IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/iq-rates-are-dropping-many-developed-countries-doesn-t-bode-ncna1008576

335 471 7 years ago

nudq2• 7 years ago

On the other hand, in a few years you won't need even basic literacy to thrive in developed countries.

It'll be enough to grunt in the general direction of the nearest piece of smart furniture. Amazon will know everything about your physical, mental and emotional state needed to know what has to be dispatched, cost deducted automatically from your UBI account.

TomMarius• 7 years ago

Is this really the future we want for humankind?

Nasrudith4• 7 years ago

The thing is short of being responsible for human extinction you never get to choose the future for humankind - only expand or limit their options.

To give an absurd example your descendants may decide for some bizzare reason it would be awesome to keep pet dodos fenced in their yards. Given that dodos are long extinct immediately it is impossible. But if their biotech advanced enough to recover the DNA and clone them and either manually reconstruct or mutate the cloned base until an acceptable genepool was produced operation "yard-dodo" would once again be a possibility - although very remote.

sbmassey• 7 years ago

Maybe we can speciate into grunting Amazon-prime-subscribing Eloi, and the technologically literate Morlocks who feed on them.

vincent-toups• 7 years ago

You call that thriving?

baddox2• 7 years ago

Sure, why not? What is the point of literacy if, well, there is no longer any point of literacy?

contingencies• 7 years ago

As someone designing what could be construed as smart public furniture, I absolutely agree.

Such change is both economically and politically incentivized, and people will almost always err toward convenience. Some recent research[0][1] suggested that purchasing free time (through paying for convenience) makes people happier than material purchases.

Further, potential criticism of such changes is swept under the rug as high end / high tech brands pioneering these services align themselves publicly with the fairytalesque yet disembodied/unassailable image of a "sophisticated" "urbanite" "consumer" who is "time poor" "cash rich" and thereby "successful" because they are "going places" (being content with where you are is unsexy). Moreover, they have "choice" so are "empowered" and can "express themselves" and "their aspirations" through "their choices" (read: spending / conspicuous consumption / subsequent social network image spam). The mythical "successful neighbour" or "keeping up with the Joneses": aspects of human social behavior (and thus capitalist marketing norms) are such a crock of shit sometimes.

A motto for the future? iCaveman: I can't.

[0] http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/18/1706541114.full

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/science/study-happy-save-...

ummwhat• 7 years ago

Ah ha. We aren't getting dumber. We are replacing ourselves with robots.

darepublic• 7 years ago

I grunt angrily at this suggestion

duxup• 7 years ago

https://youtu.be/z7FcJwg6OkA?t=73

sanxiyn4• 7 years ago

I didn't know about this and it is very interesting. Primary study of interest is this: Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused.

https://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6674

pseudolus• 7 years ago

There was an Icelandic study that tended to provide some support for the hypothesis to the effect that people with high educational achievement had fewer children which led to an overall trend of decreasing educational achievement in the population [0][1]. Proving the world is unjust, Mike Judge wasn't listed as an author and didn't even receive an acknowledgement.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/5/E727

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/16/natural-sele...

angstrom• 7 years ago

As much as a I like the movie it's worth noting that on such short timescales there's probably a more significant impact of nutrition differences and the failure of IQ measures across different society structures ie agrarian, industrialized, service oriented.

sanxiyn4• 7 years ago

The paper deals with the issue. It is measuring genotype score, not IQ, so failure of IQ measures is irrelevant.

Benjamin_Dobell• 7 years ago

The article covers this:

One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term).
[...]
However, a 2018 study[1] of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families.

The studies would seem to contradict each other, which isn't all that surprising.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf

lazyjones2• 7 years ago

This seems to be data for males (conscripts) only. It seems they didn't examine correlation with lower-IQ mothers, which may have been a factor.

MasterScrat• 7 years ago

Or, as XKCD said it... https://xkcd.com/603/

sanxiyn4• 7 years ago

There is no contradiction. Iceland study states upfront that genetic decline size is 10 times smaller than environmental effect and is masked by it.

kss238• 7 years ago

The article discussed this but said that even within family's IQ is going down by generation so it cannot be entirely the effect you described.

mirimir2• 7 years ago

Maybe, even within families, it's higher-IQ siblings who'd rather do non-reproductive stuff.

Edit: Upon reflection, that's rather an ugly way to say it. And in saying that, I was thinking of the well-established fact that reproduction rate is inversely related to educational level and so on.

opwieurposiu• 7 years ago

Sending our smartest women to spend their most productive child bearing years at university is not sustainable if we want to raise or maintain population IQ via the traditional breeding methods. Hopefully these same college women will get us enough skill at manipulating genetics to surpass the incredibly slow optimization process of natural selection. It is currently a race against time. Which will win out, gene manipulation or dysgenic selection?

rnernento3• 7 years ago

I wonder when we're going to collectively realize that this epidemic of stupidity is by far the greatest threat facing humanity. It's the reason we're having so much trouble addressing all our other problems, e.g. corrupt government, climate change, etc...

bshipp3• 7 years ago

I can't agree with that conclusion. There are plenty of brilliant idiots and idiotic geniuses in the world and it can often be more difficult to change the mind of a "smart" person who has drawn the wrong conclusions than a simple person who has done the same. Individuals who draw their sense of self-worth from their perceived intelligence a more likely to stand their ground, argue semantics, and log every cheap rhetorical grenade they can until they are blue in the face.

For evidence of the irrationality of intelligent people, I proffer the example of every pointless university faculty departmental meeting, ever.

CM30• 7 years ago

Eh, is there any evidence that being smart and being 'nice' are necessarily correlated? Seems like there are quite a lot of intelligent people who do morally questionable things or threaten humanity.

Becoming a corrupt government official and lining your own pockets at the expense of the rest of the population isn't necessarily a dumb thing, nor is working in an oil company or developing weapons for the military. Every dictatorship through history has had scientists and academics working for them on all kinds of horrific things.

That's not saying intelligence can't help fix problems or that being dumb is good. But being selfish or evil or sociopathic doesn't seem to have a lot to do with your intelligence, and the issues often come down to selfishness, greed or a lack of morals more than anything else.

rnernento3• 7 years ago

Honestly I don't think the smart evil people are the problem. I think the fact that society is in general pretty good is strong evidence that they are outnumbered. I believe most people want to be good. I also thing the smart evil people are more likely to want to manipulate others than the smart good people. That's why a burgeoning population of people who are easily manipulated is such a problem.

pixl973• 7 years ago

This is just standard stupidity as we have always had. What has changed is the scope of the problem. While a few generations ago, stupidity affected ones local environment, now stupidity can have a global impact. People back then could not do any better. This isn't about intelligence, this is about intelligently working together. Something humans don't do a great job at in large numbers.

rnernento3• 7 years ago

I'm definitely torn on this one, I hope you're right. Part of me thinks it's a combination of things though, also remember what the article this comment was on indicates. IQs are dropping in developed countries.

itamarst• 7 years ago

This article is full of very explicit racism.

castlecrasher2• 7 years ago

I fail to see how it's filled with racism. If you're referring to the theory that it's immigrants and poor people reproducing more, you must not have read the next paragraph before you got angry about it:

One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term). Alternatively, widening immigration might be bringing less-intelligent newcomers to societies with otherwise higher IQs.
However, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families.

The article (and study) make it clear that IQs are dropping from parent to child, even.

foolrush3• 7 years ago

You aren’t wrong, and yet you get downvoted.

SAT tests are rooted in eugenics theory. IQ testing, despite the original developer warning of incorrect application, was weaponized in that direction.

Yet here you find yourself getting voted down.

https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=h...

https://owlcation.com/social-sciences/Intelligence-Testing-a...

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/assessment

fromthestart2• 7 years ago

So, hypothetically, if objective measures of intelligence show correlations with ethnicity, we should just ignore them because they're inconvenient? Isn't that a little irrational? How can you make any use of intelligence measures if you cherry pick according to your preconcieved notions of what you want them to show? What then is the point in practicing any sort of psychology or sociology at all, if your conclusions are so unscientific?

clord• 7 years ago

Lots of things are “rooted” in dark places. Rocket technology developed in wartime Germany. Some pesticides came out of gas chambers. Agent orange is a herbicide now. Should we throw out everything developed by someone who holds a bad idea by today’s standards?

thrower123• 7 years ago

Where? The one sentence mentioning immigration? It seems to me that the article goes over and above to try to attribute this change to environmental factors.

geggam• 7 years ago

How is measuring something racist ?

foolrush3• 7 years ago

Historicize.

Medicalization.

5trokerac3• 7 years ago

They tell us that we lost our tails

Evolving up from little snails

I say it's all just wind in sails

Are we not men?

We are Devo

Are we not men?

D-E-V-O

amval• 7 years ago

If I had to take a bet, I would bet on a combination of a shortened attention span and unknown long-term effects of technology on the brain development plus environmental factors (for example, it seems like plastics are having an impact in things such as fertility rates and our hormonal balance. This could cause other unknown effects).

Interesting topic, in any case.

notahacker2• 7 years ago

I suspect it means that kids today are a little bit less interested in logic puzzles than their parents, who were themselves turn a lot more interested in them than their grandparents, and IQ testing simply isn't robust enough to accurately capture generational differences in cognitive performance if there actually are any. Instability of IQ testing over time seems a less contentious hypothesis than earlier generations being on average too stupid to accomplish anything...

jqueryin• 7 years ago

I would bet on too much screen time for the whole family; seen it first hand. Parents sitting on their devices all evening and not interacting with their children. It's a missed opportunity for learning, especially at a young age.

neilv• 7 years ago

That's a disturbing image I hadn't considered. The parents I know (mainly CS people) have talked for years about "limiting screen time" of the kids, but I didn't consider that some other parents might have too much screen time themselves, to the point of shortchanging child early development.

icebraining3• 7 years ago

Which devices? The data used in this report is mostly pre-smartphone.

vfinn• 7 years ago

My guess would be that we are too rushed, munching way too much information that scatter our brains, too prone to use shortcuts to get ahead (can't afford being deep), too busy to let ourselves sink into the very much needed meditative state, paradoxically too result-oriented to have time for quality, too fast-paced to let ourselves relax, get bored, and sleep enough. We are too reactive, too shallow, too busy, too stressed. We are constantly in an overexcited, coffee-pumped state following the patterns required to grind the results that meet the deadlines. And that's the opposite of a happy, alert, fresh, calm, sensitive state of being, in my opinion, that leads to good IQ results.

stOneskull5• 7 years ago

i think that's a big part of it, yeah, and then add on outrage emotion of all that stuff.

rb808• 7 years ago

My first thought was that kids are spending more time on schooling and homework, and less on creative play and unsupervised time outdoors. Childhoods today are very different than 50 years ago.

masklinn• 7 years ago

Were that the case, the highly regimented asian educational system would have yielded significantly sub-standard average IQs.

magduf6• 7 years ago

In Asia, kids regularly go outside without supervision. In Japan, kids as young as 7 or 8 walk themselves to school without their parents.

