That study focuses on the severe end of the spectrum but I've also read that just getting it (even if asymptomatic) may have a longterm impact on the brain. That's grim, even more so given how many now consider infection to be an inevitable part of life.
> “It’s not that dumb people are having more kids than smart people, to put it crudely. It’s something to do with the environment, because we’re seeing the same differences within families,” he said.
> The study not only showed IQ variance between children the same parents, but because the authors had the IQ scores of various parents, it demonstrated that parents with higher IQs tended to have more kids, ruling out the dysgenic fertility theory as a driver of falling IQ scores and highlighting the role of environmental factors instead.
That movie really missed the mark. It made out like the dumbing down would be a result of generations of poor breeding. Instead we see the dumbing down has been due to people willingly thumbing their nose at science and reason.
The backlash against science is fairly reasonable, given how often science is misrepresented and how often preliminary findings are reported as facts, often in some misguided attempt to help make it easier for people to understand.
People pick up on the discrepancies, and overstating our confidence early makes it look really bad when it turns out that the results were incorrect.
The Covid pandemic is a great example of this, a lot of extremely sketchy and highly preliminary studies were misrepresented as certainties. It takes many months to produce a solid scientific study, sometimes even years. Yet here we were, a month into the pandemic inundated in studies that simply could not be solid. But they sounded scary, so they made the news. This created the appearance that science kept contradicting itself. One week the virus had a 40% mortality rate, and then next it had 0.1%. What gives, science?
The basic posture of science is "I don't know". If you gloss over that fact because it's scary when science doesn't have answers yet, then what you are communicating isn't science, it's something else, speculation, the party line, I dunno.
Overall the fundamental problem is a basic lack of faith in grown adults to make their own judgements, and a willingness to simplify the message so much that it no longer is good science. If you don't let people be adults, they will be children instead. That is exactly where we are right now.
My point is we didn't have an understanding. Science doesn't move that fast, and whatever was published was highly speculative, but the it sounded scary so it got media coverage.
> The backlash against science is fairly reasonable, given how often science is misrepresented and how often preliminary findings are reported as facts, often in some misguided attempt to help make it easier for people to understand.
Oh, that's nothing. You should have seen the post-WWII era, when the backlash against Science was rooted about efficient new ways of killing people and destroying the environment (both with and without the atomic bomb), and against authoritarians touting Progress while demanding the regimentation of society and destruction of traditional values and ways of life.
The position of science in society is a discussion worth having.
Excessive optimism toward science has had fairly detrimental results in the past. Often the problem isn't science itself though.
A trap is that you can't actually derive values from science, because it doesn't provide any -- whatever values you extract from science are those you put in yourself through hidden assumptions. That makes it very easy to lean on science to ostensibly support almost any action through some line of reasoning like "Science shows that if we kill the poor, we'll be able to reduce taxes by 90%. Therefore we should get our guns!" Science doesn't care if our taxes are high or low, it doesn't care if we live or die. Even if the premise about taxes is scientifically correct (I don't know), the conclusion isn't based on science alone.
That's a bit of a parallel to the discussion of lockdowns and masks and so on, while science may be able to answer what effects these have, science can't say we ought to do these things. That requires something else to be added, although sadly the discussion has almost entirely been about what the science says about these things, not the relative worth of saving lives versus individual freedom vs GDP, which is the real discussion.
The science itself is good. It's scientism that's dangerous. Also malicious intents of some academia members to get grants or lifelong job based on the misleading research.
It was slapstick... it wasn't supposed to hit any mark. It was supposed to make you laugh. Just because some elements are used to mock the current state of things doesn't mean it's supposed to be a reference.
The analytical side of me doesn't understand how scores on a test that baselines the average to X (in the case of IQ, it is baseline of 100), then distributes them around that baseline on a normal distribution curve can go down over time.
The article didn't link data so I can't dig in further.
So many variables here including way the math portion was measured moving to multiple choice in the 1990s when the scores start dropping, hopping on a flight, still skeptical.
Other quick one, all 95% confidence interval on data that moves less than +/- 2.5% either way. I understand confidence interval isn't a straight linear margin of error, it one I'd want to also look at further.
> Access to education is currently the most conclusive factor explaining disparities in intelligence, according to Ritchie. In a separate study that has not been released, he and his colleagues looked at existing research in an effort to demonstrate that staying in school longer directly equates to higher IQ scores.
> But more research is needed to better understand other environmental factors thought to be linked to intelligence. Robin Morris, a professor of psychology at Kings College in London who was not involved in Ritchie’s research, suggests that traditional measures of intelligence, such as the IQ test, might be outmoded in today’s fast-paced world of constant technological change.
> “In my view, we need to recognize that as time changes and people are exposed to different intellectual experiences, such as changes in the use of technology, for example social media, the way intelligence is expressed also changes. Educational methods need to adapt to such changes,” Morris said.
The first step is to run the same test. The second step is to work out why the results are different (if they are), which might include teaching styles, focus issues, malnutrition, or many other things.
Ḯ've heard that statement from many but I've never understood how they've been able to make this conceptually difficult for themselves:
IQ tests measure relative to a reference population. So we can speak of the IQ of a person aged 20 born in 1990 on a test where 100 is the average score at age 20 of the population of those born in 1960, etcetera.
Changes in average IQ has been something that has been spoken of in the literature since Flynn was young, back when IQ scores were rising.
Okay, I see what you're saying, so we take two sample groups, use one as a baseline, then lay the second group over that curve.
So now we need to be really careful about bias in the sample groups.
To say IQ scores are dropping and we don't know why then means to me we don't know what variables were the key drivers of the first groups results so we therefore cannot possibly create a consistent second group to measure against the baseline.
I'm still stuck but I'm often dense and skeptical on these type of analysis.
wasn't the IQ of young kids also increasing? which is mostly attributed to better health [both physical and mental] (which is mostly due to better socioeconomic situation in developed countries, so basically the whole post-WW2 upward curve)
> don't know what variables were the key drivers of the first groups results so we therefore cannot possibly create a consistent second group to measure against the baseline.
This is why there are practices around statistics sampling and confidence intervals and whatnot. Of course we can’t exactly recreate, that’s impossible, but we can create samples in a way that the results are generalizable in both the baseline and the comparison. And the results are useful.
I have a friend who says that it’s impossible to know if we can’t sample 100% (“how can we know how it will work in 100 million if we only test in 1000?”) and it’s frustrating how just basic concepts of math and statistics make it hard for them to accept any research.
There are many ways of knowing the means objectively. In countries with mandatory military service and where IQ tests are administered in connection wit that service there is reliable data.
Another source is the number of clinical cases of mild mental retardation. This will mostly depend on how large the population subgroups with lowest IQ are, but if they are approximately fixed and there's no explosion in assortative mating it would be possible to calculate the true mean from that.
If you have a measurement tape with 1000 irregular markings with no system to them. You can use it as a measure of a persons height by reading off which marking a large group of people end up closed to. But reporting those marks make little sense, since they are irregular. So instead you report that a person is at the marking for the %percentile of the revenge group.
It’s easy to see how such a system can be used to measure a decrease or increase of height over time, even though your normalizing your reporting and even though the markings are irregular.
The average can vary from a given sample set over time and be used as a comparison. For a statement like "IQs are going up/down" you could probably get away with simply monitoring the average over time.
If you start digging around to see that you're fairly comparing the groups then you'll almost always be able to split hairs. Most statistics outside of a theoretical context are flawed if you poke them hard enough.
It is remarkably obvious if you look at Tryon's experiment[1], and remember the Nature Genetics meta-analysis[2] proving average 49% heritability among all measured human traits.
“Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.”
Book III of Odes, Horace
circa 20 BC
“Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased … The ordinary spoken language has also steadily coarsened. People used to say ‘raise the carriage shafts’ or ‘trim the lamp wick,’ but people today say ‘raise it’ or ‘trim it.’ When they should say, ‘Let the men of the palace staff stand forth!’ they say, ‘Torches! Let’s have some light!’”
Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness), Yoshida Kenkō
1330 – 1332
Higher education has never been a worse investment. There's so little time or incentive to read, and it's hard to sit down and say "I'm going to read a book". It's hard to read a book and also watch tv and also talk to friends etc etc, but that's how we spend all day - constantly interacting with media or socially.
I've had increasing trouble reading books for years. It stresses me out, I can't just sit for hours reading, I have things to do. It takes real... something - focus, mindfullness - to actually sit down and think in an explorative way that isn't strictly driven by work.
This isn't that surprising. IQ tests a specific type of intelligence, and we probably don't leverage that sort of intelligence day to day. Instead, we create hyperfocused individuals and build structure and process around them so that they can collaborate. Being generally intelligent and having general problem solving skills is less and less important, or at least we treat it that way.
Division of labour has been a tool to make us dependent on the system and our overlords. People like Kropotkin have been saying this for quite some time.
>Instead, we create hyperfocused individuals and build structure and process around them so that they can collaborate.
I agree and disagree. There are arguments in favor of both sides. Look at what happened in software development alone. Where you were only expected to push basic code before, many employers now expect you to be a flexible mini-IT department on top of having the social skills to communicate with customers and managers. At the same time, they specialized other things to a degree you're now a "dotnet developer", "java developer" etc., as if specializing in that direction was ever the goal of software development / computer science.
