5 ms·

The Rise and Fall of IQ: The Cognitive Divide

27 points by drcwpl 2y ago

nitwit005 2y ago
An entire article about some data, without any chart or a number that isn't a date.
- dcminter 2y ago
  Also I thought that the average IQ was 100 by definition so what does it even mean by "IQ scores steadily climbed" ...? Edit: Wikipedia article on the Flynn effect clarifies: "When the new test subjects take the older tests, in almost every case their average scores are significantly above 100." though, so ok I guess?
  - nutrie 2y ago
    The score is tied to your age and is relative to the whole population of that age, IIRC. It’s been a long time since I took the paid test. So today’s 100 is, say, 130 fifty years ago. I think there were 4 age groups.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- _yb2s 2y ago
  The article is ridiculous- an obviously non-existent problem (why are they expecting IQs to continue increasing- why would they?), with a completely absurd and implausible speculative explanation.
  - kylebenzle 2y ago
    They expected IQ to continue increasing because it has been continuously increasing. (I think it used to be a rule on HN to read the article before commenting).
    - _yb2s 2y ago
      Indeed, that was my criticism- it is absurd to expect something to keep increasing forever just because it did increase for a short duration previously, especially given what we do know about how human brains work. Even the hypothetical explanations they raise the article "better nutrition and healthcare" as well as the "positive manifold" idea would obviously be limited, basically one-time effects. Moreover, despite being a generalist myself, and not being a fan of specialization, I don't see any convincing evidence of an increase in specialization- which their argument is founded on. Humans have been highly specialized for most of modern history, yet it has only recently been popular to explore the downsides of that and push the other way. If anything this has been reducing, especially in the sciences with the advent of new broader interdisciplinary fields like systems biology. The examples in the article like "high schools now teach coding and advanced mathematics" also seem like evidence of a reduction in specialization that existed previously. Does this person really think people are getting dumber because high schools are teaching kids too much advanced mathematics? > I think it used to be a rule on HN to read the article before commenting No, HN has clear guidelines on this. There is no requirement to read an article before commenting, but it is not allowed to accuse someone of having not read an article or to comment in a way that questions or implies that they might not have. It is also required to assume good faith, and anyone criticizing an articles content is implicitly claiming to have read it.
      - mnk47 2y ago
        > it is absurd to expect something to keep increasing forever just because it did increase for a short duration previously The problem isn't that it stopped increasing. It's that it's steadily decreasing now. I made a comment about this recently with sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41844739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41844739 Not convinced by the blog author's theories, but it's a real problem worth discussing.
tiahura 2y ago
For those of us born at the zenith, the arc is quite clear: the counter-culture won and we’re now producing generations of morons and imbeciles.
- bryananderson 2y ago
  Unlike every person born before me and every person born after me—all of whom insist their childhood was the zenith—my childhood was actually the zenith
  - tiahura 2y ago
    That’s sort of what the data says.
    - aredox 2y ago
      Thank you for this clear demonstration of your imbecility. ("The data" says nothing about your own personal intelligence.)
- mock-possum 2y ago
  Is this a reference I’m not getting?
bogdabogda 2y ago
[flagged]
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Well intelligence does evaporate over time… literally for most people past age 60 to 70. Hence why most company boards have a mandatory retirement policy for board members past a certain age.
- _yb2s 2y ago
  Is this a reference to the racist/white supremacist "great replacement" conspiracy theory?
superb_dev 2y ago
Zero consideration of the obvious question: what if IQ just isn’t a good measurement?
- JamesBarney 2y ago
  Isn't a good measurement by what measure? There's been 1000's of studies on it. It might be one of the most robust findings in all of psychology and psychometrics (Big 5 is in the same ballpark). You can predict all sorts of things from it. If IQ is a bad measurement, than there are no good measurements in psychology.
  - empath75 2y ago
    What does it measure?
    - JamesBarney 2y ago
      Something called g. Which is basically rounds to our intuition of how smart you are. It is one the best predictors of job performance (up there with a work sample test), income, reaction time, how much schooling you'll get, how likely you are to commit crime, how long you'll live. Imagine it like this, if we give someone a history test, a math test, a physics test, and english test. We'll notice how good you are at any given tests predicts how good you are at other tests. Even though math and history don't have any real overlap in terms of skills. They also found that doing well on some of these tests will better predict how well you'll do at others. For instance math and physics are typically more g-loaded so if someone does well on a math or physics test they are more likely to do well on an english test than the reverse. We call this quality of that predicts how well you're going to do at intellectual tasks g. And then we built a test to try to measure G and that's an IQ test, with IQ being the measurement of g.
      - empath75 2y ago
        > It is one the best predictors of job performance (up there with a work sample test), income, reaction time, how much schooling you'll get, how likely you are to commit crime, how long you'll live. People say stuff like this all the time as if it's an uncontroversial fact, and it's much less supported by the literature than you're implying. So much of this is a matter of interpretation and the people interpreting it are generally people personally vested in the concept of IQ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4557354/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4557354/ I do agree that an IQ test can help measure severe intellectual impairment, or a change in an individual's ability because of illness or injury. I have a lot of doubts about it's meaningfulness beyond that.