That kind of thing is illegal in America.

dagw• 7 years ago

While that may be true, it also seems to me (anecdotal) that schooling today involves a lot more 'creative play' and self guided exploration, and lot less rote learning than it did 50 years ago. I wonder if it's possible to untangle the effects.

magduf6• 7 years ago

My first thought was that kids are spending more time on schooling and homework, and less on creative play and unsupervised time outdoors.

In America, unsupervised time outdoors is illegal in many states.

TheShrug2• 7 years ago

I have a hard time agreeing with this statement. I don't doubt that there have been some unnecessary charges against parents, but I don't believe that there are any strongly enforced laws regarding this. There has always been unsupervised children everywhere that I have lived. Whether they are walking to school or walking around and playing with friends.

ramblerman2• 7 years ago

Oof, this is a can of worms... Can you properly analyze the reasons behind this without going into ethnic differences in IQ? Is it happening in China for instance?

I don't think we should entertain those studies personally, but I'm not sure you can honestly conclude anything about this without that data.

ggdG2• 7 years ago

Can you properly analyze the reasons behind this without going into ethnic differences in IQ?

The article mentions a Norwegian study [1] measuring an IQ decline within families.

So it looks like the cause must be environmental.

My pet theory is that reading as an activity has been replaced by the consumption of audiovisual content.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf

jcadam• 7 years ago

I'd also wager that our increasing usage of computers (including/esp. the handheld kind) to perform tasks that used to require us to use our brains plays a role (e.g., I don't bother calculating the tip at a restaurant anymore, I just have a phone app figure it out for me).

And this will only get worse... until we're like the Eloi, surrounded and dependent on technology no one understands anymore.

precisioncoder5• 7 years ago

See my comment above, the data in the Norwegian study is VERY suspect

joeatyl• 7 years ago

That head-in-the-sand approach doesn't make these issues go away.

bluedino• 7 years ago

Lower skilled jobs, leaving the brain to atrophy is listed as a possible cause.

I'd be curious as to what effect having a phone in your face for 6 hours of the day has on IQ, compared to whatever the heck it was people did before social media.

wil421• 7 years ago

I think it depends on the content. I had a book in front of my face for about 6 hours a day for 13 years in grade school. Not counting college.

A majority of the content I watch on YouTube gives me more knowledge, from Programming to Fishing. A chunk of what I look at is absolutely junk and I feel like it rots my brain if I watch/read too much.

anoncake11• 7 years ago

A majority of the content I watch on YouTube gives me more knowledge,

Knowledge isn't the same as intelligence though. Maybe having effortless access to knowledge actually makes us less intelligent because we don't get to practice figuring things out ourselves as much.

challenger22• 7 years ago

One claim I imagine that no sociologist will ever be able to prove (or disprove)-

If we are living in a crisis of confidence about society- one in which people are plagued by pessimism about too many humans causing global warming, secular stagnation, overpopulation, where all the low hanging fruits are already picked, lack of moral purpose, with the impression that humans are a plague upon the world-

Won't the average pessimistic person care less about trying hard to do anything? And won't this manifest as less effort to be smart and just?

bbarn• 7 years ago

Well, you can probably prove the feedback the average person receives from media has become more pessimistic, and if you assume some people respond to that feedback, that's a pretty easy line to draw.

malvosenior• 7 years ago

I think it's really hard to be creative when you spend your time worrying about all of that stuff. Most of my peers spend an inordinate amount of time stressing out about every item you list. They get locked into ways of thinking that are nearly identical to each other and that lockstep voice bleeds out into other unrelated areas. There's a lot of group think.

I don't worry about any of that stuff and have a lot of extra energy to explore random topics and generally more positivity to power my endeavours.

It seems the like overt consumer marketing of the 20th century has morphed into a social/political marketing in the 21st century. Because this is a new phenomena people don't seem to realize it's happening and instead blindly contribute their mind the borg, so to say.

svachalek• 7 years ago

It's an interesting thought but it's really hard to compare societal fears across generations. I grew up knowing that if the US or USSR saw a tactical opening, the world could literally just end in something like 11 minutes. Other generations worried about global cooling, overpopulation, Communism, crime waves, and all kinds of other things we can look back at as silly now but that doesn't mean they weren't equally stressed about them at the time.

rblatz• 7 years ago

Isn’t IQ standardized around 100?

nprz• 7 years ago

And if you're thinking, "Isn't the test set up so that 100 is always the average IQ?," that's only true because researchers rescale the tests to correct for improving raw scores.

grenoire• 7 years ago

Air pollution is also known to be a potential reason why the Flynn effect (newer generations of test-takers performing substantially better on older tests, accounting also for test familiarity) is declining; with the "IQ curve" over time plateauing. We know that increased presence of CO and CO2 reduces cognitive capacity on many areas.

khrbrt• 7 years ago

Ashes Ashes did a podcast on this: https://ashesashes.org/blog/episode-07-last-gasp

And a related episode on air pollution in general: https://ashesashes.org/blog/episode-38-dead-air

beenBoutIT• 7 years ago

IIRC, the off gassing from carpet that most of us recognize as 'new suburban home smell' takes 10 points off of a kid's IQ.

FabHK3• 7 years ago

Reversing, not declining.

FabHK3• 7 years ago

Carbon monoxide pollution has decreased (or been stable) in the countries I've bothered to check over the last decades (while the Flynn effect was in full swing):

https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/carbon-monoxide-trends

https://www.epd.gov.hk/epd/english/environmentinhk/air/data/...

https://iir-de.wikidot.com/emission-trends-carbon-monoxide

z3t4• 7 years ago

Should not look too hard on these numbers. When I took the military "IQ" test it consisted of 3d objects printed on paper - figuring out how the next rotation should look like, and understanding old/unusual words. I can guess they are still using the same test.

robbiep• 7 years ago

... you’re describing an IQ test?

kkwteh3• 7 years ago

One huge assumption no one has challenged is the notion that IQ is a valid measure of intelligence. One reason to doubt this is that above a low threshold (80 IIRC), IQ has no correlation with salary.

rantanplan• 7 years ago

Because... the higher the salary the higher the intelligence?

ahje3• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle

roenxi• 7 years ago

It is a little risky assuming correlation - hopefully salary is correlated with a sort of general economic contribution rather than intelligence. Intelligence isn't a prerequisite for contributing mightily.

If intelligence was correlated with salary that would be a symptom of bad outcomes in the economic system. I'd expect that, but wouldn't be happy to see it. Eg, whoever is running the local plumbing small business is in a position to make a lot of money. The plumber might be smart or might not be, really shouldn't matter.

I've seen situations where truck drivers make a higher salary than engineers. More intelligence almost correlated with a lower salary.

Dirlewanger• 7 years ago

IQ's not the most robust measurement, but it is one of the best we have for predicting overall success in life.

factsaresacred• 7 years ago

IQ measures intelligence, not how much the market values intelligence.

Perhaps what you're getting at is 'how much does IQ matter' which is an interesting question.

In modern society the answer is probably a lot. And when you factor in the negative correlation between intelligence and aggression / self-control, probably a lot more.

mapcars• 7 years ago

I also doubt IQ measures intelligence, more like intellect and memory.

asveikau• 7 years ago

IQ attempts to measure intelligence. Key difference. You should not put too much weight on an attempt to measure subjective qualities or reduce a human being to a number.

mcv• 7 years ago

Not sure what salary has to do with it. Salary is not intelligence.

I'm not saying that assumption is not wrong; I certainly have my doubts about the validity of IQ tests. But salary isn't a valid measure of intelligence either.

Honestly, I don't think we can even really agree on what intelligence is, and as long as that's the case, we can't really know what we're supposed to measure either.

WillPostForFood4• 7 years ago

If you look at socioeconomic success (education and occupation), there is an extremely high correlation with IQ.

http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intellige...

There are a lot of reasons you would expect divergence when just looking at salary. A Reporter is averaging 41k, a Postdoctoral Research Associate is averaging under $48k while a nurse makes $65k and a elevator repairman is making 79k. Higher status jobs don't necessarily pay more.

bjourne3• 7 years ago

Yes, but an even higher correlation between socioeconomic success and socioeconomic status:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/money-academic-su...

vbuwivbiu• 7 years ago

https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

kkwteh3• 7 years ago

I agree with other replies that salary is a very flawed indicator of intelligence, but it was a simple data point to share. My only point is that it's not at all obvious that IQ is a valid measure of intelligence.

If you think about what is involved in an IQ test and all the ways someone's intelligence manifests itself, it seems clear to me that IQ is at best a very distorted and narrow measurement of intelligence.

anoncake11• 7 years ago

Other possible explanations:

- Intelligence is not correlated with salary

- Intelligence is negatively correlated with materialism

- Intelligent people get paid more for doing work that requires I but less for having an unpleasant job (given equal pay, would you rather be a programmer or a garbage collector?)

- Intelligence is negatively correlated with other abilities (brain areas specialized in reasoning can't be specialized in social skills, energy spent on the brain can't be spent on the immune system)

- Intelligence is negatively correlated with mental health (Less Intelligent people don't notice or understand problems more intelligent ones do – ignorance is bliss; the things that make one intelligent also make one less stable – the genes that make one less intelligent haven't died out because evolution hasn't progressed that far yet but because the brain designs intelligent people have are buggy.

oreo834• 7 years ago

"genes that make one less intelligent"

Come on, surely you aren't suggesting that genetics have anything to do with intelligence, are you?

floatboth2• 7 years ago

I don't think you're using the word "materialism" correctly here.

thethirdone• 7 years ago

One reason to doubt this is that above a low threshold (80 IIRC), IQ has no correlation with salary.

Do you have a source for this? Everything I have read suggests IQ is highly correlated with income (without considering a threshold).

kkwteh3• 7 years ago

https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

anthuman• 7 years ago

IQ is a valid measure of a certain kind of intelligence. And it most certainly correlates with salary and success at an individual and a national level.

The higher your IQ, the greater the odds of you making more money. The higher the collective IQ of a nation or group, the greater the odds of that nation or group being successful or wealthy.

https://brainstats.com/average-iq-by-country.html

If you look at the list of successful and wealthy countries and the list of national iqs, they tend to correlate fairly well. Barring war or some external impediment, the nations with the highest iqs tend to be wealthier and the lower iqs tend to be poorer.

Pepe1vo• 7 years ago

This study seems to base its conclusions for the most part on a study from 2016[0] and a study limited to Norway[1]. Both of these studies base their findings on data from 1995-2005 (with the exception of the Netherlands and Britain which both span larger periods) this data itself is collected from variety of experiments with varying sample size and testing methodologies.

