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.
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.
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.
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.
see how you can make steady daily passive incomes on virta stock trading without risking your money. visit the website here http://www.virtatrade.com/index.php for more detail
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.
> 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.
Since 1985 women can volunteer, mandatory conscription for women was introduced in 2015. So at least historical data is definitely skewed. Currently, there are 13% women in the Norwegian army... https://forsvaret.no/aarsrapport/statistikk/personell
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.
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?
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...
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.
Yeah, the legions of academics are definitely the reason the world is going to go to shit because of climate change. I'm sure they're also the ones who voted Trump into power. I bet they have very few good ideas about how to reduce corruption in government.
The reason climate change is such a difficult political problem to handle is that it requires significant upfront cost but the resulting benefits are difficult to forecast and measure. As a society, we've encountered this time and time again over the past century.
Think back to the whole 'acid rain' theme some of us lived through growing up. The phenomenon was discovered in 1972, but it took over 20 years before legislation with teeth was actually implemented, and 30 years before significant reductions were measured. And this was on a phenomenon with relatively few point sources responsible for a large portion of emissions, something fairly easy to regulate.
There's no questioning the science behind climate change, IMHO, but the lack of definitive, practical action is due far more to an inherently myopic political process. Politicians have very limited incentive to look at any project with benefits beyond the date of their next re-election.
You can blame it on Trump and his supporters, if it makes you feel better, but I'm hard-pressed to identify a democratic government which actually implemented policies which result in any significant real, measurable impacts on climate change. Democratic leaders are rewarded for appearing to take action, far more than would be if they actually did something.
You're making this about republicans vs democrats. No idea why. My whole point is that politicians on both sides of the aisle are terrible and one of the reasons we have terrible politicians is because the general populace doesn't vote for them for the right reasons. Ad campaigns shouldn't be as effective as the are. Corruption is easily seen, it should be punished by the voters. The vast majority of the voting public is willfully ignorant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
SAT tests are rooted in eugenics theory. IQ testing, despite the original developer warning of incorrect application, was weaponized in that direction.
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?
We don't even know if ethnicity and IQ are the common factors here. I have a hunch is it's far more weighted on culture than genetics but I don't have any evidence to back that up.
Read the research. Read the links. Study sociology. When you invent a metric and model, you imbue it with bias.
“Objective” is something that has been up for debate since the dawn of epistemology. It hasn’t been solved yet. It’s also worth understanding the Demarcation Problem.
Well because it confuses causation and correlation in addition to being a fertile ground for confirmation bias. Not to mention the rich history of "last time".
Even if group X is lower it telks you nothing about Y and allows the jump to justification for travesties like eugenics if it is "clearly their genes", wiping out culture and engaging in mass child theft "if it is their culture" and whatever other sick and twisted rationalizations occur.
Except oops - it was comparing subsistence farmers in a disease ridden area to vaccinated and well fed and educated upper middle class! Or the tests are based upon preconceived notions themselves and they did worse because the "neutral" puzzles assumed left to right as associated with temporal flow.
>Well because it confuses causation and correlation in addition to being a fertile ground for confirmation bias
How do you already know this a priori? We know intelligence is strongly heritable, there's no reason to prematurely conclude that there are no variations among ethnicity tied to genes.
>Even if group X is lower it telks you nothing about Y and allows the jump to justification for travesties like eugenics
Nonsense. Slippery slope fallacy. Acknowledging that people have different levels of intelligence does not imply that we should deny them rights to life. But it would, for example, potentially explain certain discrepancies in socioeconomic outcome, which is critical when considering efficient allocation of resources to combat inequities.
>Except oops - it was comparing subsistence farmers in a disease ridden area to vaccinated and well fed and educated upper middle class
You seem to imply that all IQ studies are and will be poorly constructed. This does not have to be the case.
There is an unfounded presumptive bias in society currently that all people are born with identical potential IQ and that all discrepancies arise from socioeconomics. Moreover, we've been strongly conditioned not to question this assumption, lest we be shamed with accusations of racism. But this is a fundamentally unproven assumption and denying evidence to the contrary will likely lead to worse outcomes for society.
They get called racist because they /are/ racist. They don't spend their time looking at genes and interactions but the cosmetics and tautological assumptions that potential = outcome. I have never seen them find intelligence in a place that didn't align with their prejudices.