codingwagie 2y ago
[flagged]
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  Good college to decent paying white collar job is still very interesting to most women.
- ARandomerDude 2y ago
  > decent paying white collar job, just isnt that interesting in modern society and isnt highly selected for from a mating perspective What? I have literally never met a mother who is uninterested in whether her husband pays the bills.
empath75 2y ago
There is such a simpler explanation for this. You can get better at IQ tests by practicing and studying. For a long time IQ scores were seen as an important measure of your value as a human being, and more importantly, were used to gate access to jobs and other opportunities. So people learned how to get better at passing IQ tests. Now IQ tests are no longer fashionable and we're drifting back to the scores you'd expect in a naive population.
- jstummbillig 2y ago
  A very simple explanation, indeed
- nutrie 2y ago
  Also stress can play a role, along with one’s ability to remain 100 % focused.
- kylebenzle 2y ago
  So you are saying that for example the first time generation X takes an IQ test at 15 and gets a 100 score on average but now my son generations takes the same test at 15 and gets 10 points lower, its probably because gen X had been "training" to take IQ tests?
- lostmsu 2y ago
  Are you sure the IQ scores went out of fashion because people were able to train to get them higher, and not because one of: 1. There are only so many IQ tests, so people applying simply memorized the one job administered or 2. IQ tests were so effective they prevented nepotism, and people just could not have it Do you have any data to support you point?
- JamesBarney 2y ago
  That's possible. I'd be surprised though if enough people were studying and practicing IQ tests to drive this difference. Practice has some benefits but are fairly limited for IQ tests. And I doubt a high enough portion of the population was practicing IQ tests regularly enough to move the needle this much.
- 2y ago
advael 2y ago
I've always thought the Flynn Effect was yet another Moore's Law, and both demonstrate Goodhart's Law. We didn't get transistor density doubling year over year because this was a natural tendency of some physical law, we got it because of mountains of money and engineering effort poured into doing that. Similarly, we didn't get rises in a measure of what society considers intelligence because of some genetic or uncorrelated environmental factor, we got it because what we're actually measuring with IQ, since it was invented by Binet, is education and selection of minds toward a particular category of reasoning tasks. I think Binet did something impressive when he distilled the priorities of the entire education system into a psychometrically-evaluable quantity that's relatively stable across individuals, but the way people overstate the generality and broad applicability of this metric baffles me. Like people will point out that IQ correlates with lifetime income and also SAT scores. But those two things not only correlate with each other for a much clearer reason (We gate educational outcomes with standardized tests that resemble IQ tests, and also gate economic outcomes with educational credentials), but that reason also is a causal explanation that mostly amounts to a decision made by human institutional policy, rather than some grand enduring fact about the nature of intelligence Like look, I get how people get so attached to this stuff. I've got a high enough IQ score to be beyond the statistical sensitivity of Raven's Progressive Matrices which mostly seems to mean that I'm great at test-taking and puzzle-solving, and I get that IQ seems like this really powerful explanation of variance on vibes from an internal perspective. It feels like people above a certain point on the curve are just so much more vibrant and curious sometimes! But I've come to believe that this is more an artifact of how we shunt certain people within the education system than some deep difference between people on some generally-applicable measure of capability. Lots of social science theories about assortative mating and such seem to observe that people with brains that work similarly will also tend to like each other more, and we have vast edifices that determine other socialization-determining factors based on these kinds of heavily-correlated metrics.
- mannyv 2y ago
  Except that data says you're wrong. As a classic example, look at (1) the effects of adding iodine to salt and its impact on IQ, and (2) the withdrawal of leaded gasoline and it's impact on IQ. And in general, IQ goes up as nutrition goes up (to a point). It's hard to be smart if you're calorie-reduced. That said, is IQ important? To an extent, yes. In general a higher IQ means someone can hold more things in their head, which means they can handle more complexity. Is it important? It depends. I would rather have a high-IQ doctor than a low-IQ doctor, for sure. I would rather have a high-IQ network engineer than a low-IQ network engineer.
stonethrowaway 2y ago
Something Awful: The Internet Makes You Stupid.
- cgordo840 2y ago
  I think some things that were said about "training" for IQ tests in the past (which increased scores) are true , but in a different way than may be considered on the surface. I believe we WERE training, but in a different way. But I will get back to that. To me, an iq test is a simplified way to judge someone's intelligence in a narrow fashion. A bunch of questions, in a controlled environment, that you can practice for. Seems a bit simplified as a means of measuring intelligence. Especially when very little of our lives are spent in such an environment. With the world being full of so many variables it seems like it would be more beneficial to gauge how that intelligence responds not just to simple questions or problems but how it applies that knowledge in real world situations. I think that is why a high or low IQ score does not necessarily determine success. I said before that we were training in the past for IQ tests. The training we were doing wasn't anything we did in school. It was the way we grew up and lived our lives. Before technology "improved" our lives, we had much more interactive experiences with the world. We played investigators in a world that required more physical engagement & effort to answer your questions. At that time it wasn't as simple as just using Google, having answers at our finger tips. If you had questions & wanted answers, it was more of an undertaking. It took more effort. Before you even started, you understood that you would have to WORK to answer your questions. Research and information gathering was much more difficult and involved. You also often had to speak to many different people along the way because information and opinions werent always easy to come by. I can also say from personal eperience that the satisfaction I had in the past having to do all the work to get my answers was much more satisfying than simply pressing search. I think this applied not only to learning & information gathering, but to life in general. In today's world, while I wouldn't say life is easier (it has its own challenges), i would say a lot has been simplified. Most of our daily struggles have changed. Technology has changed us from being doers into being more thinkers. More specialized. Specialized because the level of our technology forces us to specialize. Even if I have a high IQ, the world isn't as open & accessible as it used to be. It takes many years of learning & often a degree from a very specialized field to be successful. The things in the past that fueled our IQ growth, like all of our wordly interactions and learning due to the lack of said technology, have been in many ways removed. I keep coming back to what I call worldly interactions. In our lives today much of our lives take place in a very limited environment. There is not the unknown factor of daily physical interaction out in a big world with endless experiences & possibilities. You are sitting there scrolling on a tablet or pc from the comfort & safety of your home or office. Being more of a digital society we have lost a lot of our interaction with the world. I believe it is this simplification, this lost interaction, that has lead to lower IQ scores. We learn through our myriad of experiences and interactions. Having a broad volume of past experiences to learn from is how we grow our intelligence and become wise. Not simply by having a high level of gathered information & facts. Intelligence is applied. The level of our current technology has unintentionally lead to this. By requiring us to specialize in today's world, the interactions gained through generalization that were facilitated by the lack of technology, have been lost. To help get my point across, i will use today's medical field as an example. A few years ago I started having seizures. I saw many different doctors specializing in their own fields. They all seemed very knowledgeable in their respective fields. But when it came to applying their knowledge across different fields, they were very limited. I was often told when asking questions "that is out of my area of expertise", even if they were related. I would have to be referred to another specialist. Whose knowledge was great but was again, narrowed only to their specialization. This leads to quite an issue. Todays specialization has lead to a doctors inability to be diagnosticians. By being unable to connect dots across different fields due to lack of general knowledge, it has lead to delayed and missed diagnosis. Not every case fits the books, some require thinking outside the lines and connecting dots that dont ordinarily connect. Specialization, by eliminating exposure to other fields has removed the idea of being a diagnostician due to their narrow scope. Its awfully hard to consider other conclusions if you don't have the breadth of knowledge to intelligently consider them. So....doctors seem more educated & know more about their specialty, but their usefulness has become very very narrow & something has been lost along the way. This connects back to worldliness and experiences. The same way doctors have been limited by specialization is the same way technology is limiting us as a whole. Many of the challenges that fueled our IQ growth have been removed. Since we have fewer real life experiences and & have less opportunity to apply that knowledge broadly due to specialization....we can see the results.
spondylosaurus 2y ago
I'm surprised that the article talks about "specialization" without mentioning that many modern IQ tests have specialized subscores... but then again, this may not be common knowledge. Back in the day I used to compile patient evaluation reports for a psychologist who specialized in Diagnosing Patients With Stuff. The point of the diagnoses (and the reports) was generally to help kids and adult students get educational accomodations: for example, if a kid's report proves that they struggle with written instructions due to dyslexia, they'd be able to request a verbal/auditory alternative for relevant assignments. The psychologist would administer LOTS of tests and interviews for each patient, usually over the course of a few days, and those tests usually included one of the Wechsler IQ tests: either the WAIS-IV/V for adults or the WISC-V for kids. Both of these tests include an "overall" score called full-scale IQ (FSIQ), but this wasn't the focus of patient reports—the different subtests were. Also noteworthy that FSIQ is just the average of the scores on those subtests, which measure things like verbal comprehension, working memory, and processing speed (and sub-sub-tests thereof). These are useful in a clinical context because they let you identify conditions that are marked by discrepancies in different areas: for example, that kid with dyslexia probably struggled with processing speed but did fine with verbal comprehension. So a patient's overall score was a lot less relevant than any subscores that seemed like outlier compared to other subscores. (Today's Wechsler tests are aware of the Flynn effect and supposedly get recalibrated to account for it, but I can't speak to that personally.)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tim333 2y ago
Here'a another article with an actual graph of the rise a slight fall off of IQ results in Norway https://check-iq.org/blog/reverse-flynn-effect-explained https://check-iq.org/blog/reverse-flynn-effect-explained My guess would be it's mostly down to schooling and practice. It went up 1950-1980 mostly due to better education, maybe down 1995 to now due to too much mucking about on the web/phone rather than maths homework?
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  That is my impression. Broad spectrum problem solving, knowledge, critical thought have become less emphasized as society has become more streamlined and efficient. In such an environment, attributes like conscientiousness are more emphasized. This is highly evident in changes to our US education system