I see this as just more hyper focusing in a way. Now I have even less time for exploratory pursuits, my "role" has expanded and thus takes more of my focus. So I have to think about more things, but it's all confined to the expectations placed on me by my job.
From Finnish perspective, it's just not availability of TVs but the content too. Until 90s we had just two channels that were mostly showing content from public broadcasting corporation (Yleisradio) with some segments of commercial programming. Cable and satellite TV did exist but they were really quite uncommon (and kids had to learn English in order to watch them). I've understood that Norway where the paper is from was similar.
I'd go even further: I think people have a hard time dealing with abundance in many areas of our society. Take for example the abundance of food: Some people have a hard time dealing with the constant availability of anything you could wish for, and get fat.
We've now come into an era where there is also an abundance of information: Pretty much anything you can imagine is just a button-click away.
Young people in particular have to carefully select what information to consume, and there's a whole attention-economy built around wasting people's time, trying to manipulate them into buying shit they don't need.
Humans didn't evolve in such conditions - everything was always scarce. So I think that's why a lot of people have a hard time dealing with it. I believe there's a huge potential market for software that acts in the interest of the user, helping to deal with this abundance of information (pretty much all software that currently exists mainly works to the benefit of the company, in particular ads/data collection). But it doesn't need to be that way. So let's build solutions.
Is higher education the issue here? I know people with higher education that are willing to mute people with different opinions, I know people with higher education who fail to understand basic things, I think higher education gives you the expertise in a certain field, as you said, higher education creates machines that can help shareholders get rich, as italian I've read a lot about italian universities being ranked 1/1000th lower than US universities, but then I've lived with US people from Harvard in Berlin, it's of course just two example, but I was even questioning how the hell they survived that much, in sense that I had a flatmate asking how the trash bin worked, how the microwave worked or how the oven worked, with little to no awareness of the world, it's weird but yeah I think education from top universities is good for money but it has little to do with daily needed intelligence
> Access to education is currently the most conclusive factor explaining disparities in intelligence, according to Ritchie. In a separate study that has not been released, he and his colleagues looked at existing research in an effort to demonstrate that staying in school longer directly equates to higher IQ scores.
Yes, I see, there is a study with some conclusions, but that doesn't mean that one has to ignore his life experiences, also because I would like to see what were the parameters of the tests, I have also other examples of people with higher education failing to understand how democracy basically works and wishing people with different ideas wouldn't vote, so yeah probably the study is right, and the parameters were general, I just find people with higher education more specialised but less functional in day to day stuff
> italian universities being ranked 1/1000th lower than US universities
I don't even know what that means. That sounds like they'd be ranked only a tenth of a percent lower than US universities, which doesn't jive with the rest of your point.
Would be great if this was true but they are using many factors. When I actually sorted by research impact I got a quite different ranking the last time I checked
Seeing as most the studies mentioned Norway which has a perfectly healthy and functional university system that doesn’t leave people in debt, I doubt it.
Going to University doesn’t affect IQ much, IQ is not learned.
IQ may or may not be learned but IQ tests are very much a skill. The difference between my first test and the second one was almost 30 points. These were not too far apart but the second time I simply knew what to expect.
I consider myself a person of average intelligence who learned very early on that preparation can set me ahead of the group.
I practiced interviewing, public speaking, coding, writing, test taking, etc, and it's helped immensely. I mean, most tests tip their hand later, which allows you to go back and revise earlier answers. most writing is formulaic, you just have to find a good example. any system that you are evaluated by can be learned.
To prep for grad entrance exams, I wroke up early every Friday, got ready, drove around, sat down and took a timed practice exam at 930 sharp. all to emulate my Friday 900am exam appointment. I got the score I wanted.
None of those things are IQ tests. You just listed a bunch of things that explicitly are possible to study for. Well designed IQ tests can not be studied for, they're just measuring your pattern recognition ability, not any knowledge you have.
This. I cannot understand why people seem to think that IQ test results are an objective measure of anything. Of course we all make mistakes sometimes or have bad days or brain fog for whatever reason. Even the time of day affects cognition. How would any kind of test compensate for this? A particularly good or bad score can very well be just a fluke.
I have never seen anyone I would consider really smart who took these tests seriously.
+1 The actual scientific usage of IQ test is to screen for children that are on the low part of the spectrum and then do more qualitative analysis and care. The whole focus on high-IQ is just nonsense. I don't have any ref on hand about that tho.
In a foreign country asking your flatmate how to operate the foreign appliances instead of wasting your time on trial and error or looking it up, likely also in a foreign language, is an example of not being intelligent?
Yeah i'm in a foreign country now, and despite the laundromat was made by a German company, where I'm originally from, I had to ask locals to explain to me what the buttons meant, because there was no manual on the internet, and it was different to German ones (there's a phpbb forum where one guy DMs u pdfs for your model, but I didn't want to bother signing up). Haven't went to Harvard tho.
I think top schools like Harvard, Stanford, Oxford etc. can serve as excellent environments for people to reach their full potential, but due to cultural reasons and funding, they are willing to make large compromises on who can get a degree there. Going to Harvard doesn't mean you are intelligent, but I've seldomly seen such high density of super clever people as at these top schools.
His premise is that higher education offers little to no value. What theoretical value a higher education might provide is squandered because people are too busy living their lives, namely working to make ends meet, in order to leverage it. This certainly has proven true economically as we can see that incomes held stagnant through the rise of post-secondary attainment, contrary to assumptions of the past that speculated that college graduates would be able to earn more as a result of having a higher education. Similarly, and perhaps related to, he posits the features tested by IQ are not being practiced because people are too busy to carry out that practice.
I’ve found it more difficult to sit and focus in recent years. I blame pandemic-related anxiety for some of it, but not all. It’s mostly all the instant-on distractions available now, like the media you describe. The web in general discourages focus.
Thinking about higher education as an 'investment' is part of this problem. In Europe, we had the Humbold system of higher education, but sadly that was now eradicated in favor of the more utalitarian anglo style education. At least Italy still has the fairly classical approach.
ther are a usually few general courses (civics, economics, etc) at every undergrad, but these are usually low quality, mostly useless, and absolutely dwarfed by the usual introductory classes (usual STEM for STEM, etc)
“There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_...
I’m also not sure what you mean. What is Anglo style education? I feel like my university experience in the US is heavily Humboldtian [1] in two specific ways: the general education requirements which explicitly stated goals of producing world citizens and teaching broad non-vocational reasoning skills and history lessons, and second, doing research as an undergraduate and later as a graduate, in research universities.
Also curious what you mean by thinking of education as an investment being part of the problem. What is the problem, and why does framing education as investment contribute? Are you talking about purely financial forms of investment? Education is widely viewed as social, cultural investment by society, as well as economic investment, and this is widely agreed to be a good thing, isn’t it? At the personal level, education is also viewed as a career & future financial security investment, and this also seems reasonable, no? I feel like the most important investment my education bought me was the freedom to choose my career path over time. Had I not gone to university, I do believe my choices would be more constrained than they are today.
Maybe this is an education availability problem? What are you doing to teach the young generation?
I think the article is wrong. Kids if thought today are more intelligent than past generations.
it might be important to separate the hardware and software parts of intelligence.
IQ tests mostly measure the hardware part (pattern recognition, working memory, spatial reasoning, attention to detail, speed, focus, reasoning about abstract rules)
the software part is mostly about applied epistemological rationality, how good one's life strategy is, and how well one can execute that. (of course there's a hardware component to this too. someone with good emotional resilience, low neuroticism, high self-motivation achieves things with relative ease given the opportunities)
then there's a measurement problem. if someone is taught the importance of attention to detail since they were very little, taught to control their emotions better (eg. boredom), then they will likely score better on the hardware test too.
that said our collective knowledge is much greater than decades ago, our teaching methods are better too, but alas not everyone received the same top quality teaching.
plus there is a big issue with the curriculum. most people are tragicomically underskilled in dealing with themselves and other people, hence they are bad at recognizing and solving problems that brutally impact their lives (and the lives of those around them).
aaand of course there's the plain old resource availability problem (everyone inherits, the question is what. advantaged people get advantages with very high probability, disadvantaged people get disadvantages...)
I grew up back in the days when many more people read books...there were used book stores everywhere...men sometimes carried a paperback book stuck in their back pocket...but that's not to say that everyone read a lot...but there was more reading in general...and one reason why we read more was that television was just not as good as it is today...
and reading does develop a certain sort of intelligence that is important and is very useful...I saw my own youthful reading and its good effects in the computer science classes that I passed and where 80% of the class just could not do the work...intelligence counts....when you spend your youth reading books for hours a time, year in and year out, your brain grows "smart muscles"...and that makes it easier to focus on difficult problems...
I saw a lack of that sort of intelligence when I worked for a large government agency and when people lacking in that sort of intelligence made a huge mess of designing the business processes for that agency...intelligence counts...
society at large and especially those at the top pretend that intelligence no longer matters...but they are wrong...
> sometimes carried a paperback book stuck in their back pocket
> and one reason why we read more was that television was just not as good as it is today...