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?
I have yet to be convinced that comparisons of IQ between cohorts have as much practical utility as rockets or pesticides (on the contrary, the sole utility of intergenerational comparisons of IQ tests seems to be in highlighting the limitations of IQ as an objective measure of intellectual capacity...)
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.
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).
me too, and I would bet one reason is making childrearing incredibly expensive and prone to problems, so intelligent people will avoid the ordeal whole the stupid ones have children because they perceive that as status-earning, if not a way to get welfare $.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with it, because in Japan kids generally have far less time to be kids due to the rigorous school system and testing focus. That in turn leads to Japan's increased rate of suicide among the youth.
It's frowned upon, and a federal law isn't going to stop local cops from hassling parents. Remember, cops don't actually have to follow or enforce the laws, they can basically do what they want, and if you don't like it, your only recourse is to sue.
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.
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.
Parents are routinely investigated or get police contact because of this. Of course, being America, it varies a lot from place to place (you probably won't have a problem if you're in an extremely rural place and your kids are playing around in the 40 acres that is your backyard, but in a conservative suburban subdivision you certainly can have CPS investigate just for letting your kids play in your back yard).
As for "always", things were definitely nothing like this when I grew up in the 80s. This isn't the same country I grew up in.
The article you cited says: "The police officer left with a curt nod and without filing a report." And "agree[d] that this was a little ridiculous." It was officially marked a "non-event".
The whole point of the story is that it's not illegal. An inappropriately nosy neighbor caused a stir, and that sucks. But there's no reason to escalate and downward spiral the situation by countering with factually incorrect claims.
It's a record of a "non-event." It's precedent of an accusation against the mother being illegitimate, not a black mark against her. Though I'm sure she obviously wishes the incident had never happened.
Either way, though, it's still not in support of calling it "illegal" to have your kids playing outside unsupervised.
I agree with you that this isn't the same country you grew up in. I'm only a decade behind you, and the country is certainly not the same country that I grew up in either!
The common nostalgic "this isn't the same country I grew up in" topic just gets brought up all of the time, I'm guessing because it garners a lot of clicks from us who miss our naive childhoods but I just don't see it being as illegal as you do.
I can google around for all sorts of "florida man" stories. Just because I can find some very weird and newsworthy stories, doesn't mean that everything and everywhere is like that. I can probably live in Florida and have a normal life, and raise my children however I would like.
There was a case in Maryland about this a few years ago that blew up into a big deal [1]
> Back in December, Rafi and Dvora made national headlines when police picked them up as they walked home from a local park. The children’s parents, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, subscribe to the philosophy of “free-range” parenting, which holds that children develop self-reliance by exploring their neighborhoods or riding public transportation on their own, if their parents judge them ready. [...] After the first incident, Montgomery County Child Protective Services investigated and found the senior Meitivs responsible for “unsubstantiated neglect.”
> A few states have laws stipulating the minimum age when a child can be left home alone. In Illinois it is 14, in Maryland, eight, and in Oregon, 10. Maryland’s law further stipulates that a young child left in the care of a person under 13 is “unattended.” Many more states offer home-alone guidelines, which vary as widely as the laws do (age six in Kansas, age 12 in Mississippi). [...] In most cases, whether such home-alone rules extend to outdoor spaces is something lawyers could argue either way.
"Unsubstantiated neglect" seems to mean here "we don't have enough information to come to a conclusion, further investigation is required."
I would also add that CPS investigations are holistic, and look at the totality of the children's care. It is possible for them to investigate something innocuous but discover other problems.
Agreed, I think the relevance of the example is that in some parts of America, unsupervised children are to be investigated, not left to their own devices as unsuspicious.
Parent of my original comment states "There has always been unsupervised children everywhere that I have lived," and that's something that's changing in America as families don't want to deal with the possible legal consequences that may arise.