There certainly appears to be something interesting here, but I'd be hesitant to draw any conclusions from this data the way TFA does, which reeks a bit of sensationalism. At best I'd call it something worth investigating more thoroughly, at worst it's statistical noise.

[0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2016-dutton.pdf

[1] http://differentialclub.wdfiles.com/local--files/assigned-to...

jandrese• 7 years ago

This is the kind of study where I expect in a few months to see headlines about IQ NOT dropping, and then more headlines about how IQ is dropping and in the end the whole thing is inconclusive.

The more attention grabbing the headline is the more skeptical I am of the study.

magicnubs• 7 years ago

Hasn't it only "fallen" by something like 1 point? That seems like it may easily be due to some (potentially very hard to identify) confounder.

wcunning• 7 years ago

I wish that I saw more of these comments on HN links to science articles that explain some research paper. From now on, every such comment that analyzes the underlying study's power and significance, I'm going to upvote, as a general policy.

rladd• 7 years ago

If it is in fact happening, perhaps carbon dioxide levels during pregnancy and early brain development are critical?

We know that elevated CO2 is negatively correlated with cognitive scores: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2016/07/indoor-co2-du...

phonypc• 7 years ago

From your link:

"But a new Danish study failed to confirm these findings. The paper, published in February 2016 in the journal Building and Environment, reports no cognitive decline even when subjects breathed air containing 5,000 ppm carbon dioxide."
"Even scientists who have found an effect say more research is needed before they are convinced that modest amounts of carbon dioxide are a public health problem. Satish says that, so far, nobody even knows by what biological mechanism carbon dioxide might dim the brains of test subjects."

I feel like people are way too readily accepting this CO2 cognitive decline thing. There are other comments here saying that we know CO2 causes cognitive decline.

stOneskull5• 7 years ago

i see 'outrage culture' being a big part. instead of thinking and talking, it's easier to just say 'bigot-racist-homophobe'.

trhway• 7 years ago

Substantial gains in GA were apparent from the mid 1950s (test years) to the end 1960s–early 1970s, followed by a decreasing gain rate and a complete stop from the mid 1990s. [...] It is concluded that the Flynn effect may have come to an end in Norway.

The single and/or the first children have higher IQ, so the Flynn effect is a reverse to the number of children per family, ie. it is a reverse to that graph:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

And on the other side of the world - the "one child” policy results are in:

"An increase of intelligence in China 1986–2012" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961...

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

gingabriska• 7 years ago

So it's reversion to mean which is often seen in nature. If we see that today we don't really need high IQ to navigate our way through the cities, nation or even continent because we've GPS and other technologies which drastically reduce the amount of complexity we need to keep up with. Why should a higher IQ exist then?

If we look at the past and see when and where the IQ increase took place, we see it increasing when when we were required to complex terrain and protect ourselves from harsh climate.

sergiomattei3• 7 years ago

Well, what can I say? We have access to all human knowledge at the palm of our hand, but we don't have the discipline to use it wisely.

1. The rise of social media is a huge contributing factor to misinformation and shortening attention spans.

2. Consumption, consumption, consumption. Most consume but don't create.

3. The unknown effects of technology on our brains. We're all just primates playing with extremely complicated toys. We don't know their effects on us.

The next decades will be interesting...

ahje3• 7 years ago

2. Consumption, consumption, consumption. Most consume but don't create.

That's where I'd put my money. All of a sudden, the need to consume crappy pop culture has exploded around us, and people simply don't do things any more -- "Netflix and chill" has simply pushed other activities aside.

This is, of course, nothing new; it's just that modern streaming services deliver makes it so much more available than it was 30 years ago.

sergiomattei3• 7 years ago

Yeah, unfortunately for most people creative leisure doesn't exist anymore. Then again, this also has other factors (work taking over most of our time).

sverige• 7 years ago

The statement that "We have access to all human knowledge at the palm of our hand" is a profound error that I'm seeing repeated more frequently of late. Getting a search result with the text of some learned document is not equivalent to actually reading the document and digesting it mentally and emotionally so that you have some understanding of it.

This illusion of having all human knowledge at hand is one of the reasons people are becoming dumber, not smarter.

sergiomattei3• 7 years ago

Note the phrasing - we have access. It doesn't imply we use it effectively. In fact, I say we do the complete opposite.

But yes, there's access to an immense amount of books and resources.

fwip3• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure the same arguments were made about television, radio, and yes, even books.

If you look at social media today, it's all about creation. You create posts or photos or clever tweets and share them with your peers. This is the opposite of sitting down in front of the television for a few hours to watch corporate-generated programming.

elorant• 7 years ago

I wonder if social media play any role in this. People tend to consume a lot of crap which I guess make them less intelligent.

lurker458• 7 years ago

better insulation leading to poorer indoors air quality ? put enough people in a closed room and CO2 will build up quickly leading to drowsiness, slower thinking, etc.

kemiller2002• 7 years ago

This is totally my opinion, but I always think articles like these are totally bunk, laughably. I seriously doubt the world is getting dumber. I've seen these assessments, my kids have had to participate in them. I've found them to be either biased or subjective on several occasions. It depends on things like the disposition of the person giving the assessment. (I saw this on when seeing someone take the Stanford Binet assessment.) I'm not saying this happens on all of them, but that along with wild claims about IQs "dropping" makes me question their results.

whatshisface2• 7 years ago

If the biases are consistent on average then a change still matters. If I added or subtracted a random number between 0 and 100 to every reported IQ score in the world it would become virtually useless as a measure of each person, but the global average IQ would hardly change.

watwut4• 7 years ago

Biases are not random nor evenly distributed

precisioncoder5• 7 years ago

Very interesting.

I started thinking about possible other reason's this could occur and checked into the data about the Norwegian study. The data was all from mandatory conscription so it couldn't be tainted could it?

Guess again.

At the same time that IQ started dropping Norway changed their conscription policy...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Armed_Forces

"In practice recruits are not forced to serve, instead only those who are motivated are selected.[14] In earlier times, up until at least the early 2000s, all men aged 19–44 were subject to mandatory service, with good reasons required to avoid becoming drafted."

Hmmmm so IQ in the tested cohort started dropping when it was only tested in people who chose to take part in Military service rather than all 17-18 year old males?

That seems like it could have another explanation...

EDIT:

So it seems I missed some info ->

I went back and looked at the data in the study to see whether it used the preliminary research or only for successfully recruited candidates and discovered this:

"Cohorts born before 1962 were subject to a different scoring norm, and cohorts born later than 1991 faced a radically different conscription process with less than 50% invited for in-person testing after completing a web-administered survey. As a result, representative data are not available for later birth cohorts. Data for immigrants are excluded as information on full family size and exact birth order is of lesser quality, while selection into scoring is markedly different as immigrants typically do not face mandatory conscription testing but need to self-select into conscription."

So it seems the preliminary examination does not include enough information or the conscription in general has changed to radically for that information to be reliable.

After more investigation it seems that basically they're saying that from 1980 - 1993 IQ rose, then fell again from 1993-2007 reaching roughly the same levels as previously.

All data after that is tainted as too much has changed in the data source (conscription).

However one very important point about this is that all data is pre-smartphone.

bshipp3• 7 years ago

This explanation isn't nearly as fun as all the wild speculation we're all posting below you.

+1 for actually hunting down the original study and interpreting it.

-1000 for spoiling our self-righteous party.

notus2• 7 years ago

Actually they didn't read it well

redleggedfrog• 7 years ago

Seems like your IQ isn't a problem...

ramblerman2• 7 years ago

Wow, that's ridiculous they didn't consider that, or chose to ignore it.

Good find.

notus2• 7 years ago

As others have pointed out, they missed a very crucial detail, and then didn't edit their post for some reason.

nudq2• 7 years ago

While 63,841 men and women were called in for the examination of persons liable for military service in 2012 (mandatory for men), 9265 were conscripted

Sounds like all men are tested, not all serve.

mirimir2• 7 years ago

That's a confusing Wikipedia article. It also says:

Since 1985, women have been able to enlist for voluntary service as regular recruits.[citation needed] On 14 June 2013, the Norwegian Parliament voted to extend conscription to women.[15] In 2015 conscription was extended to women making Norway the first NATO member and first European country to make national service compulsory for both men and women.[16] There is a right of conscientious objection.[citation needed]

So at least since 2015, all men and women called in were apparently tested.

precisioncoder5• 7 years ago

Good catch... I wasn't reading thoroughly enough...

I went back and looked at the data in the study to see whether it used the preliminary research or only for successfully recruited candidates and discovered this:

So it seems the preliminary examination does not include enough information or the conscription in general has changed to radically for that information to be reliable.

lordalch• 7 years ago

Valar Dohaeris? Wait, nevermind...

raxxorrax2• 7 years ago

While I think the comparability of IQ test to the past or other countries is very rudimentary, this sounds like this could be a huge factor at least.

BethGagaShaggy• 7 years ago

Figure 1 A shows a the trends in cohort IQ for the study, and it only goes roughly from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, which is the whole of the comparable period, and it does rise and fall within that period. I just don't know what you're on about.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf

verttii• 7 years ago

We need people like you to be journalists.

jsjolen2• 7 years ago

I wonder if obesity can be at least partly to blame.

Anecdotally I've talked to some teachers who say that children's media nowadays is simplified. Less 'difficult' words, always explaining (never leaving things to be figured out by the consumer).

varjag• 7 years ago

Obesity is hardly a factor in Norway, where one of the studies was conducted.

jsjolen2• 7 years ago

There has been an obesity increase in all western countries, including Norway.

Here's the best source I have on Norway: https://www.fhi.no/nettpub/hin/levevaner/overvekt-og-fedme/

I wouldn't disregard it as a factor.

Nasrudith4• 7 years ago

Of course the IQ tests themselves are also long known to kinda suck at their job, clarity towards what they are actually measuring and let alone the actual causality.

IQ brings to mind "screen time" as a trendy but useless metric as it is even worse than "print time" where the contents could be anything from pulp fiction and comic books to advanced textbooks qnd latest articles and more.

Even the article lazily goes with the cliches of pop culture to blame (certainly not calling the Kardashians and their associated personal image cult/business venture anything but vapid) but this "issue" inevitably turns into yet another choose your own useless scapegoat based upon preconceptions fest based upon no evidence.

eof• 7 years ago

Wait a second. IQ is a weighted average. IQs “raising” in developing countries due to more modern problems to solve, would also manifest itself as “dropping” IQs in developed countries.