I feel like there's a little disconnect between these two statements. It's not that television is taking priority, it's that the times when people used to break out a book -- that they carried in their back pocket or purse! -- now break out their phones and engage with social media, or they check their work email, or respond to slack messages, or they get involved in texting, or they play some video game just to make the time go faster. I suppose some of them put in headphones and watch Netflix, but I don't see that often, to be honest.
The world has gotten so busy and defaulting to 'on' that no one feels they can default to reading a book, but you can. You just have to decide to carry a book and, instead of breaking out a phone at those times to stay connected, you just let yourself be disconnected, and you read a book. Or meditate.
That's how I go about my life, and frankly I don't understand why more people don't. I never use my phone unless it's an emergency. I get a lot more out of life meditating and reading books than checking my email, playing candy crush, and engaging with twitter.
> I've had increasing trouble reading books for years.
I've experienced this as well, and the only solution I have found is to take periodic breaks from my phone and all social media. Within a day or two of minimizing phone use that natural curiosity and desire to learn and motivation to read reemerges.
No IQ test ever got me a good paying job, but my degree, the professors' contacts, and the experience of working in research absolutely did.
The 10 years and many loans it took to get through bachelor's and PhD were the best and most important investment I made in myself to get out of the factories and warehouses and into an office with great pay, and oh incidentally an amazing job.
College education is treated as a litmus test for whether someone can figure out abstract things and produce useful output. Which is all fine and dandy, except that ”having a degree” is not really a pure measurement: it’s always confounded with a certain amount of wading-through-the-bullwhip tenacity (useless but mandatory curriculum -> non-questioning serf mentality) and a hefty slice of affluenza (outright bribery).
I agree, but stated another way, college is also a test of 'can this person adapt and meet demands to excel in a new system', a skill which I believe is underrated, under measured, and hugely valuable.
Nah, so far as I can tell: it's compliance. It asks the question "Will you do what it takes, even when it's irrational, to pattern yourself after our model?"
Moreover it's painfully easy to exploit your way through especially if you're already rich. Just go doctor shopping with Mommy so you can get a 504 and accomodations and stimulant medications.
If it selected for adaptation the curriculum would be different, things like figuring out the area of a circle using given materials, not abstract shit. If it selected for intelligence there would br a huge battery of exceptions, handicaps for the working class kids, because they have to put in way more effort than the kids living with their parents who are unemployed, likewise with non-traditionals.
You're repeating what I said: adapting to an existing process and finding success within a system is exactly what college teaches and filters on. That's usually a good thing for most job seekers.
I cannot fathom a successful professional that does not balance 'I must innovate the sysyem even if it hurts me' against 'I will work within this system for my own personal benefit by providing exactly what is requested of me'
It sounds like you are arguing that college degrees are poor signals for one’s intelligence but then you write:
> a certain amount of wading-through-the-bullwhip tenacity (useless but mandatory curriculum -> non-questioning serf mentality)
And I think a lot of people (though not me and maybe not you) would find that that is a good description of attributes employers would like. And for many people the point of a college degree is appealing to employers rather than proving oneself to be intelligent.
This is a looking vs. leaping exercise. Do you continue "looking" around for 10 years or do you "leap" at an opportunity to make a change?
While I see your point - a whole lot of people do have salary increases over a 10 year span - a whole lot of jobs people want require "X piece of paper for Y years of experience" and you cannot get that experience to begin with without either 1) the piece of paper or 2) knowing someone.
Maybe, but the road from high school dropout to NASA JPL seems a bit more tenuous when you don't include an education.
bls.gov tells a more complete story, in that machine operators make significantly less and job openings grow at a significantly lower rate than software, aerospace, robotics, and AI specialists, many of which require a degree, (and the siccessful outliers are not worth pushing as a good model for the 90%)
I can't say there wasn't a different, even a better road to some measure of success and an enjoyable career, but I can say this path was a miracle of positive life changes for me and every penny of debt I pay back to the fed is absolutely a victory lap.
I spent two years in college and never finished. I'm largely self-taught in my field. I also have a great office job. Getting there didn't require an IQ test or a degree, it required consistently providing something of value.
> I've had increasing trouble reading books for years.
Me too. But I read way more than I read when I devoured scores of books. I just do it in the web browser.
I always had very short temper with books. If the book didn't captivate me with first few pages it never got read by me. I just moved to another one.
I always really liked anthologies of short stories, because amount of the ideas to amount of text was the best there. Way better than when the author stretched just a handful ideas into a novel.
So now, with internet filled with so many interesting texts I have real trouble with books, because my short temper got even shorter. I also know a lot more of the ideas than I did when I was younger so it's hard to encounter something novel to me. So a book, that's captivating, dense and novel is really a hard find. And others get ditched by me at some, usually very early, stage. I just have even less patience for them than I had ever before.
> It's hard to read a book and also watch tv and also talk to friends etc
Some of my favourite time with two of my friends is going to a bar or restaurant in the afternoon and reading together. The tradeoff is I watch less TV and have basically disengaged from social media. But that’s more than worth it to me.
There’s a bit of misconception here. IQ tests don’t require higher education, nor book reading.
> Higher education has never been a worse investment.
While I realize you’re talking about social investment here, the idea that TV and media are better investments of your time than earning a degree seems problematic at best. TV & media will, generally speaking, not help you get a better career, right?
The Fed has published very recent stats in the US that people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income of people without a degree. I previously suspected it was slightly higher, like maybe 10 or 20 percent, and I felt like that would be a big number, but the fact that it’s double across everyone in America is massive, and a bit mind blowing to me. The income gap is 3x if you get an advanced degree. That seems like a pretty good investment, doesn’t it?
The debt part of the equation also needs to be considered for the investment. ROI is a huge factor. If it takes you 15 years to break even, the person who never saddled themselves with debt is now 15 years ahead of you income-wise and it will take you another 10 years to catch up to them as far as cumulative income goes. So what is being offered as a "great investment" is not quite as obvious to me.
That cuts pretty hard the other direction though. Going into debt on a house with half the income of other people around you is a huge reason why foreclosures happen.
Worrying about 15 years is short-sighted too, that’s not very long. If you pay it off in 15 years, and then you have 2x the income of someone who didn’t go to school, you’re 35 making great money and in a job with better prospects and mobility than if you didn’t have debt but took a job that didn’t require a degree. This is, of course, statistically speaking. Some people do manage to do very well without a degree, but it’s pretty important to understand that it’s not even close to the average outcome.
My personal experience with student debt was that it got me a job out of college that paid well enough that I paid off my student loans much faster than I’d anticipated. I thought it was going to be 10 years, but it was more like 3. (To be fair I didn’t borrow that much, and cost of college has been rising faster than inflation ever since I graduated.)
I agree that it's a very nuanced situation that probably requires a lot of analysis on a situation by situation basis. But it's not as obvious or plain that higher education is a worthwhile investment as you painted before. I wanted to push on that a bit.
There is no guarantee of success for any given individual, that’s always true. However, if someone you know is 18 and deciding whether to go to college, what would you recommend instead? What steps would you advise taking to be successful without more education, knowing that most high paying jobs require a degree just to get in the door for an interview? It just happens to also be compelling to me to know that, causal or not, degree holders on average have 2x higher salary and hold most of the patents and managerial spots are held by degree holders. The Fed data isn’t just a sampling of a few people, it’s accounting for everyone in the US. Don’t take my word for it, do a little searching and see how many research results conclude that there is enough causal relationship between degrees and income that the investment potential appears to be a pretty clear win.
I don’t see a lot of reason not to invest in education. The fear that it might not pay off doesn’t (for me anyway) push back that much on the strength of the nationwide correlation between degrees and high income.
I’m a little sad about reducing it just to money too, education is an investment in other ways too. When done well, it can be time spent gaining knowledge, investigating history, helping people understand more of the context of what’s happening here and now. Education provides freedom to explore, both now while you’re studying, and in the future with your career. I don’t have a lot of belief in the idea that the opportunity cost is too high.
I think a major part of the problem in America (I can't speak for other parts of the world) is that it's become solely a monetary equation. Tuition is, quite simply, a non-starter for a larger portion of American families, these days. While military spending goes unchecked, America shows its priorities by not spending that money in establishing 4 year community colleges at low cost or free tuition for the betterment of society at large and to be more competitive on a world theater as a whole. This wouldn't replace the need for private, more expensive universities, just as public schools haven't eradicated private schools. A rising tide raises all boats, as it were... and with a future of increased automation or offshoring, a more educated workforce would do well for us.
I couldn’t agree more. In fact, one thing I don’t understand from the Fed’s data is why the IRS (for example) or the government itself doesn’t instantly see the benefits of educating everyone at their expense, because it would immediately pay for itself many times over with the increase in tax income.
Yes! To some level that’s absolutely true and a good point.
There’s been a ton of study of the question of whether people succeed because of the skills they gained working on the degree versus the credentialism of just having a degree. The answer across many papers is that it’s a healthy mix of both, that there is a large component of causality (getting a degree leads to success) as well as a large component in the other direction (being smart & driven leads to getting a degree).
Do note that a wide swath of our economy is based on jobs that require a degree, and are not based on being “successful” with or without. It’s not a fair playing field where there’s equal opportunity to people without degrees. A big part of the income gap happens because our system is setup to reward degree earners, and so it’s guaranteed to be at least partly causal.
