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American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the 'Reverse Flynn effect'
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- GalenErso 4y ago> 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 4y agoThe prevalence of maps in our lifes via handheld devices could also contribute.
- iamerroragent 4y agoThey 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 4y agoNot 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-home-moms-and-dads-account-for-about-one-in-five-u-s-parents/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/24/stay-at-hom...
- iamerroragent 4y agoHuh that is interesting. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/estimates-families-living-arrangements.html 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.
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- notch898b 4y ago[flagged]
- watwut 4y agoWhat about this: stay at home parenting comment was as pure attempt on pushing ideology as can be. There were so many changes in the meantime - parenting is more intense, kids read less, kids watch videos more, kids socialize differently, school system is more demanding and kids finish more years of schooling, that taking a single aspect and making conclusions off it is unlikely to end up with reasonable results.
- count 4y ago'30 years ago' is 1970 to 2000 I bet :)
- iamerroragent 4y agoHahaha 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-findings-about-stay-at-home-moms/ 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.
- Apocryphon 4y agoReminds 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887
- stonemetal12 4y agoIf 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
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- hezralig 4y agoThere is ongoing debate among academics, even in Norway... In 2019, a group of researchers from the University of Oslo published a study that found no evidence of a decline in IQ scores over time in Norway, despite claims of such declines in other countries. The researchers argued that the methodology used in previous studies may have contributed to false conclusions about declining IQ scores. In contrast, a group of researchers from the University of Amsterdam published a study in 2018 that reported a decline in IQ scores in the Netherlands over the past several decades. The researchers suggested that changes in educational systems, such as increased emphasis on testing and memorization, may be contributing to the decline.
- ramblenode 4y agoA few years ago I did a pretty thorough reading of one of these Norwegian studies and the methodology was... abysmal. I don't remember which direction the reported effect was in, but I do remember that the way they computed it meant that it was the reverse direction of what the true effect should have been. Kind of an impressive mistake. Made me pretty skeptical of the FE literature.
- elhudy 4y agoHumans 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 4y agoYour 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 4y ago> Your vocabulary is tied to your expressive power and your ability to form coherent and compelling arguments There is even more to it. Language can influence (prev.: limits) your thinking and ability to categorize. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity (Removed misleading reference)
- Apocryphon 4y agoIsn't this Sapir-Whorf, which has been disproven? At least the last time I read of it in relation to 1984.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dist1ll 4y agoYup, linguistic determinism is nonsense, thanks for pointing that out. I edited my comment.
- ForestCritter 4y agoPlus the focus on teaching for the test and the move away from critical thinking in schools. I had to teach critical thinking myself to my kids and also how to research and cross reference. I have two sets of encyclopedias and a pile of other reference books and showed them how to use them. What they teach in schools now is vastly different from when I went to school. Public education has gone from teaching critical thinking and problem solving to group thinking, homogenizing and memorizing the 'correct' answers, no understanding required.
- faeriechangling 4y agoCould 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.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoFrom 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 4y agoNope - 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.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoThe 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.
- faeriechangling 4y agoI 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?
- vannevar 4y agoIt'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.
- greenhearth 4y agoIs there anyone surprised, really?
- patrulek 4y agoN?
- twobitshifter 4y ago400,000 over 12 year period
- runarberg 4y agoNot 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.
- swalling 4y agoLink to the study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289623000156 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
- squokko 4y agoFewer 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 4y agoEducation is not IQ
- Clubber 4y ago>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.
- astrange 4y agoIt's because IQ is a test and more education means taking more tests, so there is circular causality.
- squokko 4y agoMy gardener is not high IQ. Good guy and hard worker but there has got to be some correlation between IQ and education.
- sainez 4y ago> 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.
- globalreset 4y agoHonest 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 4y agoWhy would it fall? Steady seems just as fair an expectation in absence of pressure either way
- globalreset 4y agoBecause 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.
- walkhour 4y agoSame reason animals living in darkness lose their sight. There's a cost to keeping the hardware, and no rewards.
- runarberg 4y agoIt 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.
- runarberg 4y ago[flagged]
- l5ymep 4y agoApart from heresy, what is your counterargument to the bell curve?
- lambic2 4y agoStudying human athletic performance was also done by some eugenics movements, so by your logic we should stop all studies of human athletic performance?