27 points by drcwpl 2y ago

nitwit005 2y ago

An entire article about some data, without any chart or a number that isn't a date.

dcminter 2y ago
Also I thought that the average IQ was 100 by definition so what does it even mean by "IQ scores steadily climbed" ...? Edit: Wikipedia article on the Flynn effect clarifies: "When the new test subjects take the older tests, in almost every case their average scores are significantly above 100." though, so ok I guess?
- nutrie 2y ago
  The score is tied to your age and is relative to the whole population of that age, IIRC. It’s been a long time since I took the paid test. So today’s 100 is, say, 130 fifty years ago. I think there were 4 age groups.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
_yb2s 2y ago
The article is ridiculous- an obviously non-existent problem (why are they expecting IQs to continue increasing- why would they?), with a completely absurd and implausible speculative explanation.
- kylebenzle 2y ago
  They expected IQ to continue increasing because it has been continuously increasing. (I think it used to be a rule on HN to read the article before commenting).
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    Indeed, that was my criticism- it is absurd to expect something to keep increasing forever just because it did increase for a short duration previously, especially given what we do know about how human brains work. Even the hypothetical explanations they raise the article "better nutrition and healthcare" as well as the "positive manifold" idea would obviously be limited, basically one-time effects. Moreover, despite being a generalist myself, and not being a fan of specialization, I don't see any convincing evidence of an increase in specialization- which their argument is founded on. Humans have been highly specialized for most of modern history, yet it has only recently been popular to explore the downsides of that and push the other way. If anything this has been reducing, especially in the sciences with the advent of new broader interdisciplinary fields like systems biology. The examples in the article like "high schools now teach coding and advanced mathematics" also seem like evidence of a reduction in specialization that existed previously. Does this person really think people are getting dumber because high schools are teaching kids too much advanced mathematics? > I think it used to be a rule on HN to read the article before commenting No, HN has clear guidelines on this. There is no requirement to read an article before commenting, but it is not allowed to accuse someone of having not read an article or to comment in a way that questions or implies that they might not have. It is also required to assume good faith, and anyone criticizing an articles content is implicitly claiming to have read it.
    - mnk47 2y ago
      > it is absurd to expect something to keep increasing forever just because it did increase for a short duration previously The problem isn't that it stopped increasing. It's that it's steadily decreasing now. I made a comment about this recently with sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41844739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41844739 Not convinced by the blog author's theories, but it's a real problem worth discussing.

