The thread built on a previous submission of this 18 March 2014 story to Hacker News, with lots of comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158510 https

The thread built on a previous submission of this 18 March 2014 story to Hacker News, with lots of comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158510 I remember reading this article back then, and I see this story has been submitted a couple of other times here. Rereading the article just now, I was astonished that the author doesn't mention any of the massive data sets that show that IQ scores have been steadily RISING around the world, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect,[1] after James R. Flynn, the researcher who first drew the attention of the psychological community to all the data on rising IQ scores around the world.[2] Really, if we are going to talk about mysterious effects of "toxins" here, we should first of all look at the actual trend lines in the real world. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_higher_than_our_grandparents?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_... [2] http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/about-us/directory/beyond-the-flynn-effect http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/about-us/directory/beyond...