- runarberg 4y agoYou’re right, you got me. I can’t think of anything which modern intelligence researchers are proposing but sport scientists aren’t. No policy proposals or claims about say a general athletic factor which the elite class has but the impoverished doesn’t, or anything like that. These things are entirely equivalent /s
- rahimnathwani 4y agoThis 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-show-iq-declines/ 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?
- ParksNet 4y ago[flagged]
- jasonladuke0311 4y ago[flagged]
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- dang 4y agoWe've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for or against. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- polski-g 4y agoBy just comparing TFR across income (read: IQ) groups, you can know that IQ is dropping.
- tptacek 4y agoIt's worth looking up whose blog this is before trusting any of its analysis.
- dragontamer 4y agoIQ 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.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoI take full credit for this, mostly though my HN comments. You're welcome.
- siliconsorcerer 4y ago[flagged]
- readthenotes1 4y agoI do not understand what it is I have the honor of you trying to tell me
- oblio 4y agoHe's joking that his comments lower IQs.
- chikitabanana 4y agoyour*
- poisonarena 4y agoyour reddit style comments
- exogeny 4y ago[flagged]
- beaned 4y agoI 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 4y agoThere’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 4y ago[flagged]
- kepler1 4y agoThe 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 4y agoI said nothing of the sort. I said that the difference exists and asked if we should be able to talk about it.
- jmclnx 4y agoI 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 4y agoI would like to believe this, but as someone with pretty privileged kids, it's not this. It's the phones.
- jstarfish 4y agoAgreed. They're learning precalculus in middle/high school these days, a subject I had no exposure to until late college (and which I had to cheat my way through). I can't help them with much of their homework anymore. School is way more challenging than it used to be. But then they go home and learn mindless consumerism, social engineering and conspiracy theory from their phones. The kids are better-educated than myself, but they exhibit a general lack of creativity. Everything is "role playing" other people's behavior or fanfiction expanding other people's work; even their sense of humor is meme-based and monosyllabic. Where their behavior turns malicious/criminal, they're usually getting their inspiration from some counter-culture influencer encouraging it. A test that measures ability to think outside the box is showing poor results with this generation? Color me shocked!
- SoftTalker 4y agoI had precalculus in 11th grade, and calculus 1 in 12th grade. This was in the early 1980s. We had calculators, but they were simple TI-30[1] type. One line digital display, no graphics. All the problem sets (and graphs) were done on paper. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-30 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-30
- ravenstine 4y ago
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoThe 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 4y agoIf 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.
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoPut it in a text to speech software and listen to it closing your eyes. Here is one you can use: https://www.texttovoice.online/ https://www.texttovoice.online/
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoOr ChatGTP it for you: Me: Summarize your understanding of this sentence: 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. ChatGTP: This sentence appears to express concern about a trend where everything, including universities, is becoming politicized and ideologically driven, leading to a reduction in genuine debate and an increase in banal disputes over subjective preferences and privileges. It suggests that this trend is leading to a militarization of discourse, where false accusations are made and a victimhood mindset is fostered. PS: that style of writing uses a technique to filter attention retention on interpretation. Stretches your "interpretation stack"
- regularjack 4y agoI 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?
- rickstanley 4y agoAll of America or just north America?
- pcurve 4y agoDrop 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-psychologist-weighs-in.html 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 4y ago> 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 4y ago> 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xkcd1963 4y agoIntelligence can't be generalised.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
- xkcd1963 4y agoYou could put the most intelligent person in the Savanna and they would just die, whilst a bushman will survive. Who was smarter in the end?
- fauxpause_ 4y ago[flagged]
- ForestCritter 4y agohmmm, but if you have two bushmen, one with a high IQ and one with a low IQ who will better survive. Or what if the most intelligent person in the Savanna was a bushman...So it depends on what you consider intelligence. Critical thinking is part of IQ testing and I would expect a wiley bushman to be good at critical thinking if he is going to survive.
- xkcd1963 4y agoExactly. People that want to apply IQ see it as a general performance metric. But general performance has many different aspects. In the example of the bushman it does not matter how fast you can count the alphabet,.it won't be helping your survival.