This does not mean people are getting dumber, it just means there is a narrowing gap, which is good, not bad, assuming you want the best for all humanity.

bjourne3• 7 years ago

It is not true that dumber people have more children. At lest not generally:

Cognitive ability and fertility among Swedish men born 1951–1967: evidence from military conscription registers "We examine the relationship between cognitive ability and childbearing patterns in contemporary Sweden using administrative register data. The topic has a long history in the social sciences and has been the topic of a large number of studies, many reporting a negative gradient between intelligence and fertility. We link fertility histories to military conscription tests with intelligence scores for all Swedish men born 1951–1967. We find a positive relationship between intelligence scores and fertility, and this pattern is consistent across the cohorts we study. The relationship is most pronounced for the transition to a first child, and men with the lowest categories of IQ scores have the fewest children. Using fixed effects models, we additionally control for all factors that are shared by siblings, and after such adjustments, we find a stronger positive relationship between IQ and fertility. Furthermore, we find a positive gradient within groups at different levels of education. Compositional differences of this kind are therefore not responsible for the positive gradient we observe—instead, the relationship is even stronger after controlling for both educational careers and parental background factors. In our models where we compare brothers to one another, we find that, relative to men with IQ 100, the group with the lowest category of cognitive ability have 0.56 fewer children, and men with the highest category have 0.09 more children."

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.035...

At lest for this group of men, higher iq correlated with more children. There might be something to the belief that dumb people procreate more, but it might also be a stereotype popularized by movies like Idiocracy.

jboles• 7 years ago

not generally:
among Swedish men born 1951–1967: evidence from military conscription registers

What's that?

bjourne3• 7 years ago

What's what?

Symmetry3• 7 years ago

One angle that seems to always get overlooked in these discussion is also the one that's tended to be the most important historically: the environmental bio-determinism angle. Eliminating malaria in an area, iodizing salt, reducing lead exposure, encouraging people not to drink while pregnant, and things like that have had very large effects on population IQ. Iodizing salt along increased IQs by about 10 points in areas like Chicago without much iodine in the water and where they didn't eat much seafood.

So when I see something like this, presuming it's real, I'd first look at changes in diet, presence of environmental hormones from plastics, and things like that to explain it.

Symmetry3• 7 years ago

Another obvious explanation. We know that large increases in the CO2 in our indoor environments can decrease results on IQ tests. Is there a reason to think that small increase in the CO2 in the atmosphere wouldn't produce a proportionally smaller decrease in IQ scores? Or, hopefully, that better insulation causing higher levels of CO2 indoors in testing places wouldn't produce lower scores as another possibility.

misiti3780• 7 years ago

So, the Flynn effect is over?

sanxiyn4• 7 years ago

Yes. There has been LOTS of studies reporting the end of Flynn effect.

cityzen• 7 years ago

Curious how working memory factors into this. We recently had our kids tested for a bunch of things and although their IQ's were average their working memory was off the charts. We had never really heard of working memory and perhaps it's a new "thing" but it makes sense.

From this page: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/keep-it-in-mind/2010...

"The study also found that, as opposed to IQ, working memory is not linked to the parents' level of education or socio-economic background. This means all children regardless of background or environmental influence can have the same opportunities to fulfil potential if working memory is assessed and problems addressed where necessary."

29athrowaway• 7 years ago

100 points of IQ is the mean. If scores consistently fall so will the mean.

mattnewport3• 7 years ago

Evidence for this can be seen in the widespread misuse of the word rate.

floatboth2• 7 years ago

Any "widespread misuse" eventually turns into just "use". Linguistic prescriptivism is terrible. What people actually say determines "correct" usage.

mattnewport3• 7 years ago

Linguistic prescriptivism is terrible.

That seems rather... prescriptive.

There is no central authority that dictates the use of the English language (that is both descriptive of reality and prescriptive in that I don't think there should be).

Meaning is not purely a matter of emergent use however, it also derives from the meta discussion around that use and the collective attempts to codify use in dictionaries etc.

In this case I'm being prescriptive and saying this is a terrible way to use rate and reflects typical journalistic mathematical illiteracy. Anyone and everyone is however free to ignore my opinion of course.

dfilppi• 7 years ago

Or put another way, "human IQ test taking ability is declining".

Creationer• 7 years ago

The good news is that molecular biology is rapidly advancing to the point where we can identify specific genes contributing towards certain traits eg:

Intelligence:

https://www.cambridgebrainsciences.com/more/articles/22-gene...

And aggression:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A

As we continue to research, and hopefully one day allow embyro selection and gene insertion/deletion for genes linked these traits, we can resume the increase in IQ.

Epigenetics complicates things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics but it just means we have more research to conduct!

inciampati• 7 years ago

This may be more remote than you imagine. These conclusions treat complex multicellular organisms as additive linear functions of (a very low resolution image of) their genomes.

We aren't close to understanding intelligence as it relates to cellular or molecular biology.

repolfx• 7 years ago

Are you sure?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev...

There's good reason to believe most of the "single gene affects complex trait" stories are false.

wayoutthere2• 7 years ago

Is it plausible that rising CO2 levels are slowly causing cognitive impairment? I recall seeing studies showing a link between the two; and this would be an outcome.

elefanten• 7 years ago

The concentrations required for such effects are way higher than atmospheric CO2 changes that'll happen any time soon.

dv_dt• 7 years ago

If the general atmospheric concentration of CO2 is higher, what might the effect be of indoor areas where one might be testing IQs. There was just a HN discussion on how high CO2 might get say in a regular bedroom overnight. How about a testing room with multiple people exhaling CO2, vs a slower diffusion rate from the outdoors?

To what end effect, I don't know. But it's an open and interesting hypothesis to explore.

scarmig• 7 years ago

Not particularly plausible. If you wanted to go that route, then linking rising temperatures to more uncomfortable learning and testing environments would probably be more plausible, but even that is a stretch.

rc_kas2• 7 years ago

This is all caused by advancement in medical technology. So many people are alive now that should have died during birth. So many should have died at younger ages that are kept alive due to medicines (that people depend on for life). Pain reduces your ability to think. So many people are alive but living in pain. In past decades those people would obviously not be alive.

timdiggerm• 7 years ago

Why do you use "should" instead of "would"?

rc_kas2• 7 years ago

Yeah. True enough. Just looking at it all through the lens of survival of the fittest and evolution, I guess.

bthrn• 7 years ago

The optimistic interpretation is that it was meant as "should have died <were it not for the advancements>"

ranprieur• 7 years ago

IQ is not intelligence. IQ is a number determined by a culturally biased test.

The most likely reason scores are dropping, is that test-makers are not keeping up with changes in culture. People are 2019-smart and getting lower scores because they're not 1970-smart.

throwaway5752• 7 years ago

I feel like you'd have to content with test reliability, correlation with other measures of intelligence, and the general multi-decade upward trend (not specific to 1970s, the Flynn effect).

It's possible there is something to this.

aik• 7 years ago

What does 2019-smart mean though? People's brains are optimized for better handing of super-stimulating entertainment? Does that translate into better problem solving and other important skills? Have the importance of those smarts related to those skills changed in 50 years? If not, adjusting the IQ tests to match these doesn't make sense.

baddox2• 7 years ago

I think it's more that "problem-solving skills" are only defined in terms of a set of problems, and the set of problems that are encountered in everyday life changes over time.

skywhopper3• 7 years ago

"What does <year>-smart mean though?" is the question you have to answer to make an IQ test. And it's impossible to answer. IQ test-makers have been getting it wrong in various ways since they started. All an IQ test can tell you is how well you do on IQ tests. If IQ correlates to other outcomes, that's because the test was designed (intentionally or not) to correlate with those other outcomes, not because IQ test-makers are meta-geniuses who know the answer to "What does <year>-smart mean though?"

ryandrake• 7 years ago

How does “culture” play a biasing role? Is there an example of a question that someone 1970-smart will answer correctly but someone 2019-smart will get wrong? Curious.

thebooktocome• 7 years ago

People in 1970 had to navigate with paper maps, which is actually a cognitively loaded activity.

People in 2019 do not, so they don't get the same amount of spatial reasoning exercise from that activity.

HuShifang2• 7 years ago

I don't have domain expertise here, but I suspect one example would be simple numerical calculation: electronic devices are so widely available today that hardly anyone can do long division in their head, or by hand for that matter, whereas relatively many more people in 1970 probably could, and had no ready electronic alternative. Whether people in 2019 could learn this skill as well as people in 1970 if it were deemed a priority, I don't know, but I think it's fair to say that the skill was much more valued in 1970, and considered a more integral aspect of "intelligence." (And of course, numeracy only became so important relatively recently in history -- centuries ago, the ability to successfully hunt and forage was much more essential to most people's definition of "smart" than anything involving numbers.)

skywhopper3• 7 years ago

All speculative, but:

Part of the IQ test I took years ago involved memorizing and repeating sequences of digits. When I was growing up in the 80s, I had a large number of phone numbers memorized for friends, family, businesses I needed to contact regularly, etc. Presumably, memorizing dozens of seven- and ten- digit numbers regularly improved my ability to memorize long strings of digits.

Today, I no longer know any phone numbers besides my own and my wife's. And I know hers only because it's just one digit different than my own. I'm sure children are not getting any practice at this sort of thing.

So, does memorizing strings of digits have anything to do with how smart you are? If this is still part of IQ tests, then I'm not surprised raw scores are decreasing.

anon1m0us7• 7 years ago

If IQ isn't intelligence, then what is?

fwip3• 7 years ago

IQ is a measure developed a hundred years ago to distinguish learning-disabled children from "lazy, normal" children.

"What is intelligence?" is a broad enough question that you could write your dissertation on it.

skywhopper3• 7 years ago

Nothing we can quantify.

Will_Parker• 7 years ago

I'd say all of Shakespeare, Jimi Hendrix, LeBron James, Martin Luther King (keep on going if you like) have a form of extreme intelligence not measured well by IQ tests. The kinds of problems in IQ tests are one thing our brain can adapt to solve but humans are so incredibly neuroplastic that IQ is much too narrow a concept to be definitive.

lliamander2• 7 years ago

IQ is just an abstraction, an assessment of one's ability to perform a range of cognitive tasks. Intelligence itself cannot be directly measured.

That being said, IQ is highly predictive one's ability to perform a broad range of cognitive tasks (along with many other important life outcomes).

AlexTWithBeard• 7 years ago

Sorry, I fail to see how asking to choose a specific geometric figure out of four can be culturally biased.

Unless we embrace the culture of "there are no wrong answers".

tomdell2• 7 years ago

Different communities use different variants of the English language - different words, different grammar, and different meanings for the same words. The standard English on most English IQ tests is not going to be as accessible or understandable to somebody who speaks a different dialect and isn't as familiar with standard English.