Also really important to pay more attention to what actually happens as opposed to what could happen theoretically. Yes people might succeed with or without degrees, but how often does that actually happen? There are some amazing and compelling anecdotes, but ignoring the stats is a bad idea if you’re trying to decide whether to go to college or not.
Look at patents in the US as an example of how people might succeed with or without a degree. There is no degree requirement and nothing stopping people from inventing without a higher education, nonetheless the overwhelming majority of patent holders have degrees, the majority are advanced degrees beyond bachelor.
Not intelligence but insecurity is the formula for success. Truly intelligent people are comfortable figuring stuff out along the road. Success is accidental and might even be worth avoiding.
> people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income of people without a degree
I feel like the better measure would be comparing their productivity, rather than the base rate at which society, on average, appears to value degrees.
The question was whether education is a good investment, which poses the idea of some kind of return on an initial cost. The investment question was posed in the form of personal cost and personal return. In that sense, productivity is not a measure of the personal return of an education. I mean a few people might see it that way, and it could be associated indirectly with success, but by and large productivity on it’s own is not a benefit.
Productivity could be seen as the social return for a social (tax based) investment in education, and indeed we do measure things like GDP and compare nations on a global scale. In that sense, education appears to be a good investment socially. Countries that have high rates of education also have high GDP.
Aside from that, unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to measure “productivity”. You might want to take a stab at trying to define what that even means for people in various careers. It’s easy to measure the productivity of factory workers, but insanely hard to measure productivity for doctors or writers or advertisers or nearly any white collar job. Is productivity measured by how much output there is, regardless of quality? Is productivity measured by how much money exchanges hands? These things could be even worse than valuing education, no?
Not to mention the selection effect: if you took the cohort that would finish four year degrees and didn't send them to college, they would still be making more money.
This has been studied. It’s true but only with caveats and qualifications. Yes they’d be making “more”, but the only important question is how much more, and the answer is that it’s not nearly as much as the degree holders. One really big reason for this is that income is partly based on having the degree, not some kind of objective idea of skill or intelligence or determination.
Of course, there's a dramatic premium on college degrees, no question about that. But the selection effect in that statistic is disproportionately important to understand, even if at this moment in time its magnitude is low. It helps understand the counterfactuals necessary to think about how the credentialist dynamic can or may change. Eg if you can cleanly extract the signal that employers are getting from it, you can decouple it from the corrupt, extractive institutions that are currently squatting over the credential.
I’d be careful not to jump to the conclusion that credentials are bad or requiring them amounts to anything corrupt, extractive or squatting.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with requiring that a job applicant meet minimum standards, in fact most people are wildly in favor of requirements when it comes to, say, doctors & lawyers, not to mention our infrastructure designers and safety inspectors, etc.. It’s certainly within the purview of the employer to define those requirements, and okay for them to require some well rounded ness and non-vocational skills, right?
The selection effect has, like I mentioned earlier, been studied extensively, and many researchers have come to the conclusion that despite the credentialism, college degrees also do impart useful knowledge and skills on the degree holders, even when attempting to adjust for many possible confounding factors such as family income, family education, and the filtering weight of the credential system. It’s not that hard to accept that the majority of people who spend 4 or more years trying to learn actually do learn something and achieve some general skills, right?
It’s complicated, but I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing that society & business widely agree to allow the bachelor’s degree to represent a certain level of preparedness. Yes, it’s a wildly blunt measure, often inaccurate, and it may be commonly misinterpreted too, since we’re really talking about minimum standards, and not a measure of skill, but I see reasons why the state of things might have evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a first approximation.
> I’d be careful not to jump to the conclusion that credentials are bad or requiring them amounts to anything corrupt, extractive or squatting.
I'm not assuming this. I have independent reason to consider universities to be corrupt, extractive institutions. This is downstream of their oligopolistic position wrt the labor market, but a hypothetical set of less-evil institutions than our current universities would still be an efficiency problem to be solved.
The early steps places like Google have taken towards accepting certification programs are an example of (attempting to) cleanly separate the value that a degree confers, without cutting off access to large swathes of the population or condemning them to mountains of debt.
Ie, there's a lot of signal in degrees, but there's a LOT of noise, and there's a massive amount of economic and moral value in finding better-quality signal.
> I see reasons why the state of things might have evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a first approximation
Yes, I hope this comment makes it clear that I'm not assuming that degrees are literally useless for hiring. But that is an extremely low bar, and I think it's similarly difficult to justify the claim that degrees are a remotely efficient bar for a big chunk of what they're currently used for.
I grew up rich enough that I was able to deeply enjoy four years of intellectual exploration and partying, but that's cold comfort for the people locked out from being a firefighter or starting medical school or a thousand other productive pursuits, because they couldn't surmount the barrier of an additional tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars that the inefficient degree requirement confers.
This isn't just theoretical: the choking-off of opportunity is IMO a massive tragedy relative to a world that was less enamored with the degree. That doesn't suggest we can simply burn the job market's credentialism down, but we can be clear-eyed about the current system's flaws and set our headings correctly for incremental change.
I see; and I pretty much completely agree. It is indeed a shame that we allow citizens to bear the cost of education personally, and that it even has to be a choice or justified as investment. You’re right that the cost acts as a pre-filter for income just to get in, and that the university system has flaws and is inefficient. I like the way you summarized it at the end and aspire to stay clear-eyed and oriented towards incremental improvement. Thanks for clarifying!
Also, this doesn't take into account the fact that people who get a 4 year degree are more likely to have parents who are well off. In a lot of ways a college degree is just a measure of your parent's socioeconomic status.
> There’s a bit of misconception here. IQ tests don’t require higher education, nor book reading.
From the article:
> [Article] These environmental factors could include changes in the education system and media environment, nutrition, reading less and being online more, Rogeberg said.
> [Article] The earlier rise in IQ scores follows the “Flynn effect,” a term for the long-term increase in intelligence levels that occurred during the 20th century, arguably the result of better access to education, according to Stuart Ritchie, a postdoctoral fellow in cognitive ageing at the University of Edinburgh whose research explores IQ scores and intelligence and who was not involved in the new study.
> [Article] Access to education is currently the most conclusive factor explaining disparities in intelligence, according to Ritchie. In a separate study that has not been released, he and his colleagues looked at existing research in an effort to demonstrate that staying in school longer directly equates to higher IQ scores.
> While I realize you’re talking about social investment here, the idea that TV and media are better investments of your time than earning a degree seems problematic at best. TV & media will, generally speaking, not help you get a better career, right?
I'm saying that higher education has never been a worse investment. Not that it's a bad investment. It's just higher risk and higher cost than ever.
> The Fed has published very recent stats in the US that people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income of people without a degree.
That's really tiny considering that it costs 4 years of income + potentially a huge amount of debt with serious compounding interest.
> That seems like a pretty good investment, doesn’t it?
It seems like it can be a fine investment for some people. If you're rich and won't take on debt it's a great investment.
Keep in mind most of that difference is probably not a consequence of the 4 year degree, but just a selection bias of people getting degrees generally also being the people that earn more.
So don't. Read little bits here and there as you get a chance. I frequently read a few pages while I'm waiting for people to get ready, stuck in waiting rooms or sometimes in a slow moving queue.
How truly "empirical" is said research or any research in psychometrics?
I've seen many of the claim correlations of IQ with "success" like career trajectories, divorce rates, better health and longevity, etc.. However, I've yet to see any strong correlations. Does IQ have a correlation stronger than 0.5 with anything?
IIRC, I am pretty sure parental income, or lack thereof, is a better predictor of "success" than IQ.
> How truly "empirical" is said research or any research in psychometrics?
My understanding is that IQ researchers invented a lot of the statistical techniques used across the social sciences today, and I think faired the "reproducibility crisis" fairly well. It's about as empirical as the social sciences get.
> I've seen many of the claim correlations of IQ with "success" like career trajectories, divorce rates, better health and longevity, etc.. However, I've yet to see any strong correlations. Does IQ have a correlation stronger than 0.5 with anything?
0.5 correlation is pretty big in the social sciences. I mean, think about: there are probably hundreds or thousands of factors that influence your life outcome. Much of the differences we see tends to come down to what researchers call "non-shared environment", which is just a fancy term for all the random stuff that happens in your life.
For a single factor to have such a large effect is pretty amazing.
> IIRC, I am pretty sure parental income, or lack thereof, is a better predictor of "success" than IQ.
A lot of which can be explained by the parents' IQ.
IQ doesn't explain everything, not by a long shot. It just explains more than any other single factor, and should generally be something researchers should control for whenever they attempt to measure some other phenomenon.
Yes, IQ tests spacial intelligence, a very European and male specific thing. But that is an actual form of intelligence, it's not a waste of time.
Reading books. So at Stanford nobody watched TV. I think later Netflix, a bit. The only time I knew a peer was watching television was some girls in my dorm getting together to watch Gossip Girl, and only that. Just that show. And it was a very abnormal thing, nobody else anything at all. Keep in mind you can play eg Super Smash Bros at the library, there's a video game section in the library and you can play video games if you want. You can try out new titles. I did that.
If you watch TV, you won't get into Stanford, basically.
I gather why it's male, but is spatial intelligence particularly European? IIRC, East Asians overall score noticeably higher than Europeans overall, all else held equal. And their relative underrepresentation in the US elides the fact that this is a huge proportion of the global population.
