax reductions per child (scales with income) would be one approach.
    • tharne 5y ago
      Like a lot of the comments here, this seems to conflate education and intelligence, when in reality the relationship between the two is tenuous. When talking about the attributes of highly educated people, the most common trait you're likely to find is diligence, which is not at all the same as intelligence though perhaps more important. Education certainly does seem to decrease family size, particularly rates of female education.
• Quarrelsome 5y ago
  Using IQ as a concept to enshrine intelligence is a terrible mistake IMHO because it encourages this toxic RPG-enshrined idea that intelligence is a number that goes up. That makes it only slightly better than it being just a bool. We don't even begin to know how to measure intelligence or what is in or out of scope when we use the term "intelligence". So to use such a study as a short hand to suggest a country is getting "stupider" or "smarter" just feels like shamanic rune throwing. We could suggest that IQ is a measure of intelligence but I would argue that IQ only matters if you're applying to university which also gives it this correlative value of "wealthy" and "parents that care" if you're cherry picking economic outcomes which makes it hard to pick apart as a vacuumed characteristic. It also is a very narrow measure given that the breadth of human endeavour requires a lot more types of intelligence than just shit-hot pattern matching.
  • throwaway5590 5y ago
    • throwawaygh 5y ago
      OP's beliefs about how IQ is used in intelligence research -- and in particular this paper -- are almost entire correct. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887
    • Quarrelsome 5y ago
      I would suggest reading less Stormfront mate. They lap this shit up over there and hence I have a very cool point of view on people that believe deeply in IQ and also lack the eloquence to tell me _why_ they think I'm wrong.
• pcrh 5y ago
  This ignores the fact that while intelligence, however measured, has a large hereditable component, that inheritance is environmental, not genetic. The Flynn effect, which showed widespread gains in IQ scores without any alteration in population genetics is the clearest indication that very significant variations in IQ can occur as a consequence of environmental effects.
  • sanxiyn 5y ago
    I agree. I think, just as Flynn effect was due to environment and not eugenics, loss of Flynn effect reported here is due to environment and not dysgenics. On the other hand, if you take Flynn effect seriously, you also should take loss of Flynn effect seriously.
  • notahacker 5y ago
    James Flynn of Flynn effect fame is one of the authors of the paper, which makes the weakness of the conclusions all the more surprising. We've got paper showing rises in scores in the US, falls in Scandinavia and a sharp rise and fall over the space of of dozen years in Estonian boys and we're worrying about the possibility of 'dysgenic mating' and loss of those capable of higher level deductive reasoning abilities and not just concluding that comparing different cohorts taking the test isn't telling us very much? The most logical conclusion of the data presented in paper is that the test results is unstable between dissimilar environments to the extent we shouldn't really bother using it for comparisons between populations (as opposed to an extremely crude measure of relative abilities within a cohort, where it is generally better than other crude proxies for actual human capability), still less mourning real world losses of reasoning ability. Tbh I thought doubting the tests was the page Flynn was already on.
    • pcrh 5y ago
      Agreed. Admittedly I only scanned the paper, however it did appear to attempt to compare a large number of disparate measures in different countries which makes teasing-out the valid comparisons quite a taxing task.... Nevertheless, from other reports in the past few years, it appears that the rises in IQ widely observed during the 20th century (the Flynn effect) have not continued into the 21st. This would possibly argue that improvements in childhood and general health were large contributors to the Flynn effect.
• yssrnjm 5y ago
  I don't know about this article. I read a sentence that suggested that immigration might be linked to dysgenic effects on IQ. I refuse therefore to give attention to this document for the simple reason that it might be used by racist people to justify bad things... I am an immigrant. I refuse to consider views that might, even indirectly, question my presence on this country.
  • kbelder 5y ago
    Regardless of whether they're true or not? That doesn't factor in?
• mwattsun 5y ago
  I think it's worth asking if intelligence tests are even keeping up with a fast changing social environment. For example, young people are extremely adept at communicating with memes or a few seconds of video. Are these new skills even measured?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• throwawaygh 5y ago
  Administering IQ tests to adults is fraught with difficulties, especially when comparing across generations For example, the WAIS-IV measures "working memory", in part, via orally administered arithmetic word problems. An imminently reasonable thing to associate with intelligence in the pre-pocket-calculator economy! But today? Kids spend a lot less time drilling arithmetic now than N decades ago. Those drills are more often administered on computer screens than orally in front of a classroom. And almost no one does a non-trivial amount of mental arithmetic in their work life. So this is mostly a useless skill. And, because it's a useless skill, we devote a lot less time to mastery. Even once mastered, the skill atrophies because it's just not very useful. Question: if scores on these oral arithmetic word problems only barely decline despite significantly less practice -- both in the classroom and in everyday life -- what should we conclude? Stated differently: if someone with 10K hours of tetris grind drops 2% more blocks than a total newbie, who's likely to be more adept at other forms of spatial reasoning? The more general critique is that "intelligence research" has ossified around Cargo Cult psychometrics. At one point, "orally administered arithmetic word problems" were a fantastic proxy for economically useful mental faculties. That is no longer true. As the set of useful capacities change, so too should psychometric evaluations. Both because treatment effects are going to make cross-generational comparisons worse than useless, and also because the thing being measured has become irrelevant. The humble pocket calculator should have taken Sociology by storm half a century ago. But the field hasn't kept up, and the problem is about to get exponentially worse as generative AI tools and other types of advanced automation start to augment every aspect of mental labor. What it means to be "good at solving hard problems and getting things done" when assisted by GPT-614830 might look entirely different from what it means to be "good at solving hard problems and getting things done" today.
  • Apocryphon 5y ago
    Sounds like this is the only comment in this thread to actually examine the content of the tests that these measures rely upon.
• 5tefan 5y ago
  Not necessarily related but I would like to bring up this and hope it's something to consider: Do what you're told, go home, come back next day. Repeat. That is not 100% correct but good enough to summarize modern life. Why learning abstract stuff in school if your career is stuck in call center jobs or you're the warehouse guy? You don't really need math at home. There is few demand for intelligent problem solvers. There is a very high demand for "just do what you're told". I see that everyday in my corporate setup. It is sad but I see it.
  • HPsquared 5y ago
    The main purpose of school is just that: to train people into obedience and routine. The particular subjects are incidental really.