But like, I can send 6 year old to store and I am 100% sure there will be no investigation. Neither holistic nor non-holistic. Just me and no problem at all. No question about anything. No stress no meetings no questions no knocking on the door when I just want to chill and watch TV.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The paper doesn't say IQ doesn't correlate to socioeconomic success, it just notes that IQ tests may be biased by socioeconomic status. But even within this study you could look at the lowest economic group, and the kids that have better genetic markers go to college at ~5x the rate of kids in the same socioeconomic group with poor markers. It also doesn't say much about access to college today for lower socioeconomic groups because it is entirely looking backwards at people born between 1905(!!) and 1964. It is not surprising that the lowest quintile is much less likely to have attended college. In 1940, the census bureau estimate is less the 5% of Americans had a bachelor's degree or higher, so it would be expected that the educated 5% was very biased towards the upper class.
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.
- 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.
Are you suggesting that genetics have nothing to do with Intelligence? AFAIK it isn't much but I find it hard to believe that it's nothing. Our genes make us smarter than other animals, why shouldn't they make a difference between humans?
Also I just listed all possibilities that came to my mind, whether I think they're likely or not.
I believe that was sarcasm, mocking that kind of very vocal people who like to argue that intelligence, gender and race are purely a social construct and have no physical foundation. Extreme offense is usually taken when someone attempts to correlate intelligence with race.
But if you don't know that, intelligence being correlated with ethnicity is a plausible hypothesis. We shouldn't take offense when someone who doesn't know the data tries to correlate intelligence ethnicity purely because they are interested in biology. Which is of course probably not the motivation of most people who claim there's a correlation.
Very few people argue that intelligence is a "social construct", though the position taken by scientists and philosophers in the area is that race and gender are "social constructs"; that doesn't make them not real, though - but it does mean they're only about as real as money. A kind of objectivity obtained through many subjectivities.
If genetics played a roll in intelligence don't you think we'd see some intellectual differences between groups of genetically similar people(i.e. races), like we do with physical characteristics? Some races of people are taller than others on average, and some races are more resistant to certain diseases. Obviously we don't see differences like this when it comes to cognitive ability though.
Different ethnicities have different physical characteristics because they are adapted to different environments. Being able to efficiently use sunlight is useful in high altitudes, being able to tolerate heat and intensive sunlight is useful near the equator. Intelligence is useful everywhere.
Maybe the person you're replying to was thinking of the philosophical metaphysical concept of materialism, i.e. opposed to idealism. But your usage seems correct to me, it's that the word has multiple meanings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If it fell 1 point per 10 years, but used to grow 3 points, that is a much stronger change than the bare number suggests. (My numbers are made up and unsourced)
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.
>"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.
the citizens in 1984 would have a lower IQ because of what they're allowed to think. and i see groups, whether they're left, right, whatever, like mirrors, each thinking their group is the 'good guys' and they maintain the party line even if it isn't their own thought. that cognitive dissonance leads to other IQ-lowering factors like medications and violence.
IQ is a psychometric measurement and the best ones are "culture independent" like a bunch of matrix rotations or memorizing sequences of numbers. You can have a high IQ and still live in a political bubble (actually most of us probably do, regardless of IQ)
I thought it was sufficiently common knowledge that Africa and the parts of Eurasia that produce refugees have lower average IQs than the parts of the world that receive refugees: https://brainstats.com/average-iq-by-country.html
The linked article addresses the shortcomings of this explanation:
> 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.
> Some environmental factor — or collection of factors — is causing a drop in the IQ scores of parents and their own children, and older kids and their younger siblings. One leading explanation is that the rise of lower-skill service jobs has made work less intellectually demanding, leaving IQs to atrophy as people flex their brains less.
>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:
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
This resonates with me, and I want to get on board.
But was leisure so much more creative with television and work rather than Netflix and work?
I've had some conversations recently about how [my generation and socioeconomic group] would go outside more often as children because we only really had an hour or two of cartoons in the morning before the telemarketing-disguised-as-content started, but I'm also cautious about drawing too many conclusions because (purely based on my own experiences) I feel like people will search for an opportunity to explore or be creative if the environment is at all conducive to it.
See: a lot of our early experiences with computers. Games (consumption) existed, but that didn't stop us wanting to modify them or explore how they worked.
Just do it. The level of entry is quite low, and depending on what you chose to do, it doesn't really have to cost anything but time. The only downside I've noticed is that other people won't understand why the hell you're doing it, and they'll look at you like you're an idiot when you explain you haven't watched movie X or TV show Y.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
IQ is normalized so that the average is 100. Since the bias has to balance between the people who read high and the people who read low, population-level averages turn out OK so long as they are over a large enough population so that the high readers and low readers are both present.