Well right. That's a great point, Asians do a lot better. And Jews. Although don't be categorical about it, I'm European-descendant and don't feel the slightest disadvantage compared to those groups. Though I did once, when I was changing schools, I was going to a school with Asian students, and I felt scared of competing with them academically, what if I couldn't compete? Whereas I had already competed against Jewish students, and them I could outscore. It turned out I could compete with Asians too, it was work but it was neck-and-neck. And neck-and-neck with the Jews in that school, different specific Jews, different story.
The ideas and ideals of Asian academics produced very strong results, but were not unassailable. And in this case there was adherence to tradition, sticking to what works, so the ideas and ideals were similar to other East Asian cultures. So generalization was possible, at a first approximation.
Well there's differences but they are hidden from first view, so for instance there's differences in study habits between North and South Choson Korea, the North students were systematically were scored adversarially but passed the Confucian Exam all the more. Those Koreans from the North (especially in the most mountainous regions) were doing exactly what Asian students are doing now in American Universities: "the more you push us down, the stronger we'll be, and the more success we will attain, the tighter the quota the more we'll fuck the quota."
Same goes for Jews before the Holocaust. Hard, hardcore, especially with medical schools, I heard a story of Columbia (or NYU?) medical school refusing their own college valedictorian just because he was a Jew. Simple as that.
But then...it got watered down, unconstitutional, I don't know, things just ain't the same. Still work like fuck, but...just not the same desperation. The muse that helped me most.
> Although don't be categorical about it, I'm European-descendant and don't feel the slightest disadvantage compared to those groups.
Yes, I thought it was explicit in the conversation that we're talking about averages. The claim that spatial intelligence is European also doesn't mean an eg individual black person should feel disadvantaged in the realm of spatial intelligence.
Hertz. Clock speed, and in that respect Africans have the advantage in most cases. They call it "being frosty" or sometimes "being cool" but it means having more time to react to everything, "having the perfect words at lightning tap," which has a psychiatric definition. Helps at sports and at crime (on both sides, criminals and police, police references ask for that in terms of "being very assertive"). At music and performance, particularly improvising. At fighting and warfare.
So it sounds like these are things that make no money but Africans can be good at but that's just a glitch in the economy. For instance an American President really has to be very very frosty. 10 Hertz at least. In that capacity Barack Obama Jr. was among the best presidents, perhaps the best in clock speed. Yeah his policy persecuted me from the first month to the absolute end of his term, but I can still look at the bigger picture. Trump also, look at him in the Ali G show DVD, that's how frosty he is. Steve Jobs, and Ross Perot. Ross Perot outclocking Steve Jobs, Perot would have made a great president. I would say faster than Obama or Trump.
There's other forms of intelligence too. Like tied to the senses. Intuition. Having beautiful dreams, doesn't matter if they're forgotten when awaking. Autism obviously, but that's too easy. Mental retardation, in particular in how dead on it makes them on the straight and narrow, that's a priceless blessing.
Because the only real worth of a person is if they're good, and not bad. There is nothing else.
Why would those skills make money? Would you pay someone "with 10 hertz" to demonstrate his cleverness, or at least what he sees as cleverness?
Intelligence is ability to build mental models that predict reality. If you see a lightning strike, build a correct mental model of it and use it to create electricity to power a light bulb - that's intelligence. But cracking a clever joke about the lightning strike that rhymes with something doesn't need intelligence - that's a purely mechanical skill.
Intuition is a very different quality. If intelligence lets you build a somewhat accurate map of reality, intuition is a bird's eye view of that reality.
In simplified terms, IQ tests test "logical thinking ability". It has nothing to do with reading or higher education.
On another note, it also has nothing to do with empathy, ethical responsibility etc. so the glorification of someone with a high IQ sometimes baffles me a little. One could be a high IQ tyrant.
All that verbiage and the best he can do with respect to establishing causality is an offhand remark that causality is “heavily implie(d)”. Controlling for confounders won’t necessarily recover estimates of causal impact.
At the least I’d like to see something like an instrumental variables analysis.
From what I've read is that IQ is largely genetically determined, With all the complexities that genes bring with them. And its very hard to increase intelligence in a meaningfull way. But whats important is that its very easy to make someone really really dumb. Like the disaster that was leaded gasoline causing an estimated loss of 2 to 8 iq points on a test.
Education absolutely increases IQ test scores but wether its an increase in intelligence itself whatever that may be is questionable.
An IQ test cannot distinguish between a subject who originally came up with a problem-solving technique due to innate intelligence, and one who has already seen that type of problem and learned the problem solving trick from someone else (possibly from having challenged numerous IQ tests).
There is some alignment between IQ tests and academic work; an academic background gives you a few tricks for solving those kinds of problems.
It all depends on how define intelligence, If by intelligence you mean the ability to reason about and solve complex problems then education definitely improves intelligence. However, if you choose to define it as something innate then by definition education does not change that. I think the former is a far more useful definition, its more important what a person can actually do as opposed what they could do in some hypothetical world
The problem I see is that intelligence is at large innate, someone with a 110 IQ bracket can't realisticly retest at an IQ of 140 unless you're training purely on IQ tests. This puts a severe upper bound on what anyone can 'solve trough education' as someone with a first tested IQ of 140 requires zero education to achieve a retest of 140 AND has the ability train or educate themselves even further. The IQ test itself is as real of a problem someone can solve as any other hypothetical problem. So if you choose to define intelligence by education, then you're still selecting for innate intelligence plus someones work ethic. Which to me is silly because the education system itself already selects for that and IQ tests are carefully designed for innateness which is why retests or learning for an IQ test bars you from a valid score. I'm sure Intelligence is somewhere inbetween but we can barely solve for one variable at a time.
So the Flynn effect (rises in IQ to a certain point in time) has been demonstrated in many many many cultures with many tests, many of which are difficult to explain in terms of formal western education. Like nonverbal pattern recognition tests given to traditional tribes in jungle areas. It's one of the mysteries about the Flynn effect and why it's so difficult to explain.
It's also not just the case that the "bottom is being raised", but also that the whole distribution was shifting.
I think these kinds of things make it unlikely education is explaining at least the rise part of the curve. To the extent the fall is in a subset of these types of measures of settings it also might not be (but it could be).
The more recent decline has been less well-documented although there are multiple studies using multiple measures that have shown this, so I believe it is a trend at least in some regions of the world (developed, western). I have a fuzzy memory that the decline is stronger with verbal measures (as opposed to nonverbal) but I might be misremembering that.
Education is strongly related to IQ/g/general cognitive ability but they're not perfectly correlated. I think when I looked this up a week ago or so, the best estimates were like 0.50 in a general population sample.
Clinically a discrepancy between IQ and educational achievement is important, as it points to someone not getting resources they need etc.
So yes, they're related, and yes, education could explain general population trends over time, but no they're not the same.
I just read this passage from the short story "Flowers For Algernon":
"I'm not sure what an I.Q. is. Dr. Nemur said it was something that measured how intelligent you were--like a scale in the drugstore weighs pounds. But Dr. Strauss had a big argument with him and said an I.Q. didn't weigh intelligence at all. He said an I.Q. showed how much intelligence you could get, like the numbers on the outside of a measuring cup. You still had to fill the cup up with stuff."
Is this attributable to leaded gasoline?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
"Use of leaded gasoline, which he invented, released large quantities of lead into the atmosphere all over the world. High atmospheric lead levels have been linked with serious long-term health problems from childhood, including neurological impairment"
Lead poisoning disproportionately affected those born between 1950 to 1980 and have significantly dropped in the last 20-30 years. So I don't think so.
I believe you're neglecting the cascade effect. If those people had children (they did) then their emphasis on education and the kind of rearing for children that encourages more intelligence was surely effected.
So two hypotheses: Generation X was a generation of unparalleled genius effortlessly surpassing their idiot ancestors before who merely built the modern world and their children who merely consumed and produced vastly more written content than ever before whilst playing with increasingly complex abstractions on computers, or IQ test comparisons between dissimilar populations don't really mean very much, because the "quotient" is a ranking mechanism for solving a certain type of paper puzzle, not an actual thing.
The apparent peak IQ generation consistently scores lower than later generations on age-adjusted measures of health, wealth, educational achievement etc though.
The fact that IQ test scores are somewhat useful as a ranking mechanism amongst a cohort is completely consistent with it being just being a collection of standardised tests calibrated to score in a particular way, not an actual "thing" where apparent subtle generational changes might represent genuine changes to our physiology or intellectual potential and not just inconsequential differences in our preparedness to solve paper puzzles.
>the "quotient" is a ranking mechanism for solving a certain type of paper puzzle, not an actual thing.
Sure, except it strongly correlates with pretty much every single measure of fluid intelligence you can think of. And with a billion real life outcomes, besides.
It just so happens that the best statistical distillation of intelligence measures happens to take the form of "paper puzzles". We can, I guess, do a 12 hour barrage of 50 different intelligence tests, but what's the point, when one does the job.
> Sure, except it strongly correlates with pretty much every single measure of fluid intelligence you can think of. And with a billion real life outcomes, besides
Sure, test scores correlate with other test scores (surprisingly badly) which correlate with other proxy measures of intelligence. Quelle surprise!