- poisonarena 4y agothe most intelligent person, you already answered your question
- throwawayterror 4y ago[flagged]
- graycat 4y ago> "... with many attributing the change to various environmental factors." How 'bout social factors?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoWhen 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 4y agoThat 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices
- WalterBright 4y agoI've often heard from humanities academics that STEM majors do not confer critical thinking skills.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoThe irony of demonstrating a lack of critical thinking ability by claiming to be the great teachers of it has always been extremely amusing to me. Don’t correct them, it’s honestly better this way.
- all2 4y agoBoth the beauty and horror of non-stem courses is that they require a degree of abstract reasoning on par with computer science. What one does with that reasoning is up to them (and it is often twisted in laughable ways, see the portion of an abstract I posted up-thread). Often times the brightest thinkers have been from 'soft' sciences like history or sociology. I think it is because of the abstraction required to reasonable think about these subjects.
- gantron 4y agoHow does an article like this get published without summarizing the specific results or quantifying the drop?
- Jeff_Brown 4y agoSeriously. A few time series plots would be far more informative than all that blather.
- carabiner 4y agoLow IQ scores.
- randcraw 4y agoNothing more to say about variation arising from geography around the US, such as urban vs rural, high vs low education, by age, etc, etc. And have other developed countries seen similar shifts? It's like the authors overheard a single sentence on the topic in a bar and decided to turn it into an entire article without looking into it any further.
- runarberg 4y agoYou submit it to a junk journal with a political agenda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_(journal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_(journal) Seriously though, they observed a reverse Flynn effect by taking a thin slice of negative test results from a test that doesn’t even measure IQ and finding it statistically significant. This kind of reminds of when climate deniers take a tiny slice of climate records and claim the earth is actually getting cooler. --- Unsurprisingly you’ll actually find many IQ researchers in institutions which are still trying to deny climate change. E.g. Charles Murray is now working for the American Enterprise Institute.
- dmn322 4y agoBet it's related to income inequality and the reduction of wages wrt productivity. Stress is known to reduce short term memory, which affects IQ.
- jiggywiggy 4y agoAs 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 different kind of tests. Statistics might average that out, but I've also seen it uses often to use as a tool to decide where young kids go. It's not accurate enough.
- pg938hkd 4y agoThe 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
- Dr_Birdbrain 4y agoOne of the people interviewed made a flippant comment that the focus on STEM may have had a negative impact on abstract reasoning. Haha what? Sounds like that person is one of the people impacted by the reverse Flynn effect.
- femiagbabiaka 4y agoIQ is useless: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-....
- crabkin 4y agoIQ will be seen in a 100 years the same way phrenology is now.
- runarberg 4y agoIt already is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
- ryan93 4y agoWeird that that whole book is spent arguing against guys who worked like 120 years ago instead of confronting the voluminous modern work. "Of all the book's references, a full 27 percent precede 1900. Another 44 percent fall between 1900 and 1950 (60 percent of those are before 1925); and only 29 percent are more recent than 1950. From the total literature spanning more than a century, the few "bad apples" have been hand-picked most aptly to serve Gould's purpose." https://www.debunker.com/texts/jensen.html https://www.debunker.com/texts/jensen.html
- runarberg 4y agoYou are aware that this book was published in 1981, and is largely a history book on scientific racism? I brought up this book is because it justly categorizes IQ research among other pseudo-scientific practices such as phrenology. You should also be aware the Arthur Jensen is one of the scientists which Gould is criticizing, and that his reputations hasn’t gotten any better since 1980. This source of yours is hardly an impartial one.
- ryan93 4y ago
- iq_throw_123 4y agoImagine that, 150 years ago or whenever, some clever soul had decided to make a written test to measure niceness, and called the test score Niceness Quotient. And the first version sucked, but some other folks iterated on it and over time the test was improved until it correlated pretty well to the sorts of things you would think that niceness would correlate to. 150 years of progress later, we'd have a whole field of Niceometry and researchers trying to isolate sub-areas like charity, friendliness, etc, and trying to suss out an underlying factor of general amiability, and the whole thing would be so well embedded in to the culture that almost no one remembers that "nice" is just a regular word with no objective or scientific definition, and that we measure it with a written test not because that's a good way to measure niceness but because we can't find a better way.