tiahura 2y ago

For those of us born at the zenith, the arc is quite clear: the counter-culture won and we’re now producing generations of morons and imbeciles.

bryananderson 2y ago
Unlike every person born before me and every person born after me—all of whom insist their childhood was the zenith—my childhood was actually the zenith
- tiahura 2y ago
  That’s sort of what the data says.
  - aredox 2y ago
    Thank you for this clear demonstration of your imbecility. ("The data" says nothing about your own personal intelligence.)
mock-possum 2y ago
Is this a reference I’m not getting?

bogdabogda 2y ago

[flagged]

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Well intelligence does evaporate over time… literally for most people past age 60 to 70. Hence why most company boards have a mandatory retirement policy for board members past a certain age.
_yb2s 2y ago
Is this a reference to the racist/white supremacist "great replacement" conspiracy theory?

superb_dev 2y ago

Zero consideration of the obvious question: what if IQ just isn’t a good measurement?

JamesBarney 2y ago
Isn't a good measurement by what measure? There's been 1000's of studies on it. It might be one of the most robust findings in all of psychology and psychometrics (Big 5 is in the same ballpark). You can predict all sorts of things from it. If IQ is a bad measurement, than there are no good measurements in psychology.
- empath75 2y ago
  What does it measure?
  - JamesBarney 2y ago
    Something called g. Which is basically rounds to our intuition of how smart you are. It is one the best predictors of job performance (up there with a work sample test), income, reaction time, how much schooling you'll get, how likely you are to commit crime, how long you'll live. Imagine it like this, if we give someone a history test, a math test, a physics test, and english test. We'll notice how good you are at any given tests predicts how good you are at other tests. Even though math and history don't have any real overlap in terms of skills. They also found that doing well on some of these tests will better predict how well you'll do at others. For instance math and physics are typically more g-loaded so if someone does well on a math or physics test they are more likely to do well on an english test than the reverse. We call this quality of that predicts how well you're going to do at intellectual tasks g. And then we built a test to try to measure G and that's an IQ test, with IQ being the measurement of g.
    - empath75 2y ago
      > It is one the best predictors of job performance (up there with a work sample test), income, reaction time, how much schooling you'll get, how likely you are to commit crime, how long you'll live. People say stuff like this all the time as if it's an uncontroversial fact, and it's much less supported by the literature than you're implying. So much of this is a matter of interpretation and the people interpreting it are generally people personally vested in the concept of IQ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4557354/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4557354/ I do agree that an IQ test can help measure severe intellectual impairment, or a change in an individual's ability because of illness or injury. I have a lot of doubts about it's meaningfulness beyond that.

codingwagie 2y ago

[flagged]

dyauspitr 2y ago
Good college to decent paying white collar job is still very interesting to most women.
ARandomerDude 2y ago
> decent paying white collar job, just isnt that interesting in modern society and isnt highly selected for from a mating perspective What? I have literally never met a mother who is uninterested in whether her husband pays the bills.

empath75 2y ago

There is such a simpler explanation for this. You can get better at IQ tests by practicing and studying. For a long time IQ scores were seen as an important measure of your value as a human being, and more importantly, were used to gate access to jobs and other opportunities. So people learned how to get better at passing IQ tests. Now IQ tests are no longer fashionable and we're drifting back to the scores you'd expect in a naive population.

jstummbillig 2y ago
A very simple explanation, indeed
nutrie 2y ago
Also stress can play a role, along with one’s ability to remain 100 % focused.
kylebenzle 2y ago
So you are saying that for example the first time generation X takes an IQ test at 15 and gets a 100 score on average but now my son generations takes the same test at 15 and gets 10 points lower, its probably because gen X had been "training" to take IQ tests?
lostmsu 2y ago
Are you sure the IQ scores went out of fashion because people were able to train to get them higher, and not because one of: 1. There are only so many IQ tests, so people applying simply memorized the one job administered or 2. IQ tests were so effective they prevented nepotism, and people just could not have it Do you have any data to support you point?
JamesBarney 2y ago
That's possible. I'd be surprised though if enough people were studying and practicing IQ tests to drive this difference. Practice has some benefits but are fairly limited for IQ tests. And I doubt a high enough portion of the population was practicing IQ tests regularly enough to move the needle this much.
2y ago