TazeTSchnitzel• 7 years ago

Your approach to analysing geometry is informed by whether you have had a mathematical education.

andybak3• 7 years ago

Sorry, I fail to see how asking to choose a specific geometric figure out of four can be culturally biased.

Really? You can't think of any factors other than innate genetic intelligence that would influence your success in answering questions like this?

Let me give you the first example that springs to mind. I can come up with many more.

I used to know someone who had anxiety issues about their intellectual ability and would clam up when they felt they were being tested. Anything that seemed "test-like" to them would make them stressed and confused. I would bet any attempt to measure their IQ that triggered this behaviour would produce a lower score than if they didn't suffer from this.

Is that a measure of innate intelligence?

Like I said I can think of many similar scenarios although they would be more hypothetical.

bArray• 7 years ago

Because children who spend their time looking at screens will probably find it harder to understand spatial dimensions. Perhaps they gain something else, like heightened social awareness, but not physically actively playing with 3D objects will surely take its toll.

But, the trend of increased screen time in my opinion is a bad one and would probably lead to lowered IQ. There's no reason to get stuck on a problem or spend time being bored. As children playing with Lego, Mechano, K'nex, etc, we taught ourselves to solve problems with no shortcuts. We were bored, we found a problem, we got stuck, we troubleshooted and we overcame. It seems like the younger generations of today are losing this Scientific process.

Probably the most concerning issue is that the reward system doesn't require pushing your mental abilities. You can see interesting output without having to put the work in. Because many of the websites/apps measure success in engagement, they literally want you to do as little work as possible to see as much interesting content as possible. Contrast that to pre-screen time, where if you wanted to play with the Lego model on the box you had to build it. Mechano would even actively put mistakes into the instructions to allow kids to problem solve.

sonnyblarney2• 7 years ago

"I fail to see how asking to choose a specific geometric figure out of four can be culturally biased"

I think a lot of newcomers from very poor countries may not be exposed to some things as often, they might not be thinking about shapes and geometry in the same way - more importantly, the notion of tests and test taking.

Solving little abstract problems in a test format as we understand them ... I think is something that's only normalized in certain countries.

I think there's enough potential variance in those things to make a difference.

It's not like people can't grasp what a 3D cube is ... but some cultures just may have that much more exposure to things, more familiarity. Enough to move the needle.

I went to a French immersion school as a kid, in an English city. I studied mostly in French for most of the day until high school. When they did some kinds of testing, there were 'word tests' which depended on some degree of vocabulary.

Though my peers were basically 'a cut above' in almost everything (French immersion was basically public school's version of private school) ... we did noticeably more poorly on that test, granted the lexical nature of it makes 'cultural bias' more obvious.

I think it's 'a thing' though maybe a small thing.

ynot269• 7 years ago

I had to take an IQ test as part of my adhd diagnosis. I was asked about sherlock holmes, I have never read sherlock holmes, I haven't seen the series, and I mentioned that when the test administrator asked me questions related to it.

Barrin922• 7 years ago

Sorry, I fail to see how asking to choose a specific geometric figure out of four can be culturally biased.

No, but whether that is a meaningful measure of intelligence is where the bias creeps in. In our times having high mathematical aptitude is considered to be a sign of intelligence and intelligence is associated with success, so the very same people who like mathy things design IQ tests and hand out credentials and make the most money, so the entire process is largely circular.

What constitutes intelligence is dependent on what environment you're in. If in 100 years all the technical things have been automated it's conceivable that people with high degrees of social intelligence or creativity who can leverage technology rather than implement it will get to define what intelligence means.

wongarsu3• 7 years ago

Unless we embrace the culture of "there are no wrong answers".

For "name the next number in the series" questions there literally are no wrong answers unless you place further restrictions.

IQ tests typically use shapes and not numbers, but that doesn't solve this specific question. Finding the answer is more about finding the same answer as the official solution, which is culture dependant

ryanmarsh• 7 years ago

I took an IQ test recently. It was all finding patterns in shapes. Very different from, say, the SAT.

What about this would be culturally biased? The test could literally be administered in any language or even orally to someone who couldn’t read.

lawlessone2• 7 years ago

You've likely been exposed to tasks such as this or similar before.

not everyone has. I don't think these are as unbiased as we like to think they are.

tokai2• 7 years ago

I remember reading somewhere that people raised in modern housing and cities could cultivate a better affinity for thinking about geometric shapes. That could give a cultural bias against the global rural south.

ceejayoz• 7 years ago

It was all finding patterns in shapes... What about this would be culturally biased?

Well, a culture that doesn't stress pattern finding in schooling would be at a disadvantage, for example.

You can also practice pattern finding, and get better at it. That indicates it's not a very effective test of intelligence, which you're supposed to just either have or not have. You're testing a learned skill, not raw intelligence.

mutzp2• 7 years ago

Have you seen an IQ test? It's the most neutral thing there is, culturally-speaking.

Also what does it mean to be 1970/2019-smart?

chmod775• 7 years ago

1970 smart is being able to diagnose and repair a problem with your own car or maybe having hobbies that require some form of creative thinking and problem solving.

2019 smart is to know how to browse Instagram while on your way to work without running headfirst into a wall.

/jk

driverdan• 7 years ago

I'm surprised how many people here don't understand the inherit biases IQ tests have.

In order for something to test intelligence you shouldn't be able to improve your score by learning, practicing, or studying. Scores should be reproducible. I've yet to see an IQ test that didn't test skills you could improve by practicing.

They also assume knowledge. For example, the IQ test I had when I was young included word comparisons. This tested vocabulary more than intelligence. Someone who didn't have a formal education or didn't know English well would score lower regardless of their intelligence.

IQ is not highly regarded in psychology. It's more reliable than garbage like Meyers-Briggs but is not a true test of intelligence.

xyzzyz10• 7 years ago

In order for something to test intelligence you shouldn't be able to improve your score by learning, practicing, or studying.

You cannot really improve your IQ score by any significant margin by studying in general, unless you memorize the answers on a particular test. This doesn’t make the IQ tests any less useful or valid than SAT or MCAT.

Scores should be reproducible.

They are. Test-retest correlation on high quality IQ tests are well north of 0.9

I've yet to see an IQ test that didn't test skills you could improve by practicing.

If you practice (I.e. memorize the answers) for a specific test, e.g. Wechsler, you won’t get any gain on Stanford Binet, for example.

Yes, because intelligent people tend to have more knowledge. People don’t attain vocabulary simply by being taught the words at school. Vocabulary is learned by experiencing contact with words, and intelligent people tend to seek these experiences more. But yes, comparing an Englishman and Korean on an English-language analogies section of WAIS makes no sense. Fortunately, there almost always is measurement invariance within same country/culture, meaning that the tests measure the same latent ability.

sisu20193• 7 years ago

Literally the opposite is true. What is it about IQ that makes people straight up hallucinate the opposite of reality.

TraceWoodgrains2• 7 years ago

You're asking for an impossible condition. People are adaptable. They can train digit span (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/208/4448/1181), eyesight (https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00278), absolute pitch (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/030573561246394...)... really, virtually anything you care to name. The moment you identify something testable, you identify something trainable.

They're not infinitely adaptable, though. The further you go from whatever baseline you're working with, the harder it will be to make significant progress. What's more, people with higher base scores will tend to progress faster. These repeat effects also tend to fade over time (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED076675). Finally and most importantly, virtually all types of skill training are extraordinarily domain-specific. In the digit span example above, the individual who trained up to a digit span of 79 was tested on chains of alphabetic characters instead and went right back down to the standard 7 +/- 2.

What does all this mean for IQ tests? Well, the goal is to identify broad baselines, not specific trained skills. The best ones will test a broad range of specific cognitive skills (like the Stanford-Binet) or a specific g-loaded skill that an individual hasn't practiced (like Raven's Progressive Matrices). It's fine for them to assume knowledge if they are directed towards specific cultures (for example, English vocabulary is fair game in an IQ test aimed at teen/adult native English speakers), but tests like Raven's should be used for broader contexts. If someone really needs an accurate idea, comparing several tests is worthwhile: A determined individual can practice some specific skills on one test, but those skills won't transfer.

IQ isn't perfect, but it's a useful proxy for intelligence that correlates meaningfully with quite a bit. Specific IQ tests can be trained for in limited ways, but such training only reflects narrow skills and so can easily be avoided by testing a variety of skills in thoughtful ways.

tigershark• 7 years ago

So are you saying that you can’t improve your intelligence and you’ll always have the same intelligence level, predetermined at birth, for the whole of your life? I don’t really think this is the case. I’m pretty sure that is widely known that you can improve your intelligence by training / practicing. If the IQ test results are improved with training then it is something that attests their value beside other bullshit tests that don’t improve with practice.

UnFleshedOne2• 7 years ago

What about all the claims that it is a best performance predictor we have? [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)#Pract...

ahallock2• 7 years ago

I agree it's a measurement and does not encompass every aspect of intelligence, but I thought they developed tests which had no cultural component, using symbols and patterns.

martin-adams• 7 years ago

I think what you’re saying could be posed as a question. Is an IQ test a useful measure of intelligence in the same way in 2019 than in 1970?

lee• 7 years ago

IQ is probably one of the closest tools we have to measuring intelligence, at least in terms of a person's ability to process information and reason about it.

IQ is not intelligence, but it's the closest thing to approximate it for certain cognitive aspects.

ardit332• 7 years ago

I am going out of a limb and say that there is a chance that immigration is a factor as well.

Pre 1990, the immigration in Europe was very limited, and after the fall of Communism there have been large immigration movements within Europe, and now from outside it.

Two main reasons immigrants could cause IQ changes:

1. Genetic variation (you are actually not measuring the same population in the 80s, and the 2000's). eg, Denmark's minority/immigrant population has changed a lot since the 80s, going from 3% to almost 12% today. That could be affecting the score. You are not measuring just Danes, but 88% Danes, 8% Turkish, and 4% others.....

2. Lots of immigrants came either for economic reasons, or actually from WAR (Yugoslav wars in the 90s). Early child trauma, lack of nutrition, and the difficulties of restarting life somewhere could affect IQ scores, as we know environment, especially in early childhood could affect the score

If these measurements are coming from the Army, but they are not actually differentiating from first/second gen immigrants and original Danes, and then they are not really indicating that the local (original) population is having a decrease of IQ. Mostly than the newcomers have slightly lower IQs.

Since Denmark was mentioned in the article, here is a chart of their immigrant population change over time, and it is pretty drastic. From a homogeneous population to a more diverse one:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Emil_O_W_Kirkegaard/pub...

bsaul• 7 years ago

Wondered about that as well, but another article, linked in the original one, mentions the original study dismisses that hypothesis, since it happens between members of the same family :

https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores-falling-in-worrying-r...