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...
"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.
True enough, however through my mistakes we have established that all self righteous theorizing should take into account that the data is pre-smartphone ;)
They read it well enough to generate a testable hypothesis about the underlying data. He or she should be commended, not criticized.
Even with the resulting edit there appears to be, at least to me, a clear need for additional investigation utilizing non-Norwegian conscription data before the original research question can be validated.
> 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
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.
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:
"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.
idk about Norway, but in my country most army conscripts are immigrants from the third world. So if that's what they use to measure IQ, it's normal that it's dropping.
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.
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).
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.
538 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 498 ms ] threadIt'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.
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.
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-...
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6674
[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/5/E727
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/16/natural-sele...
see how you can make steady daily passive incomes on virta stock trading without risking your money. visit the website here http://www.virtatrade.com/index.php for more detail
> 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
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.
For evidence of the irrationality of intelligent people, I proffer the example of every pointless university faculty departmental meeting, ever.
Think back to the whole 'acid rain' theme some of us lived through growing up. The phenomenon was discovered in 1972, but it took over 20 years before legislation with teeth was actually implemented, and 30 years before significant reductions were measured. And this was on a phenomenon with relatively few point sources responsible for a large portion of emissions, something fairly easy to regulate.
There's no questioning the science behind climate change, IMHO, but the lack of definitive, practical action is due far more to an inherently myopic political process. Politicians have very limited incentive to look at any project with benefits beyond the date of their next re-election.
You can blame it on Trump and his supporters, if it makes you feel better, but I'm hard-pressed to identify a democratic government which actually implemented policies which result in any significant real, measurable impacts on climate change. Democratic leaders are rewarded for appearing to take action, far more than would be if they actually did something.
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.
>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.
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
“Objective” is something that has been up for debate since the dawn of epistemology. It hasn’t been solved yet. It’s also worth understanding the Demarcation Problem.
But still a danger and probably the core of the antipathy towards a closer look at data about intelligence.
Even if group X is lower it telks you nothing about Y and allows the jump to justification for travesties like eugenics if it is "clearly their genes", wiping out culture and engaging in mass child theft "if it is their culture" and whatever other sick and twisted rationalizations occur.
Except oops - it was comparing subsistence farmers in a disease ridden area to vaccinated and well fed and educated upper middle class! Or the tests are based upon preconceived notions themselves and they did worse because the "neutral" puzzles assumed left to right as associated with temporal flow.
How do you already know this a priori? We know intelligence is strongly heritable, there's no reason to prematurely conclude that there are no variations among ethnicity tied to genes.
>Even if group X is lower it telks you nothing about Y and allows the jump to justification for travesties like eugenics
Nonsense. Slippery slope fallacy. Acknowledging that people have different levels of intelligence does not imply that we should deny them rights to life. But it would, for example, potentially explain certain discrepancies in socioeconomic outcome, which is critical when considering efficient allocation of resources to combat inequities.
>Except oops - it was comparing subsistence farmers in a disease ridden area to vaccinated and well fed and educated upper middle class
You seem to imply that all IQ studies are and will be poorly constructed. This does not have to be the case.
There is an unfounded presumptive bias in society currently that all people are born with identical potential IQ and that all discrepancies arise from socioeconomics. Moreover, we've been strongly conditioned not to question this assumption, lest we be shamed with accusations of racism. But this is a fundamentally unproven assumption and denying evidence to the contrary will likely lead to worse outcomes for society.
Look at the complete lack of a shitstorm over actual science - MAO-A should be by all rights far more controversial given the areas delved in. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A
That should help bury and put to rest the persecution complex.
Medicalization.
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
Interesting topic, in any case.
That kind of thing is illegal in America.
In America, unsupervised time outdoors is illegal in many states.
Parents are routinely investigated or get police contact because of this. Of course, being America, it varies a lot from place to place (you probably won't have a problem if you're in an extremely rural place and your kids are playing around in the 40 acres that is your backyard, but in a conservative suburban subdivision you certainly can have CPS investigate just for letting your kids play in your back yard).
As for "always", things were definitely nothing like this when I grew up in the 80s. This isn't the same country I grew up in.