advael 2y ago

I've always thought the Flynn Effect was yet another Moore's Law, and both demonstrate Goodhart's Law. We didn't get transistor density doubling year over year because this was a natural tendency of some physical law, we got it because of mountains of money and engineering effort poured into doing that. Similarly, we didn't get rises in a measure of what society considers intelligence because of some genetic or uncorrelated environmental factor, we got it because what we're actually measuring with IQ, since it was invented by Binet, is education and selection of minds toward a particular category of reasoning tasks. I think Binet did something impressive when he distilled the priorities of the entire education system into a psychometrically-evaluable quantity that's relatively stable across individuals, but the way people overstate the generality and broad applicability of this metric baffles me. Like people will point out that IQ correlates with lifetime income and also SAT scores. But those two things not only correlate with each other for a much clearer reason (We gate educational outcomes with standardized tests that resemble IQ tests, and also gate economic outcomes with educational credentials), but that reason also is a causal explanation that mostly amounts to a decision made by human institutional policy, rather than some grand enduring fact about the nature of intelligence Like look, I get how people get so attached to this stuff. I've got a high enough IQ score to be beyond the statistical sensitivity of Raven's Progressive Matrices which mostly seems to mean that I'm great at test-taking and puzzle-solving, and I get that IQ seems like this really powerful explanation of variance on vibes from an internal perspective. It feels like people above a certain point on the curve are just so much more vibrant and curious sometimes! But I've come to believe that this is more an artifact of how we shunt certain people within the education system than some deep difference between people on some generally-applicable measure of capability. Lots of social science theories about assortative mating and such seem to observe that people with brains that work similarly will also tend to like each other more, and we have vast edifices that determine other socialization-determining factors based on these kinds of heavily-correlated metrics.

mannyv 2y ago
Except that data says you're wrong. As a classic example, look at (1) the effects of adding iodine to salt and its impact on IQ, and (2) the withdrawal of leaded gasoline and it's impact on IQ. And in general, IQ goes up as nutrition goes up (to a point). It's hard to be smart if you're calorie-reduced. That said, is IQ important? To an extent, yes. In general a higher IQ means someone can hold more things in their head, which means they can handle more complexity. Is it important? It depends. I would rather have a high-IQ doctor than a low-IQ doctor, for sure. I would rather have a high-IQ network engineer than a low-IQ network engineer.

stonethrowaway 2y ago

Something Awful: The Internet Makes You Stupid.