"In the new study, the researchers observed IQ drops occurring within actual families, between brothers and sons – meaning the effect likely isn't due to shifting demographic factors as some have suggested, such as the dysgenic accumulation of disadvantageous genes across areas of society"

inscionent• 7 years ago

From the article: "However, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families. In other words, the issue is not that educated Norwegians are increasingly outnumbered by lower-IQ immigrants or the children of less-educated citizens. Even children born to high-IQ parents are slipping down the IQ ladder."

ardit332• 7 years ago

Interesting, thanks for the explanation

iq-thrower1• 7 years ago

One hypothesis which offers an explanation for this is the accumulation of deleterious mutations over generations, caused by a less harsh environment (e.g. medical care, technology) and advanced parental age, then accelerated by cultural changes [1].

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-017-0084-x

anon1m0us7• 7 years ago

"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. "

-- Alfred North Whitehead

What he is saying is that as civilization advances, the amount we need to think to survive decreases. We don't need high IQ's to survive anymore. While being smart is a selective criterion in a mate, other criteria will tend to overweight IQ when the amount of IQ needed to survive decreases.

Thus, IQ will decrease as civilization advances past a certain threshold. Perhaps we have passed that threshold.

User232• 7 years ago

Not really. He’s talking about the power of mathematical formalism. With a good formalism you just push symbols around following easily memorized rules without thinking about what they mean until you reach your final result.

anon1m0us7• 7 years ago

I disagree. I think the quote is more generally applicable than just mathematics. For example, we can now almost drive a car without thinking about it. We can order groceries just by saying, "hi alexa, please order me some groceries." You don't even have to think about where the car keys are or even how to drive.

helen___keller3• 7 years ago

Wow we got really different interpretations out of that quote. In the context of a math textbook, I take that quote to be emphasizing the importance of abstractions and symbols for reasoning effectively.

jvanderbot• 7 years ago

I don't know if "thinking" in the context of that quote requires high IQ. I think that a high IQ person does less conscious thinking and "just gets" complex problems easily.

I think Alfed Whitehead is supporting IQ rise as civilization advances, since baseline abstractions, problems solving techniques, and patterns are taught to us by our parents / community, and are accumulated over time. We have observed this to be true continuously.

An IQ test is timed and requires pattern recognition and selection for the most part. These things are exactly the type of "operations we perform without thinking" that general intelligence supports. Being good at finding and acting on general patterns without deep thought is extremely helpful and is probably (at least loosely) associated with high IQ.

mrob• 7 years ago

The further the complexity of civilization exceeds the population's ability to understand it, the more fragile it becomes. People absolutely should cultivate the habit of thinking, because thinking helps us survive disasters.

gregoryexe• 7 years ago

I would dare to add, "All according to plan"

s_r_n• 7 years ago

I wonder if the drop in IQ is related to the increase in wealth inequality in these past 50 years as well. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth)

More cohorts of people are entering the so-called "lower" classes and with this likely comes factors that affect mental aptitude such as decrease in quantity of healthy food consumed and unchallenging jobs.

This would agree with the study, which shows that families' IQs are getting lower with each generation.

microcolonel2• 7 years ago

decrease in quantity of healthy food consumed

Far as I can tell, this is the opposite of the trend, in the U.S. and Canada.

I wonder if the drop in IQ is related to the increase in wealth inequality in these past 50 years as well.

Not sure what mechanism you think would enable that. Thinking that the richest people in society are, in relative terms, more rich than you than before has no obvious effect on anything related to IQ. Average and median PPP wealth and income continue to grow.

PhasmaFelis• 7 years ago

Far as I can tell, this is the opposite of the trend, in the U.S. and Canada.

We've got an obesity epidemic. The average American is clearly not eating healthy. Maybe you misinterpreted the OP's statement? "Decrease in quantity of healthy food consumed" is awkward, but the intent is clear from context.

pkaye• 7 years ago

Is there large wealth inequality in Norway? That is one of the studies this article references.

tokai2• 7 years ago

No. But the relative inequality is increasing.[0]

0. https://www.tnp.no/norway/economy/poverty-income-inequality-...

cryptica• 7 years ago

I think it's because intelligence doesn't help when it comes to earning money. The luck and social component is so strong that there is very little incentive for people to be intelligent.

I also do think that wealth inequality correlates with lower average IQ. Rich people want to keep the majority of people dumb; breed them like cattle, hook them up to machines and milk them.

icedchai5• 7 years ago

Though it's not a guarantee, it certainly does help. I'd argue that intelligence is part of that "luck." You lucked out and won the genetic lottery.

skookumchuck10• 7 years ago

I think it's because intelligence doesn't help when it comes to earning money.

What evidence is there of that?

The luck and social component is so strong that there is very little incentive for people to be intelligent.

People tend to make their own luck. For example, if you sit home and watch TV 6 hours a day, you are highly unlikely to get lucky. If you're out swinging the bat, you're far more likely to get a hit.

vibrato6• 7 years ago

IQ is the best test we have to predict economic success.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2007-strenze.pdf

sunshinelackof2• 7 years ago

IQ, flawed as it may be as a measure, is sometimes touted as one of the best predictors of success in life. It's just conjecture, but maybe there's a feedback loop there.

Falling34• 7 years ago

Zip code is also a very good predictor of success in life. IQ could be a great predictor, but that still doesn't mean it's measuring what we think it's measuring.

sisu20193• 7 years ago

wealth inequality doesn't mean more poor people. I know it's a lot to ask nowadays but please be informed enough about economics to at least know the very basics if you are going to bring it up.

The idea that the food availabe to people is getting worse or less, in Western Europe of all places, is absolutely ridicolous. If anything the opposite is the case. As regards jobs we also have the opposite problem: too few simple jobs.

reallydude2• 7 years ago

wealth inequality doesn't mean more poor people.

Wealth, inequality, and poor are not well-defined. Using the typical measures: poor being near the poverty line for an area wealthy being access to capital (be it over 100x the poverty wealth line or double the average) and inequality, the gap in absolute terms from top to average. The pareto principle will always illustrate how greater inequality defines that there are more poor people, even when the poverty line changes. Abstract equations, notwithstanding.

The idea that the food availabe to people is getting worse or less

The amount of food, available, is changing. The most popular bananas (https://www.sciencealert.com/new-study-confirms-that-bananas...), beef, fish (http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/cetaceans...), are all in decline for differing reasons. So there's a little truth to it from a perspective. Yours isn't any more valid than theirs, so what did you add to the discussion?

Ironically, the beef industry may be kept on life support due to the ongoing climate change. New grazelands will appear from beneath the tundra across the world offering another few generations of opportunity. Buy your land in the US Dakotas for your grandchildren. It's a golden opportunity.

tastygreenapple• 7 years ago

Why would IQ be explained by wealth inequality? I thought the literature was pretty conclusive - there's a benefit to rising above poverty but beyond that wealth doesn't buy much IQ. Poverty rates are falling, I'm not sure we would expect a person whose nutritional needs are met to be more or less smart because someone else is fabulously wealthy.

tomcam• 7 years ago

We have about 75 years of testing on that, don’t we? Communist states such as China, USSR, and were a living laboratory. You could meet wide swathes of society with essentially the same income, but there was still the same kind of range in IQ you see in wealthier societies. I recall no studies showing different IQs vs. the free market (and hence more unequal) cohorts.

anoncake11• 7 years ago

Equality is not the only way in which the pseudo-communist Eastern Bloc differed from the West.

Circuits6• 7 years ago

How? If the majority of what determines an individuals IQ is genetic then how could it possibly have declined in the span of a few decades? Worst case scenario our predetermined genetic base line IQ is not improving as rapidly as it use to in the past.

However, I don't think there is strong enough evidence to jump to that conclusion. From what I understand a simple bad attitude can dramatically alter an individuals test score. No, I think the testing methodology and the scale of the testing would have to dramatically improve before a statement like: "People are getting dumber." can be taken seriously.

theklub• 7 years ago

Isn't this the plot of Idiocracy...stupid people have more kids?

Circuits6• 7 years ago

It is but how long does it take? I do not believe it is as simple as saying:

Person A has an IQ of 102 Person B has an IQ of 104, therefore; the child will have an IQ of 103. There is no specific IQ gene and so I would imagine that it would take just as long from an evolutionary standpoint to decrease the average IQ as it would for us to loose our tails and stop living in tree's. It certainly wouldn't happen in a matter of 30 years. At least, I don't think it would... I could be wrong but I don't believe I am.

lawlessone2• 7 years ago

CO2 maybe?

https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/24/graphic-the-re...

horatiocain• 7 years ago

There are tons of socioeconomic factors to consider, but I know a lot more fairly average IQ couples with 4 kids instead of two, and I know a lot more smart people who are either childfree or single than parents.

The ability to use birth control properly requires some intelligence.

The needs/career ambitions of a knowledge work career sometimes push aside the desire for a family.

Not trying to be down on people who have lots of kids! There's just tons of factors, some less obvious.

watwut4• 7 years ago

Is it possible that you associate things that correlate with rejection of children with iq? Like ambitions and career - low ambition don't necessary imply stupid. May be that wish for children tamper ambition and career.

Symmetry3• 7 years ago

How much variation is explained by genetics versus environment depends on the range of genetics and the range of environments you're looking at. In the US you've got the the full range of normal h sapiens diversity but all children get to drink pasteurized milk, eat iodized salt, use indoor plumbing, and go to school. If you look at a country like India where that isn't true you'll see a much more pronounced impact of shared environment on IQ.

And it isn't that IQ is all genetic, it's that it's half genetic, half something we don't know how to measure, and very little shared or family environment.

xyzzyz10• 7 years ago

Current thoughts in research are that there are two major factors, each responsible for roughly half of the decline.

First is that intelligent people tend to obtain more education, and more educated people (especially more educated women) tend to have fewer children on average. This has quite obvious effects from evolutionary perspective.

The second, less obvious, is that evolution works by selecting more fit variants of genes out of the pool, and the pool is made of existing variants and random mutations that happen all the time. These random mutations are typically negative for fitness, so the evolution selects against them. However, humans these days are operating under extremely relaxed selection regime, and gene variants which would have had significant negative impact on fitness in the past, while have the exact same effect today, are no longer as detrimental for reproductive purposes, which is basically the only thing evolution cares about.

For a good reference, see Woodley of Menie & Figueredo, 2013.

Circuits6• 7 years ago

Then why exactly was IQ ever on the rise in the first place? It sounds to me (based on the point your making) like the more advanced we get the lower the average IQ should be. Yet the article said prior to the 70's IQ was on the rise.

stOneskull5• 7 years ago

political correctness and thought police

dcre• 7 years ago

There's no such thing as an IQ rate.