There's a massive difference between acknowledging a test is somewhat useful in ranking peers and agonising over whether one cohort getting scores in a particular test a couple of points lower than another cohort from a completely different background represents some real world shortcoming of the latter cohort in anything other than that particular set of puzzles. The research establishing a lack of support for supposed "dysgenic" trends (though absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence) because the drop happens within families might be superficially interesting, but we're looking at tiny points of difference in a noisy series. There's typically more variation between Weschler and Raven tests adminstered to the same individuals than the measured generational "IQ decline" the headline is encouraging us to agonise over. When all the points of data other than IQ tests suggest that subsequent generations haven't struggled intellectually compared with their forebears, there's not much reason to suspect the trends in paper puzzle scores are a signal and not just noise.
In france, kids in the 50s could write with a nib/ink by 6, before starting primary school. We are lowering our education requirements since the 70s. Basically since the rise of "international governing education", see failure modern maths and global reading.
And while IQ is not too much related to education, we let kids do what ever, when ever for a so call peace of mind, so yeah a kid who is never challenged can't have broad skills.
I would dare to say that video games are saving IQ scores but for all the wrong reasons (fast pattern recognition and spacial movement related tests).
The French education system has always been needlessly tough on kids. I went to a European school with many nationalities mixed in (each with their own section), and the poor French were overworked to hell and received lower grades than us anyway. Each teacher viewed this as normal and said that in France it would've been even harder. None of the French were especially smart because of it though, so I have no clue why they were doing it. Sadism?
I concede most people don't actively train for IQ tests, especially not people who only have to do it once. But one can't exactly claim "IQ tests are flawless measures of IQ" when they can be trained and gamed, which is the point.
But the scores that psychologists use in their studies weren’t collected from people who trained for the IQ exam. Almost impossible to find out what they ask on exams since they are sold directly to practitioners.
You seem very certain. Several of the links in that wall o' text are merely to surveys where a number of psychologists are asked whether they think IQ is a valid measure or not.
The reddit post just shows that some (maybe even a majority of) psychologists accept IQ. I could post an equal amount of links to psychology studies rejecting it.
But that doesn't even matter. What's more important is that the field of psychology as a whole is still in it's infancy as a science. Up until about the 90's almost 100% of it was pure bunk. Psychologists were using the DSM up until only a couple of years ago! Recently there has been the revelation of the reproducibility crisis. In short, psychology has a long way to go before it's on the same level as other sciences, I wouldn't be so certain of something from psychology's dark past like IQ.
I blame smartphones. Really I do. My overall ability to focus and consume longform content has gone up dramatically since ditching my phone several months ago.
Maybe set time limits then. Also have an alternative thing to do on your phone if you can't do anything else (like Duolingo or respond to important emails).
Greyscale and no social media did reduce my smartphone consumption a lot. And consulting Instagram / Reddit only on a computer is not a death in itself (plus I use Intention [1] to keep my time on those websites in a normal range.
I’m inching closer and closer to just deleting every app on my phone and tablet except what allows me to take calls, answer emails, and read books. I read so much when I was a kid, with a great deal of focus, but now I feel like I need constant shifting multisensory stimulation. I can hardly get through ten minutes of a movie without pausing to look at my phone. I can’t listen to a podcast without playing a game or something at the same time.
I absolutely feel that I’ve gotten dumber in the last fifteen years.
Technically you can remove Safari from an iPhone the same way you uninstall any app, though I’ve never tried it (yet). Apple added the ability to remove built-in apps a few versions ago.
I suspect it leaves the guts in place, as Safari is used by the OS, but it should remove the ability to use it as an app.
Android is shipped with a number of apps that cannot be removed (or even disabled). Some are Google's, and some are added by the phone manufacturer (e.g. Samsung) and some are added by the carrier (e.g. AT&T) if you buy the phone from the carrier.
If you cannot with your own, you could try with custom ROMs, or through rooting (check the security implications though).
One thing, "to each its own", but I would like to /have/ a web browser on my mobile OS devices: no browser I know does text reflow since very many years, which implies, "there is no browser". Maybe you should really assess the quality of your practices: awareness (of the absurdities) will have you manage your actions differently and accordingly.
That is a USA policy, these studies are of Europeans:
> Norwegian researchers analyzed the IQ scores of Norwegian men born between 1962 and 1991 and found that scores increased by almost 3 percentage points each decade for those born between 1962 to 1975 – but then saw a steady decline among those born after 1975.
> Similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia have demonstrated a similar downward trend in IQ scores, said Ole Rogeberg, a senior research fellow at the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Norway and co-author of the new study.
As many are implicitly noting, there seems to have been an increase of passive consumption of addictive material. Still ongoing (read posts nearby who speak about smartphones as if it were nicotine...)
that was my first instinct as well... that its probably something to do with attention span. a lot of these IQ tests requires considerable focus, for 60-75 minutes. there are studies that show a drop in attention span from the 70's to now. I think we are now at 8 min for the average person.
its that or there is some common particle that is slowly making us dumb (like lead couple decades ago) and we haven't discovered it yet.
It’s a bad hypothesis to argue that someone born in 1985 scored lower in IQ in 2003, than someone born in 1975 scored in 1993, due to a category of devices, for which the first widely adopted was released in 2007.
The smartphone has actually improved my life a lot. I still have the habit of reading 2-3 books a month but as far as my personal experiences with a smartphone. I could be biased cuz I don't use any social media(facebook/insta/snapchat/tiktok) and I have removed all algorithmic feeds from the information I consume. Smartphone is just a big sheet of glass. What you do with it is your choice and it is a very big choice.
I wonder whether we need to take another look at our modern school education system. Maybe some of the things we (rashly?) ditched had some importance that we didn’t realise at the time. Like learning poetry by heart, learning multiplication tables, “old-school” teaching methods that have now fallen out of favour.
While causal factors are not identified, the study ([1]) concludes that the decline is due to environmental factors, and neither to genetics nor to other family-related causes.
It definitely makes the kids worse off. The reason it's "harder" is because the number of complications/birth defects increase exponentially over time. In a few years after age 40, the odds cross from "negligible" to "don't have kids".
> Access to education is currently the most conclusive factor explaining disparities
> in intelligence, according to Ritchie.
That sounds weird. Doesn't that mean they're "measuring intelligence" wrongly, as plenty of people without extensive formal education are extremely intelligent?
eg those same people getting further formal education may indeed score higher on these IQ tests, but the education is in no way changing the persons IQ
Imagine two people own farms. One has very rich soil, full of nutrients, ready to grow amazing crops. The other has thin depleted soil, barely able to support plant life.
The farmer with rich soil has the opportunity to out-produce the other one, but only if he works the land. And the harder he works it, the more productive he will be (up to a point).
Or think of top athletes. Only a few people have the inborn talent to become Olympic champions. But no one becomes an Olympic champion unless they work hard—no matter how talented.
Heritable intelligence is best thought of as a potential. Education can increase a person’s IQ scores for the same reason that working out can increase a person’s athletic performance.
We don’t have a way to directly measure inherited potential in people; we can only measure what they do. Even an IQ test is based on what people do as they take the test.
But also the idea that intelligence is fixed at birth does not align with what we know about brain development. We know the brain develops through early adulthood, and that different life experiences result in physically different brains. While inheritance may put a top-end limit on how intelligent someone can become, it does not necessarily fix intelligence precisely on the IQ scale at birth.
The article insists several times this is not due to genetics, because people with lower IQ don't have more children. This is not true[0]. What the article may want to say is that it's not due exclusively to genetics.
Given fertility is negatively correlated with intelligence, and how hereditary IQ is, it's just a matter of time until IQ declines.
This is not so shocking, how many kids does your typical college professor have before 35, is it 0 or 1?
It also begs the question, who’s really more intelligent? The person who spent their prime years pontificating, or the person who won the evolution game?
> It also begs the question, who’s really more intelligent? The person who spent their prime years pontification, or the person who won the evolution game?
You're right, who's smarter? The people who manage to reproduce thus pass on their genes or the ones that are "too smart" not to?
You could say they're winning, but they are essentially abusing the good-will of society by imposing the care of their offspring onto society instead of caring for them themselves. It may sound bad, but in my mind, purposefully bringing children into the world without security to care for them seems immensely evil and selfish.
The person who won the evolution game only has a more adept ability and grasping, retaining, and applying concepts, especially at high levels. I remember people at University who so easily managed to apprehend abstract concepts while I would struggle for hours. They weren't necessarily more or less intelligent, but they were wired differently and could clearly operate at a higher level.
The article acknowledges this, and says that the major findings is:
- IQ is not as strongly correlated to parents as believed
- IQ is not negatively correlated with fertility
When an article says "we've found evidence against current accepted knowledge" it is not a counter argument to say "Current accepted knowledge says otherwise, therefore you are wrong!"
But we do need better access to the numbers behind both sides in order to participate in the discussion.
I agree you're technically right, however I think the article does everything possible to obscure this fact, see some quotes:
> The research suggests that genes aren’t what’s driving the decline in IQ scores, according to the study, published Monday.
> The causes in IQ increases over time and now the decline is due to environmental factors
> It’s not that dumb people are having more kids than smart people, to put it crudely. It’s something to do with the environment, because we’re seeing the same differences within families
But I agree we need numbers, which was the most important thing the article could've provided.