- QuiDortDine 4y agoThis is a terrible analogy, IQ tests measure something real and objective called the g factor : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) Also, intelligence tests are but a tiny part of psychology, I would hardly call it a "whole field".
- iq_throw_123 4y ago> IQ tests measure something real and objective called the g factor Sure, and NQ tests do too, because look how well graciousness correlates with cheerfulness! That can't be an accident, can it? Less snarkily, a better analogy would be athletic ability. Suppose you take a bunch of people and measure how fast they can run, how well they can shoot free throws, and how far they can throw a football. Will the results be correlated? Of course, some people are more athletic than others. Does that mean there's a quantity called 'athleticism' that we can objectively measure with a number? No; and not because all people are equally athletic, but because you're trying to take a squishy subjective English language word and pretend it's a scalar value. > I would hardly call it a "whole field". The problem isn't the size of the field, it's that academics work within their field, they don't refute it. There's a very uncomfortable result about IQ tests that a generation of psychologists have tried to explain away, and I maintain that the reason they haven't succeeded is because they are institutionally incapable of saying, "Hey, maybe this is pseudoscience."
- hyperthesis 4y ago> Scores in verbal reasoning, matrix reasoning, and letter and number series all declined but, interestingly, scores in spatial reasoning went up. The more popular video games require spatial reasoning far more than the others. > The reasons for both the increase and the decline are sill very much up for debate. Earth has entered the Vinge's Unthinking Depths, and we are struggling to notice it.
- Bud 4y ago[dead]
- runnr_az 4y agoDevolution
- karp773 4y agoI have my pet theory that the Reverse Flynn effect in America, Norway or elsewhere is a direct result of widespread adoption of all kinds of safety measures: seat belts, airbags, all kinds of protective gear, traffic lights, advances in emergency medicine and so on. Whether it's true or not, I do not know.
- Galanwe 4y agoCan someone actually explain how IQ tests work? By work, I mean how are the tests engineered, and the results computed. Long time ago someone explained to me that the engineering of IQ tests was actually drafted from a very large pool of (regularly updated) questions, where statistical significance was extracted to form a _core symposium_ of questions to sample from. Also, the IQ score itself was normalized to be normally distributed centered at 100. With this understanding, I was under the impression that IQ was a relative measure, at a specific point in time, of one's placement in the distribution. Which meant to me that IQ cannot "drop" across a population, the mean will always be 100. And IQ scores cannot be compared on a time series basis, since they are only cross sectional measures. Is that all wrong? Is there some truth to it?
- zaptheimpaler 4y agoThere is a raw score underlying any given IQ test that is an absolute value. It might just be as simple as the number of questions you get right. When testing a population, these scores form a normal distribution. We then scale the raw scores so that the mean/median or center of the distribution becomes an IQ of 100. So the raw scores can be compared across time and can vary, even though the IQ cannot as you said.
- Galanwe 4y agoHum, but my understanding was that the whole point of the normalization was that the raw scores are not in a scale that is meaningful outside of the symposium which they were placed in? Does it really make sense to compare raw scores from different tests? If that were the case then the normalization step would be useless, we would have an absolute measure of intelligence.
- whatshisface 4y agoA new test that was substantially different from an earlier test would have to be compared against it to make sure it was measuring the same stuff, and I have seen a few studies checking how well different tests were correlated.