_emacsomancer_• 7 years ago

Surely IQ increase/decrease over time would give an IQ rate.

hairytrog• 7 years ago

I wouldn't worry too much. There is a feedback loop. Modern industrial society has a few core components like welfare, addiction, extreme individualism, inequality, and short term thinking that do not select for high IQ and are not amenable to fostering high IQ - we end up with DINKs and idiocracy and people just don't have to be that smart to survive and operate. There's very little need today to plan ahead, to figure things out, to do new things. But the assumption is that modern society needs some high IQ to operate. At some point, IQ drops to the point where modern industrial society fractures, and selection forces reemerge to favor IQ friendly environments.

You should worry that about the possibility that recent tech has sidestepped the IQ feedback loop. That is, the tech is good enough without human input that it can sustain a low IQ society. In that case, it's downhill from here.

Interesting read: http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.com

comboy• 7 years ago

It seems to me that many people who have kids early (and often have many kids) are those who got them, even if not by an accident, then at least without thinking much about it. Those who try to learn as much as possible first, often decide that it overwhelms them. Planning ahead also seems to be correlated with better use of birth control.

I agree that there is some evolutionary negative feedback loop but we are doing are best to work against it because that seems like a right thing to do.

The feedback loop we haven't handled yet is automation which is increasing minimum IQ required to get a job.

paulpauper• 7 years ago

If IQs are dropping so much and society is getting dumber, why is there so much innovation and discovery lately in physics, math, and computer science? Look at arxiv. Every week there are tons of complicated physics and quant finance papers uploaded there. Just don't buy this narrative, sorry.

This is why these headlines are somewhat misleading. Just because mean IQs are falling does not mean that intellectual output must fall, so it's possible to have simultaneously lower mean IQs but more output if for example low-IQ populations have a higher fertility rate but otherwise tend to not procreate with high-IQ populations due to assortative mating. The good news is mating patterns are not random. People generally seek out partners of equal intelligence.

The idea of a 'global iq' is somewhat fallacious. To take this fallacy to its logical extreme, imagine including house pets and other animals as part of such a score. suddenly, there should be no technology at all given that such a mean would be probably 50 or so. Rather, we should be looking at IQ by quantity for each 10-20 point interval of iq above 100, not by proportion.

sparky_z• 7 years ago

The people producing those innovations and discoveries don't represent a random sample of the population as a whole.

lostmymind66• 7 years ago

It's dropping, not dropped completely. It could take decades before we see a drop in intellectual pursuits as a result in a drop of IQ rates.

mtnGoat• 7 years ago

I feel like IQ testing is kind of junk science anyways. Depending on which questions I get, my mood, mental sharpness on that say and such, Ive scored in the top couple percentile a few times, but i don't think its indicative of anything aside from i'm good at taking that kind of test.

colordrops• 7 years ago

Maybe for an individual, but do large cohorts have "moods"? Even if IQ tests only a narrow aspect of human intelligence, it's still something.

screye• 7 years ago

Is it possible that the IQ decline has to do with a reduction in sampling bias?

In previous decades the group of people taking IQ tests might have belonged to a resource rich group.

Now that IQ tests are more commonplace, we might finally be getting more signal from the below median side of the bell curve.

The article didn't mention if these biases were accounted for, and it is a critical detail to leave out.

xyzzyz10• 7 years ago

Unlikely. We’ve had very good data from conscription registers, especially in the Nordics.

nwah12• 7 years ago

Only for men, though. And in the case of Sweden, specifically, IQ and fertility were positively correlated for men who were born in the postwar period.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.035...

edgineer• 7 years ago

The last time I saw an article of this nature, a commenter pointed out that conscripts may be incentived to score lower on these tests. Isn't it true that many people simply don't care to score highly on them?

This hypothesis seems reasonable to me, and yet I don't see any mention of it in the 2018 study [0] although they do address concerns about the conscript data in other respects.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf

onesmallcoin• 7 years ago

IQ tests just seem to be a scale of how quickly one can get boerd of something, and stop trying.

nwah12• 7 years ago

Selection against intelligence should definitely not be ruled out, although there are various environmental issues that could be solved.

Female obesity is known to lead to preganancy complications which cause cognitive deficits.

Obesity in general is known to cause systemic inflammation which affects cognition and speeds up dementia.

The opioid crisis and various other types of drug abuse lead to brain damage.

Various nutritional deficiencies could play a role. Historically, iodine deficiency caused the condition of cretinism, but sub-clinical deficiencies can lead to more subtle effects.

Sleep deprivation is known to cause cognitive deficits, and electronic lights and jobs with nocturnal schedules are more common now. Light pollution and spending too much time indoors during the day throws off our circadian rhythms.

We still have various types of neurotoxins plaguing our environments. More people are living in urban environments now, which causes greater exposure to automobile exhaust. Coal plants are still spewing neurotoxins. Lead pipes are still common in many cities.

High indoor CO2, from poor ventilation, is known to cause cognitive deficits.

013a• 7 years ago

The most interesting part is that it hasn't affected the US (yet). The US is probably the leader among developed nations in bad environmentalism, blue screens, bad sleep, opioid addiction, etc... so unless there's a reporting issue in the US, that kind of rules out a lot of those conclusions.

lopmotr2• 7 years ago

Perhaps because the US imports a lot of its intelligence and is the number one preferred destination for people wanting to be the most successful?

j0057• 7 years ago

Opioids, obesity and lead pipes are not common in Europe.

pixl973• 7 years ago

While still far behind the US, obesity has dramatically increased in Europe, on average affecting 25% of the population.

rockinghigh2• 7 years ago

The causal link between obesity and low IQ does not seem to be through systemic inflammation. The research I came across suggests that people with lower IQ are more likely to become obese.

We observed no evidence that obesity contributed to a decline in IQ, even among obese individuals who displayed evidence of the metabolic syndrome and/or elevated systemic inflammation.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3813310/

Overall there was an inverse FIQ/obesity association, except in pre-school children. However, after adjusting for educational attainment, FIQ/obesity association was not significantly different. A lower FIQ in childhood was associated with obesity in later adulthood perhaps with educational level mediating the persistence of obesity in later life.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19780990

p_man• 7 years ago

One reason could be that less intelligent people on average get more kids. Especially here in Norway where you get generous support from the government for child care. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781845409852

mcbuilder• 7 years ago

That's basically the main premise of the flawed, yet hilarious, movie Idiocracy.

cwkoss• 7 years ago

If anyone hasn't seen this movie, I highly encourage watching at least the intro, it's one of the best movie expositions ever IMO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unoMMru4-c0

gridlockd• 7 years ago

My hypothesis:

Sitting at a desk all day and getting no exercise makes you dumber and that's exactly where the trend is up:

https://www.rba.gov.au/speeches/2016/images/sp-so-2016-09-21...

hansflying• 7 years ago

Socialist countries are responsible for this. Smart people work a lot, have no children and pay HUGE taxes, but dump people stay at home and make a lot of children + receive money from Government. Recipe for disaster.

Every socialist Country will fail earlier or later, just like USSR did.

nikanj2• 7 years ago

Yeah, that's why countries like Sweden and Finland are at the very bottom of all the PISA rankings /s

lohszvu• 7 years ago

Rich people are choosing to not have children. Poor people have a lot of children. Mass immigration of less-educated populations.

claudiulodro• 7 years ago

One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term). Alternatively, widening immigration might be bringing less-intelligent newcomers to societies with otherwise higher IQs.
However, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families. In other words, the issue is not that educated Norwegians are increasingly outnumbered by lower-IQ immigrants or the children of less-educated citizens. Even children born to high-IQ parents are slipping down the IQ ladder.

bhouston• 7 years ago

That suggests environmental chemical pollution or something cultural like cellphones addiction or too much Netflix or 4G radiation is dangerous. It will be interesting to see what it ends up being.

mattnewport3• 7 years ago

Even children born to high-IQ parents are slipping down the IQ ladder.

It is expected that the children of high IQ parents have lower IQs than their parents (and that children of low IQ parents have higher IQs than their parents). That is just regression to the mean. How are they separating this from that effect?

SubiculumCode• 7 years ago

While genetics does play a role in intelligence, culture, context, as well as experiencing adversity that alters gene expression during development, and sometimes inherited over several generations...all these have enormous impacts on intelligence that do not imply that we are losing from the population the genes required to maintain high intelligence..

781• 7 years ago

There is a documentary about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

sidusknight• 7 years ago

Not sure about that, aren't immigrants (on average) more educated than the native population?

Ibethewalrus• 7 years ago

I remember reading that a large percentage of US companies are founded by immigrants. About 40-50%? Can’t recall sources , but it was a much larger number than what I thought.

barry-cotter• 7 years ago

Varies by country. The US has huge amounts of unselected immigration and makes no real effort to enforce its immigration laws so you get loads of Mexicans and before them Irish and Italians. All of those populations were negatively selected; the average immigrant to the US from those countries was less educated than the average for their country during the period of greatest immigration. Countries with selective or skills based immigration like Australia or Canada, with their points systems have immigrant populations that are a lot more educated than the native population or the average for the source countries.

molticrystal• 7 years ago

Even children born to high-IQ parents are slipping down the IQ ladder.

In part, this is regression to the mean. They do not explicitly mention this in the article.[0]

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=IQ+regression+to+the+mean&ie...

ncmncm5• 7 years ago

This is the comment that suggests, speciously, that many of the other comments demonstrate the process presented in the article.

The key omission from the article was any hint of a number. Without numbers there is no way to evaluate the claim. Is the purported decline within the range of noise of the measurements?

The lack of numbers is usually a red flag indicating that the author does not want readers evaluating his claims for themselves.

lopmotr2• 7 years ago

While in this case, I've heard it before and it seems to come from actual scientists, so it's probably not just a journalist's imagination. But in general, I agree that it's frustrating to read articles about trends which don't show numbers, particularly graphs, making it difficult to judge. There are so many articles making scary claims like "X has dropped to half what it was a decade ago!" but it turns out that X fluctuates wildly anyway and the recession or whatever had a massive temporary effect on it.

That said, my 2c is that high IQ causes people to become professionals and being a professional reduces the number of children they have. From my personal observations, poor people seem to have children as their purpose in life while professionals have other purposes and don't feel as much need for children.

Contrast this to most of the last couple of millennia where the highest status men had lots of children to multiple mothers, and famines were common, which would wipe out the poorest people. The poorest people would have included those least able to climb the class hierarchy by being merchants or intelligently winning the games of politics. There also wasn't social welfare to enable the poorest people to support as many children as they want. It sounds like a breeding ground for intelligence.

acd• 7 years ago

Maybe smart phones are making the users so smart themselves?

Maps replacing spatial awareness in the brain. In other word if you drive by GPS you do not have to remember the way, the gps device remembers. Social media replacing real social interactions Automatic translation replacing language abilities We are also increasingly disconnecting from the real world senses through devices.

xvector• 7 years ago

One day we'll be one with our devices. True long-term evolution for humanity involves us taking the reins.