You gain static intelligence (what you’ve learned) using fluid intelligence (IQ). But learning new things quickly relies on a large body of knowledge to draw from.
Lots of poor people denigrate education. “Street Smart” is considered the only useful knowledge. Lots of these parents literally don’t care if their kids fail out of school (after all, they did too and are “just fine”). These kids never build up that critical knowledge early which nullifies their IQ for life.
Bad diet, abuse, crime, high stress, being raised by a single mother, etc also affect IQ. All these things are pervasive in most poor neighborhoods.
Parents don’t affect initial intelligence as much, but they certainly affect whether that intelligence is squandered.
You hint at this, but it's worth saying it explicitly--folks with lower IQ could out-produce folks with high IQ even without having more kids per-person, as long as they're reproducing at a younger age. If, say, lower IQ people were to have kids at an average age of 23, and higher people have kids at an average age of 33, the lower IQ folks would have twice as many kids over a ~100 year span and 4x as many over ~150 years!
Decades is understating it. The beginning of civilization marks the start of the first downtrend in hominid brain to body ratio. There are a few different theories about why, but I find the systemic one the most plausible. The increase in the complexity of a system comes with a reduction in complexity of the parts.
My suspicion is that having direct access to all information has offloaded some of our cognitive capabilities to our devices. Also, making everything political-- and as such being told what to think about every topic doesn't really help us exercise our critical thinking skills. Maybe we need to "use your brain" more- as my dad would have said.
Are there any credible / non scammy ways to take one of these tests online? I haven't looked much myself but it seemed like they would largely be garbage social media bait, or make you take a long test and ask for money at the end.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] thread> The study not only showed IQ variance between children the same parents, but because the authors had the IQ scores of various parents, it demonstrated that parents with higher IQs tended to have more kids, ruling out the dysgenic fertility theory as a driver of falling IQ scores and highlighting the role of environmental factors instead.
People pick up on the discrepancies, and overstating our confidence early makes it look really bad when it turns out that the results were incorrect.
The Covid pandemic is a great example of this, a lot of extremely sketchy and highly preliminary studies were misrepresented as certainties. It takes many months to produce a solid scientific study, sometimes even years. Yet here we were, a month into the pandemic inundated in studies that simply could not be solid. But they sounded scary, so they made the news. This created the appearance that science kept contradicting itself. One week the virus had a 40% mortality rate, and then next it had 0.1%. What gives, science?
The basic posture of science is "I don't know". If you gloss over that fact because it's scary when science doesn't have answers yet, then what you are communicating isn't science, it's something else, speculation, the party line, I dunno.
Overall the fundamental problem is a basic lack of faith in grown adults to make their own judgements, and a willingness to simplify the message so much that it no longer is good science. If you don't let people be adults, they will be children instead. That is exactly where we are right now.
Were they? I thought they were being represented as the best current understanding, and it was a given that it was a new disease.
Oh, that's nothing. You should have seen the post-WWII era, when the backlash against Science was rooted about efficient new ways of killing people and destroying the environment (both with and without the atomic bomb), and against authoritarians touting Progress while demanding the regimentation of society and destruction of traditional values and ways of life.
Excessive optimism toward science has had fairly detrimental results in the past. Often the problem isn't science itself though.
A trap is that you can't actually derive values from science, because it doesn't provide any -- whatever values you extract from science are those you put in yourself through hidden assumptions. That makes it very easy to lean on science to ostensibly support almost any action through some line of reasoning like "Science shows that if we kill the poor, we'll be able to reduce taxes by 90%. Therefore we should get our guns!" Science doesn't care if our taxes are high or low, it doesn't care if we live or die. Even if the premise about taxes is scientifically correct (I don't know), the conclusion isn't based on science alone.
That's a bit of a parallel to the discussion of lockdowns and masks and so on, while science may be able to answer what effects these have, science can't say we ought to do these things. That requires something else to be added, although sadly the discussion has almost entirely been about what the science says about these things, not the relative worth of saving lives versus individual freedom vs GDP, which is the real discussion.
The article didn't link data so I can't dig in further.
https://personalityanalysistest.com/iq-score/what-is-the-sta...
So many variables here including way the math portion was measured moving to multiple choice in the 1990s when the scores start dropping, hopping on a flight, still skeptical.
Other quick one, all 95% confidence interval on data that moves less than +/- 2.5% either way. I understand confidence interval isn't a straight linear margin of error, it one I'd want to also look at further.
> But more research is needed to better understand other environmental factors thought to be linked to intelligence. Robin Morris, a professor of psychology at Kings College in London who was not involved in Ritchie’s research, suggests that traditional measures of intelligence, such as the IQ test, might be outmoded in today’s fast-paced world of constant technological change.
> “In my view, we need to recognize that as time changes and people are exposed to different intellectual experiences, such as changes in the use of technology, for example social media, the way intelligence is expressed also changes. Educational methods need to adapt to such changes,” Morris said.
IQ tests measure relative to a reference population. So we can speak of the IQ of a person aged 20 born in 1990 on a test where 100 is the average score at age 20 of the population of those born in 1960, etcetera.
Changes in average IQ has been something that has been spoken of in the literature since Flynn was young, back when IQ scores were rising.
So now we need to be really careful about bias in the sample groups.
To say IQ scores are dropping and we don't know why then means to me we don't know what variables were the key drivers of the first groups results so we therefore cannot possibly create a consistent second group to measure against the baseline.
I'm still stuck but I'm often dense and skeptical on these type of analysis.
This is why there are practices around statistics sampling and confidence intervals and whatnot. Of course we can’t exactly recreate, that’s impossible, but we can create samples in a way that the results are generalizable in both the baseline and the comparison. And the results are useful.
I have a friend who says that it’s impossible to know if we can’t sample 100% (“how can we know how it will work in 100 million if we only test in 1000?”) and it’s frustrating how just basic concepts of math and statistics make it hard for them to accept any research.
Another source is the number of clinical cases of mild mental retardation. This will mostly depend on how large the population subgroups with lowest IQ are, but if they are approximately fixed and there's no explosion in assortative mating it would be possible to calculate the true mean from that.
This assumes both classification criteria and testing rates remain constant over time. Both are poor assumptions.
It’s easy to see how such a system can be used to measure a decrease or increase of height over time, even though your normalizing your reporting and even though the markings are irregular.
If you start digging around to see that you're fairly comparing the groups then you'll almost always be able to split hairs. Most statistics outside of a theoretical context are flawed if you poke them hard enough.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryon%27s_Rat_Experiment
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3285
Book III of Odes, Horace circa 20 BC
“Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased … The ordinary spoken language has also steadily coarsened. People used to say ‘raise the carriage shafts’ or ‘trim the lamp wick,’ but people today say ‘raise it’ or ‘trim it.’ When they should say, ‘Let the men of the palace staff stand forth!’ they say, ‘Torches! Let’s have some light!’”
Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness), Yoshida Kenkō 1330 – 1332
I've had increasing trouble reading books for years. It stresses me out, I can't just sit for hours reading, I have things to do. It takes real... something - focus, mindfullness - to actually sit down and think in an explorative way that isn't strictly driven by work.
This isn't that surprising. IQ tests a specific type of intelligence, and we probably don't leverage that sort of intelligence day to day. Instead, we create hyperfocused individuals and build structure and process around them so that they can collaborate. Being generally intelligent and having general problem solving skills is less and less important, or at least we treat it that way.
TBH looking at how the future is going to look like (no not utopia), those general skills seem to be more and more important on the contrary.
Being “too specialized” will hurt society in the end.
I agree and disagree. There are arguments in favor of both sides. Look at what happened in software development alone. Where you were only expected to push basic code before, many employers now expect you to be a flexible mini-IT department on top of having the social skills to communicate with customers and managers. At the same time, they specialized other things to a degree you're now a "dotnet developer", "java developer" etc., as if specializing in that direction was ever the goal of software development / computer science.
My hypothesis is the availability of low quality passive entertainment 24/7 - namely tv - is what leads to iq scores declining.
When did tvs become affordable for everyone, 1970s perhaps?
We've now come into an era where there is also an abundance of information: Pretty much anything you can imagine is just a button-click away.
Young people in particular have to carefully select what information to consume, and there's a whole attention-economy built around wasting people's time, trying to manipulate them into buying shit they don't need.
Humans didn't evolve in such conditions - everything was always scarce. So I think that's why a lot of people have a hard time dealing with it. I believe there's a huge potential market for software that acts in the interest of the user, helping to deal with this abundance of information (pretty much all software that currently exists mainly works to the benefit of the company, in particular ads/data collection). But it doesn't need to be that way. So let's build solutions.
I don't even know what that means. That sounds like they'd be ranked only a tenth of a percent lower than US universities, which doesn't jive with the rest of your point.
QS World University rankings assigns 40% to Academic reputation, and 20% to Citations per faculty, so it's pretty dominant.
Going to University doesn’t affect IQ much, IQ is not learned.
I consider myself a person of average intelligence who learned very early on that preparation can set me ahead of the group.
I practiced interviewing, public speaking, coding, writing, test taking, etc, and it's helped immensely. I mean, most tests tip their hand later, which allows you to go back and revise earlier answers. most writing is formulaic, you just have to find a good example. any system that you are evaluated by can be learned.