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- wrp 4y ago"The Flynn Effect" is a very popular topic on HN, but the general understanding of it is way off. Ulric Neisser has a good analysis in "Rising scores on intelligence tests" in American Scientist 85(5):440-447 (1997). I'll try to cover his main points... The various intelligence tests that exist show some positive correlation. The factor "g" is this degree of correlation. The best measure of g is Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM), which is a test of visual reasoning. Intelligence tests are periodically revised and recalibrated. Flynn noticed that subjects were scoring higher on older versions. Scores on arithmetic, vocabulary, and general information showed small gains or even declines. The greatest gains were on g-loaded tests such as RPM. Given the performance of current students in school subjects, such a rise in general intelligence doesn't seem plausible. Because of this, Flynn thinks the tests don't really measure intelligence. Various theories have been put forward to account for the change. The gains were far too rapid to result from genetic changes. Another theory was that Americans became more familiar with test taking in general and that transferred to IQ tests, but the rise continued for decades after the spread of broader education. Also, the tests more closely related to school content were not the ones showing the rise. Nutrition caused people to grow taller and have bigger heads, but there is very weak empirical support for a connection between nutrition and intelligence. Also, a purely biological basis for the change would indicate a rise in all aspects of intelligence, which clearly wasn't the case. There is a well established effect of schooling on IQ, but populations of children before schooling have shown gains comparable to populations of adults after schooling. Also, groups of subjects at different levels of education showed about the same gains. Finally, schooling affects tests of content more than of reasoning, but that wasn't reflected in rising test scores. Modern children increasingly have exposure to things explicitly designed to stimulate their intelligence, e.g. Sesame Street and preschool. Early childhood intervention programs have been shown to have no lasting effect on IQ. The most intensive environmental enrichment programs have been shown to have some lasting effect on IQ, but nowhere near comparable to the Flynn effect. Neisser proposes that changes in the cultural environment have caused the rise. Modern industrial culture produces vastly more of complex visual media. He thinks our increasing practice in analyzing complex imagery has caused the gains in performance on visual reasoning tests.
- Gatsky 4y agoLooking at the paper here [1], it appears there was stability, then a rise up to 2011 followed by a global drop in 2012/2013, and then more stability (Fig 1). It is implausible that things could change so quickly for everyone. A spurious effect related to methodology is surely the most likely answer? I haven't read the text in detail. Fitting a linear relationship to the above as they do in the paper seems a bit crazy to me, but I'm not a psychologist. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289623000156 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
- dehrmann 4y agoI'd blame smartphones.
- notjulianjaynes 4y ago> Leading up to the 1990s, IQ scores were consistently going up, but in recent years, that trend seems to have flipped. The reasons for both the increase and the decline are sill very much up for debate. Interestingly, you could substitute "homicide rate" for "IQ" here and the statement would still be accurate. Ignorance is bliss? >The study, published in the journal Intelligence, used an online, survey-style personality test called the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project to analyze nearly 400,000 Americans. The researchers recorded responses from 2006 and 2018, in order to examine if and how cognitive ability scores were changing over time within the country. Presumably the testing scores collected between the 1930s and 1990s weren't online tests. I wonder if the drop is explainable by people not taking an online IQ test very seriously during the golden age of the buzzfeed quiz.
- fauxpause_ 4y agoSo I’m just glossing through the paper linked in the article. There is a chart showing scores per year stratified by education. The overall trend is down, sure. But… year by year variance across education groups seems to be highly correlated. Like in 2011 there’s a positive bump in performance equally in Grad students and high school students. And in 2014 everyone dropped. Like… come on. That seems like an enormous red flag to the validity of the measurement. The year by year variance (normalized against the trend) should be random across groups unless there is something specifically different about that year. Presuming people didn’t briefly all get smarter in 2011, it’s crazy that all groups tested better. The only plausible answer is that the test was easier in 2011 right? And if that’s true, how confident can we really be that it isn’t just testing variance? Edit: that is to say, per the central limit theorem, the sample means of each sub group per year should be normally distributed around the mean. Let’s assume our null hypothesis is the reverse Flynn decline. We should expect that for a given year that some groups will do worse than the trend prediction and some groups will do better. Since we instead see that all groups do about the same relative to the prediction, we should infer that our data is not a random sampling of scores that are described by the mean of that trend line. In fact, the scores seem to be better described by other unseen factors that are specific to each year.
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- theptip 4y agoIs the test different year-on-year? I thought they were somewhat standardized instruments (or at least standard question pools drawn from randomly). Not my area of expertise though.
- fauxpause_ 4y agoI’m not clear on that either. I think they use different tests but try to calibrate them to be similar year over year with a shared question bank?
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- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y agoMaybe IQ scores fell out of fashion so people train less for them? I remember taking some test and scoring 20 points higher on the second take, so IQ tests seem to be highly trainable.
- moi2388 4y agoThere is a reason around 66% of all psychological research cannot be reproduced. Some comments here already make good points, but the biggest red flag is that psychological research involves psychologists doing statistics. And that is assuming they actually measure what they claim, which is also very often not the case at all.
- 12qw34er 4y ago[flagged]
- thworp 4y ago[flagged]
- DueDilligence 4y ago[dead]