FabHK3• 7 years ago

IQ rates? I think journalist writing quotient rates are dropping, too.

fiftyfifty• 7 years ago

Intelligence has been strongly linked with physical fitness, specifically cardiovascular fitness. Is it any surprise as humans have become less active that our intelligence has suffered as well?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/quilted-science/2009...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2785721/

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/regular-exercise-changes...

toasterlovin• 7 years ago

Correlation does not allow you to draw conclusions about causation.

And there are other plausible explanations. Intelligence is highly heritable and negatively correlated with fertility. Also, there has been an overall increase in measured intelligence since IQ tests were first invented. Nobody really knows why. But this could be a reversal of that trend. And, importantly, people have been getting more sedentary during the entire extent of the increase. So it would be hard to square that with the hypothesis that this recent decrease being caused by less activity.

swsieber• 7 years ago

I dont thin the top parent actually drew a conclusion. I read it as "These two things are highly correlated. Given that one went down, should we be surprised that the other wnet down?"

Given that there was no concerted effort to move either of them, my answer is "of course not! They are correlated"

thaumasiotes• 7 years ago

Intelligence is highly heritable and negatively correlated with fertility.

More accurately, intelligence is negatively correlated with fertility in women in the Western world. The correlation is still positive for men.

Generally it's believed that the negative effect on fertility is due to intelligent women getting more education, rather being a direct negative effect of intelligence.

michaelmcmillan4• 7 years ago

How do you know that the causality is flowing in that direction and not the other way? It could also be that we are getting physically worse because our IQ is declining.

kazinator3• 7 years ago

That's along the lines of hypotheses like lung cancer being the common cause behind smoking and yellowed fingertips.

delecti2• 7 years ago

Or perhaps even more likely, that both are caused by things like good nutrition.

StillBored• 7 years ago

Or even that there is a 3rd confounding factor.. say amount of sleep...

stOneskull5• 7 years ago

fear is really bad for the mind. same with suppressing individuality for 'the team' and its 'approved' viewpoints. learning the right things to say, fearing thought police, etc, to the detriment of unique expression and problem-solving.

petercooper• 7 years ago

Since the mean IQ is fixed at 100 by definition, how does this work?

xorand• 7 years ago

Happy ones those who don't notice. Look at what passes as interesting in the media.

Seriously now, partial reason probably is that life quality does not correlate with intelligence in the West. Maybe here there are some people reading this, who could confirm or disagree with the following. Coming from the East, one of my first persistent impressions was puzzlement when faced with barely human intelligence in a rather wealthy aspect.

drilldrive• 7 years ago

But don’t rush to celebrate American exceptionalism: If IQs are dropping in other advanced countries but not here, maybe that means we’re not really an advanced country (too much poverty, too little social support).

I couldn't help but laugh at this. Is the author trying to spin the USA as second- or third-world? We are the top global economy!

computerex2• 7 years ago

Top global economy indeed! With people having to choose between life saving medicine, food and rent. /s

America is a 3rd world nation in many aspects.

Wheaties4662• 7 years ago

In what aspects? I can't think of any that I would want to compare to a third world country.

chillacy• 7 years ago

This is why I find it so funny when people point to GDP or the stock market as evidence that it's all going fine. Most people don't own significant amounts of stock or see their wages grow as much as the already economically successful.

ncmncm5• 7 years ago

US infant mortality rate exceeds that of numerous "third-world" countries. Recently we were just ahead of Belarus, but they now have pulled ahead, well out of reach.

The US matches third-world countries in numerous other indicators, and is declining in most of them. This is not accidental; it is a direct consequence of choices made by those in power.

free652• 7 years ago

I recall that it's hard to compare infant mortality due to reporting differences.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/3/editorial-th...

crispinb2• 7 years ago

The US on a large range of measures has never quite joined the ranks of the mainstream West. It has the largest GDP, sure, but with inequality rates approaching 3rd world levels, that wealth isn't sufficiently distributed to bring its human development on many measures up to that of other nations. It's very obvious to W. Europeans, Canadians & Australasians who spend much time in the US that life is harder and poorer and less socially mobile for vast swathes of the population.

kazinator3• 7 years ago

It seems obvious to me that the proliferation of mobile devices is going to make people dumber.

People offload to these things tasks that were previously given to the brain.

Some of those tasks were mundane; yet, even mundane tasks exercise the brain better than no tasks.

The device substitutes for memory, both short term and long term. Why try to remember something? Snap an image, stupid! Lost? Doh, turn on GPS, crack open Maps. Why bother knowing anything by heart? The Wikipedia has your back; you can instantly access a detailed article featuring more than you'd ever want to know on almost any topic in any knowledge area. Skimming through text to find something? Just use search! Alphabetically searching through a paper dictionary? You're kidding, right? Paper magazine? Holy crap, why: you can't click on the table of contents. You have to read a number, then hold it in your head while finding a page that has the same number in the corner! Why would you do that to yourself?

Devices can easily be turned into tools to boost cognition; that's just not fun though, and not how most people use them. Some games are good for certain cognitive skills. There are applications for learning. Mobile devices are great for foreign language learning: you can train your vocabulary, or review audio-visual materials, anywhere.

atdt• 7 years ago

Why stop there? Maybe the decline started with the invention of writing. Here's Socrates:

But when it came to writing Theuth said, 'Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories; my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom.' But the king answered and said, 'O man full of arts, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them. And so it is that you, by reasons of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.'

(from Phaedrus)

kazinator3• 7 years ago

But did the king have data showing that IQ's are dropping alongside the adoption of reading and writing?

Being able to scribble memos to yourself probably does bring neglect to memorization; if you do nothing else with your literacy than replace your short and long term memory with writing, it's possible that your memory will stagnate.

When we introduce literacy, people read a lot more than they write, and they remember a lot of what they read. That boosts their memory and learning, even if writing down notes is otherwise detrimental.

In the modern age, you don't have to remember what you read, just the search engine keyword or piece of URL to find it again (and for the latter, there are bookmarks). Basically it's down to just remembering that you read something.

delecti2• 7 years ago

Lots of things that are obvious are wrong. You'd have to show a) we're getting worse at things that we've started offloading to phones (maybe probably true? but demonstrating causation would still be difficult), and if true, b) that IQ tests measure those same things.

Unless you show both of those you haven't shown that dropping IQ rates are related to the proliferation of mobile devices.

hinkley• 7 years ago

There was video here recently linking rising test scores to increases in prevalence of abstract thinking.

Having the answers to "everything" at your fingertips may be blunting that for us.

zmmmmm• 7 years ago

Since the drop that they are talking about began in 1975, that would not seem like a good fit as an explanation.

dxbydt• 7 years ago

proliferation of mobile devices makes people dumber

In the very 1st week of my PhD studies, we had a host of eminent researchers advising us on how to succeed in graduate studies. One of those professors put up a slide that had a giant 1-line “Don’t use smartphones”

The entire audience - all 30 fresh PhD students, simply took a picture of that slide with their smartphone, just as they did the previous slide & the next one & so on. Not even a hint of irony.

That’s when I thought - that ship has sailed.

arthev• 7 years ago

Intelligence may have been dropping since Victorian times: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961...

usgroup• 7 years ago

I’m quietly hoping that at some point folks will stop trying to make The world compatible with the idea of IQ and do more of the converse instead...

crispinb2• 7 years ago

It's fascinating to see how many people jump apparently with little pause feet-first with their pet theories, about which they seem to have no doubt. And this is on HN, which is supposed to be a bastion of rationality.

Folks, it's OK to be uncertain. This is fairly recent research, the world is complex, and we don't know everything.

Lanz• 7 years ago

IQ is known to be genetic. Natural selection has been interfered with by universal healthcare and social programs in many countries, where intelligence and educational attainment have become negative predictors of reproductive success, especially for women. The findings of this study should not be unexpected.

8bitsrule• 7 years ago

I'd look hard at the tests first. Apart from the question of validity of the measures: it's possible that the standardized tests are not keeping up with the changing ways we interact with the environment.

E.g., how many kids play with blocks these days? Building model skyscrapers, log cabins, model railroads? Outdoor games? -Unstructured- play time?

Quite a bit different from Minecraft, physically and mentally.

Or, possibly the testmakers are modifying the tests, but the new numbers are not readily comparable to the old ones.

frabbit• 7 years ago

The title is proof of its own assertion: rates are changes with respect to time units.

stinkbreathmint• 7 years ago

Can it perhaps be that people conducting such studies have reduced IQs overtime so the structure of the study has lost its accuracy? I mean getting a college degree is a lot easier than it used to be.

greendestiny_re• 7 years ago

I recently managed to nudge my German cousin into reading. Having been raised on consoles and Spongebob, he never enjoyed the written word and was more of a thrillseeker, getting into trouble with a gang of his friends that landed him in custody for a couple months. I started talking to him about Goethe's "Faust", which I was reading at the time, and suggested he take it up. He told me his probation officer nearly fell off her chair when he said he was reading "Faust"; seasoned academics shy away from it.

Yesterday he said he read through 2 GoT books over the course of a weekend and asked me if reading raises IQ. I cited that famous "Freakonomics" chapter that correlates having books with high IQ but can't define a causal link between the two. I told him reading allows us to see patterns in the world around us, which is what IQ testing tests for, therefore if he can detect patterns through reading that apply to the real world he'll be increasing his IQ by reading.

pergadad• 7 years ago

While the link to is might not be clear, it certainly has been shown to improve empathy, which in itself is an important ability for success in life. Alos of course knowledge, awareness of the world, expressiveness/language skills/vocabulary, ...

joshsyn• 7 years ago

A great time to be a capitalist.

tuberelay• 7 years ago

Premature infants have >10 IQ points drop, and as hospitals reduce their threshold of viability to 24 or 23 weeks, these infants often have really significant cognitive defects. Here in NZ around 1/3 of these infants will fail the end of year exams at age 15, vs 10% of the non-premature population. Fortunately this isn't "negative eugenics" it isn't a change in genes which cause this.

lunias• 7 years ago

I realize that IQ is normalized, but have the tests themselves evolved to better capture what it is that makes us "intelligent" in modern society?

Not to say that the usual pattern recognition type test is no longer valid, but perhaps it is a lesser predictor of functional intelligence now that computers have shouldered a large amount of the cognitive burden traditionally placed on human brains?

I believe that there could be a lessening biological imperative to be "intelligent" as more and more is provided to us rather than created / taken by us. We are more likely to be controlled today (of our own volition) than to seek out ways to control that which we currently do not.

"Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." - Thomas Gray (repurposed as a slogan for culture in 2019 and beyond)

IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries

Related Stories