The whole point of the story is that it's not illegal. An inappropriately nosy neighbor caused a stir, and that sucks. But there's no reason to escalate and downward spiral the situation by countering with factually incorrect claims.
Either way, though, it's still not in support of calling it "illegal" to have your kids playing outside unsupervised.
The common nostalgic "this isn't the same country I grew up in" topic just gets brought up all of the time, I'm guessing because it garners a lot of clicks from us who miss our naive childhoods but I just don't see it being as illegal as you do.
I can google around for all sorts of "florida man" stories. Just because I can find some very weird and newsworthy stories, doesn't mean that everything and everywhere is like that. I can probably live in Florida and have a normal life, and raise my children however I would like.
> Back in December, Rafi and Dvora made national headlines when police picked them up as they walked home from a local park. The children’s parents, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, subscribe to the philosophy of “free-range” parenting, which holds that children develop self-reliance by exploring their neighborhoods or riding public transportation on their own, if their parents judge them ready. [...] After the first incident, Montgomery County Child Protective Services investigated and found the senior Meitivs responsible for “unsubstantiated neglect.”
> A few states have laws stipulating the minimum age when a child can be left home alone. In Illinois it is 14, in Maryland, eight, and in Oregon, 10. Maryland’s law further stipulates that a young child left in the care of a person under 13 is “unattended.” Many more states offer home-alone guidelines, which vary as widely as the laws do (age six in Kansas, age 12 in Mississippi). [...] In most cases, whether such home-alone rules extend to outdoor spaces is something lawyers could argue either way.
[1] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/04/the-murky-law-on-free...
I would also add that CPS investigations are holistic, and look at the totality of the children's care. It is possible for them to investigate something innocuous but discover other problems.
Parent of my original comment states "There has always been unsupervised children everywhere that I have lived," and that's something that's changing in America as families don't want to deal with the possible legal consequences that may arise.
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.
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
And this will only get worse... until we're like the Eloi, surrounded and dependent on technology no one understands anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
And a related episode on air pollution in general: https://ashesashes.org/blog/episode-38-dead-air
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/money-academic-su...
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.
- 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.
Come on, surely you aren't suggesting that genetics have anything to do with intelligence, are you?
Also I just listed all possibilities that came to my mind, whether I think they're likely or not.
As it should be, there's simply no data to back up claims like this.
No it's not, it's flat out racist.
But seriously: Isn't considering material wealth one meaning of "materialism"?
Do you have a source for this? Everything I have read suggests IQ is highly correlated with income (without considering a threshold).
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.
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...
The more attention grabbing the headline is the more skeptical I am of the study.
We know that elevated CO2 is negatively correlated with cognitive scores: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2016/07/indoor-co2-du...
>"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.
Mean IQ of a population decreases when millions of lower-IQ people enter that population.
> 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.
> Some environmental factor — or collection of factors — is causing a drop in the IQ scores of parents and their own children, and older kids and their younger siblings. One leading explanation is that the rise of lower-skill service jobs has made work less intellectually demanding, leaving IQs to atrophy as people flex their brains less.
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...
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.
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...
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.
But was leisure so much more creative with television and work rather than Netflix and work?
I've had some conversations recently about how [my generation and socioeconomic group] would go outside more often as children because we only really had an hour or two of cartoons in the morning before the telemarketing-disguised-as-content started, but I'm also cautious about drawing too many conclusions because (purely based on my own experiences) I feel like people will search for an opportunity to explore or be creative if the environment is at all conducive to it.
See: a lot of our early experiences with computers. Games (consumption) existed, but that didn't stop us wanting to modify them or explore how they worked.
This illusion of having all human knowledge at hand is one of the reasons people are becoming dumber, not smarter.
But yes, there's access to an immense amount of books and resources.
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.
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.
+1 for actually hunting down the original study and interpreting it.
-1000 for spoiling our self-righteous party.
Even with the resulting edit there appears to be, at least to me, a clear need for additional investigation utilizing non-Norwegian conscription data before the original research question can be validated.
Good find.
Sounds like all men are tested, not all serve.
> 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.
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.
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf
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).
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.
The slow decline of reading as a source of information acquisition is a great way to explain what is going on.
No other medium--not video, not podcasts--can equal the strength of reading as a mechanism for moving information into the human brain.
READ.
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.