cgordo840 2y ago
I think some things that were said about "training" for IQ tests in the past (which increased scores) are true , but in a different way than may be considered on the surface. I believe we WERE training, but in a different way. But I will get back to that. To me, an iq test is a simplified way to judge someone's intelligence in a narrow fashion. A bunch of questions, in a controlled environment, that you can practice for. Seems a bit simplified as a means of measuring intelligence. Especially when very little of our lives are spent in such an environment. With the world being full of so many variables it seems like it would be more beneficial to gauge how that intelligence responds not just to simple questions or problems but how it applies that knowledge in real world situations. I think that is why a high or low IQ score does not necessarily determine success. I said before that we were training in the past for IQ tests. The training we were doing wasn't anything we did in school. It was the way we grew up and lived our lives. Before technology "improved" our lives, we had much more interactive experiences with the world. We played investigators in a world that required more physical engagement & effort to answer your questions. At that time it wasn't as simple as just using Google, having answers at our finger tips. If you had questions & wanted answers, it was more of an undertaking. It took more effort. Before you even started, you understood that you would have to WORK to answer your questions. Research and information gathering was much more difficult and involved. You also often had to speak to many different people along the way because information and opinions werent always easy to come by. I can also say from personal eperience that the satisfaction I had in the past having to do all the work to get my answers was much more satisfying than simply pressing search. I think this applied not only to learning & information gathering, but to life in general. In today's world, while I wouldn't say life is easier (it has its own challenges), i would say a lot has been simplified. Most of our daily struggles have changed. Technology has changed us from being doers into being more thinkers. More specialized. Specialized because the level of our technology forces us to specialize. Even if I have a high IQ, the world isn't as open & accessible as it used to be. It takes many years of learning & often a degree from a very specialized field to be successful. The things in the past that fueled our IQ growth, like all of our wordly interactions and learning due to the lack of said technology, have been in many ways removed. I keep coming back to what I call worldly interactions. In our lives today much of our lives take place in a very limited environment. There is not the unknown factor of daily physical interaction out in a big world with endless experiences & possibilities. You are sitting there scrolling on a tablet or pc from the comfort & safety of your home or office. Being more of a digital society we have lost a lot of our interaction with the world. I believe it is this simplification, this lost interaction, that has lead to lower IQ scores. We learn through our myriad of experiences and interactions. Having a broad volume of past experiences to learn from is how we grow our intelligence and become wise. Not simply by having a high level of gathered information & facts. Intelligence is applied. The level of our current technology has unintentionally lead to this. By requiring us to specialize in today's world, the interactions gained through generalization that were facilitated by the lack of technology, have been lost. To help get my point across, i will use today's medical field as an example. A few years ago I started having seizures. I saw many different doctors specializing in their own fields. They all seemed very knowledgeable in their respective fields. But when it came to applying their knowledge across different fields, they were very limited. I was often told when asking questions "that is out of my area of expertise", even if they were related. I would have to be referred to another specialist. Whose knowledge was great but was again, narrowed only to their specialization. This leads to quite an issue. Todays specialization has lead to a doctors inability to be diagnosticians. By being unable to connect dots across different fields due to lack of general knowledge, it has lead to delayed and missed diagnosis. Not every case fits the books, some require thinking outside the lines and connecting dots that dont ordinarily connect. Specialization, by eliminating exposure to other fields has removed the idea of being a diagnostician due to their narrow scope. Its awfully hard to consider other conclusions if you don't have the breadth of knowledge to intelligently consider them. So....doctors seem more educated & know more about their specialty, but their usefulness has become very very narrow & something has been lost along the way. This connects back to worldliness and experiences. The same way doctors have been limited by specialization is the same way technology is limiting us as a whole. Many of the challenges that fueled our IQ growth have been removed. Since we have fewer real life experiences and & have less opportunity to apply that knowledge broadly due to specialization....we can see the results.

spondylosaurus 2y ago

I'm surprised that the article talks about "specialization" without mentioning that many modern IQ tests have specialized subscores... but then again, this may not be common knowledge. Back in the day I used to compile patient evaluation reports for a psychologist who specialized in Diagnosing Patients With Stuff. The point of the diagnoses (and the reports) was generally to help kids and adult students get educational accomodations: for example, if a kid's report proves that they struggle with written instructions due to dyslexia, they'd be able to request a verbal/auditory alternative for relevant assignments. The psychologist would administer LOTS of tests and interviews for each patient, usually over the course of a few days, and those tests usually included one of the Wechsler IQ tests: either the WAIS-IV/V for adults or the WISC-V for kids. Both of these tests include an "overall" score called full-scale IQ (FSIQ), but this wasn't the focus of patient reports—the different subtests were. Also noteworthy that FSIQ is just the average of the scores on those subtests, which measure things like verbal comprehension, working memory, and processing speed (and sub-sub-tests thereof). These are useful in a clinical context because they let you identify conditions that are marked by discrepancies in different areas: for example, that kid with dyslexia probably struggled with processing speed but did fine with verbal comprehension. So a patient's overall score was a lot less relevant than any subscores that seemed like outlier compared to other subscores. (Today's Wechsler tests are aware of the Flynn effect and supposedly get recalibrated to account for it, but I can't speak to that personally.)

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tim333 2y ago

Here'a another article with an actual graph of the rise a slight fall off of IQ results in Norway https://check-iq.org/blog/reverse-flynn-effect-explained https://check-iq.org/blog/reverse-flynn-effect-explained My guess would be it's mostly down to schooling and practice. It went up 1950-1980 mostly due to better education, maybe down 1995 to now due to too much mucking about on the web/phone rather than maths homework?

s1artibartfast 2y ago
That is my impression. Broad spectrum problem solving, knowledge, critical thought have become less emphasized as society has become more streamlined and efficient. In such an environment, attributes like conscientiousness are more emphasized. This is highly evident in changes to our US education system