To prep for grad entrance exams, I wroke up early every Friday, got ready, drove around, sat down and took a timed practice exam at 930 sharp. all to emulate my Friday 900am exam appointment. I got the score I wanted.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" -- Goodhart's Law
I have never seen anyone I would consider really smart who took these tests seriously.
His premise is that higher education offers little to no value. What theoretical value a higher education might provide is squandered because people are too busy living their lives, namely working to make ends meet, in order to leverage it. This certainly has proven true economically as we can see that incomes held stagnant through the rise of post-secondary attainment, contrary to assumptions of the past that speculated that college graduates would be able to earn more as a result of having a higher education. Similarly, and perhaps related to, he posits the features tested by IQ are not being practiced because people are too busy to carry out that practice.
ther are a usually few general courses (civics, economics, etc) at every undergrad, but these are usually low quality, mostly useless, and absolutely dwarfed by the usual introductory classes (usual STEM for STEM, etc)
for example https://offertaformativa-unitn-it.translate.goog/it/l/inform...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...
Also curious what you mean by thinking of education as an investment being part of the problem. What is the problem, and why does framing education as investment contribute? Are you talking about purely financial forms of investment? Education is widely viewed as social, cultural investment by society, as well as economic investment, and this is widely agreed to be a good thing, isn’t it? At the personal level, education is also viewed as a career & future financial security investment, and this also seems reasonable, no? I feel like the most important investment my education bought me was the freedom to choose my career path over time. Had I not gone to university, I do believe my choices would be more constrained than they are today.
IQ tests mostly measure the hardware part (pattern recognition, working memory, spatial reasoning, attention to detail, speed, focus, reasoning about abstract rules)
the software part is mostly about applied epistemological rationality, how good one's life strategy is, and how well one can execute that. (of course there's a hardware component to this too. someone with good emotional resilience, low neuroticism, high self-motivation achieves things with relative ease given the opportunities)
then there's a measurement problem. if someone is taught the importance of attention to detail since they were very little, taught to control their emotions better (eg. boredom), then they will likely score better on the hardware test too.
that said our collective knowledge is much greater than decades ago, our teaching methods are better too, but alas not everyone received the same top quality teaching.
plus there is a big issue with the curriculum. most people are tragicomically underskilled in dealing with themselves and other people, hence they are bad at recognizing and solving problems that brutally impact their lives (and the lives of those around them).
aaand of course there's the plain old resource availability problem (everyone inherits, the question is what. advantaged people get advantages with very high probability, disadvantaged people get disadvantages...)
and reading does develop a certain sort of intelligence that is important and is very useful...I saw my own youthful reading and its good effects in the computer science classes that I passed and where 80% of the class just could not do the work...intelligence counts....when you spend your youth reading books for hours a time, year in and year out, your brain grows "smart muscles"...and that makes it easier to focus on difficult problems...
I saw a lack of that sort of intelligence when I worked for a large government agency and when people lacking in that sort of intelligence made a huge mess of designing the business processes for that agency...intelligence counts...
society at large and especially those at the top pretend that intelligence no longer matters...but they are wrong...
> and one reason why we read more was that television was just not as good as it is today...
I feel like there's a little disconnect between these two statements. It's not that television is taking priority, it's that the times when people used to break out a book -- that they carried in their back pocket or purse! -- now break out their phones and engage with social media, or they check their work email, or respond to slack messages, or they get involved in texting, or they play some video game just to make the time go faster. I suppose some of them put in headphones and watch Netflix, but I don't see that often, to be honest.
The world has gotten so busy and defaulting to 'on' that no one feels they can default to reading a book, but you can. You just have to decide to carry a book and, instead of breaking out a phone at those times to stay connected, you just let yourself be disconnected, and you read a book. Or meditate.
That's how I go about my life, and frankly I don't understand why more people don't. I never use my phone unless it's an emergency. I get a lot more out of life meditating and reading books than checking my email, playing candy crush, and engaging with twitter.
I've experienced this as well, and the only solution I have found is to take periodic breaks from my phone and all social media. Within a day or two of minimizing phone use that natural curiosity and desire to learn and motivation to read reemerges.
The 10 years and many loans it took to get through bachelor's and PhD were the best and most important investment I made in myself to get out of the factories and warehouses and into an office with great pay, and oh incidentally an amazing job.
Moreover it's painfully easy to exploit your way through especially if you're already rich. Just go doctor shopping with Mommy so you can get a 504 and accomodations and stimulant medications.
If it selected for adaptation the curriculum would be different, things like figuring out the area of a circle using given materials, not abstract shit. If it selected for intelligence there would br a huge battery of exceptions, handicaps for the working class kids, because they have to put in way more effort than the kids living with their parents who are unemployed, likewise with non-traditionals.
I cannot fathom a successful professional that does not balance 'I must innovate the sysyem even if it hurts me' against 'I will work within this system for my own personal benefit by providing exactly what is requested of me'
https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/504faq.html
Is this being abused?
- Rich people can painfully easily exploit something to make their ROI much higher
- That something can be an immensely valuable investment for the non-rich
> a certain amount of wading-through-the-bullwhip tenacity (useless but mandatory curriculum -> non-questioning serf mentality)
And I think a lot of people (though not me and maybe not you) would find that that is a good description of attributes employers would like. And for many people the point of a college degree is appealing to employers rather than proving oneself to be intelligent.
While I see your point - a whole lot of people do have salary increases over a 10 year span - a whole lot of jobs people want require "X piece of paper for Y years of experience" and you cannot get that experience to begin with without either 1) the piece of paper or 2) knowing someone.
bls.gov tells a more complete story, in that machine operators make significantly less and job openings grow at a significantly lower rate than software, aerospace, robotics, and AI specialists, many of which require a degree, (and the siccessful outliers are not worth pushing as a good model for the 90%)
I can't say there wasn't a different, even a better road to some measure of success and an enjoyable career, but I can say this path was a miracle of positive life changes for me and every penny of debt I pay back to the fed is absolutely a victory lap.
Me too. But I read way more than I read when I devoured scores of books. I just do it in the web browser.
I always had very short temper with books. If the book didn't captivate me with first few pages it never got read by me. I just moved to another one.
I always really liked anthologies of short stories, because amount of the ideas to amount of text was the best there. Way better than when the author stretched just a handful ideas into a novel.
So now, with internet filled with so many interesting texts I have real trouble with books, because my short temper got even shorter. I also know a lot more of the ideas than I did when I was younger so it's hard to encounter something novel to me. So a book, that's captivating, dense and novel is really a hard find. And others get ditched by me at some, usually very early, stage. I just have even less patience for them than I had ever before.
Some of my favourite time with two of my friends is going to a bar or restaurant in the afternoon and reading together. The tradeoff is I watch less TV and have basically disengaged from social media. But that’s more than worth it to me.
> Higher education has never been a worse investment.
While I realize you’re talking about social investment here, the idea that TV and media are better investments of your time than earning a degree seems problematic at best. TV & media will, generally speaking, not help you get a better career, right?
The Fed has published very recent stats in the US that people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income of people without a degree. I previously suspected it was slightly higher, like maybe 10 or 20 percent, and I felt like that would be a big number, but the fact that it’s double across everyone in America is massive, and a bit mind blowing to me. The income gap is 3x if you get an advanced degree. That seems like a pretty good investment, doesn’t it?
Worrying about 15 years is short-sighted too, that’s not very long. If you pay it off in 15 years, and then you have 2x the income of someone who didn’t go to school, you’re 35 making great money and in a job with better prospects and mobility than if you didn’t have debt but took a job that didn’t require a degree. This is, of course, statistically speaking. Some people do manage to do very well without a degree, but it’s pretty important to understand that it’s not even close to the average outcome.
My personal experience with student debt was that it got me a job out of college that paid well enough that I paid off my student loans much faster than I’d anticipated. I thought it was going to be 10 years, but it was more like 3. (To be fair I didn’t borrow that much, and cost of college has been rising faster than inflation ever since I graduated.)
I don’t see a lot of reason not to invest in education. The fear that it might not pay off doesn’t (for me anyway) push back that much on the strength of the nationwide correlation between degrees and high income.
I’m a little sad about reducing it just to money too, education is an investment in other ways too. When done well, it can be time spent gaining knowledge, investigating history, helping people understand more of the context of what’s happening here and now. Education provides freedom to explore, both now while you’re studying, and in the future with your career. I don’t have a lot of belief in the idea that the opportunity cost is too high.
What other investment at that age has a better expected ROI?
The way the information is presented implies causation. Get a degree, earn twice as much.
There’s been a ton of study of the question of whether people succeed because of the skills they gained working on the degree versus the credentialism of just having a degree. The answer across many papers is that it’s a healthy mix of both, that there is a large component of causality (getting a degree leads to success) as well as a large component in the other direction (being smart & driven leads to getting a degree).
Do note that a wide swath of our economy is based on jobs that require a degree, and are not based on being “successful” with or without. It’s not a fair playing field where there’s equal opportunity to people without degrees. A big part of the income gap happens because our system is setup to reward degree earners, and so it’s guaranteed to be at least partly causal.
Also really important to pay more attention to what actually happens as opposed to what could happen theoretically. Yes people might succeed with or without degrees, but how often does that actually happen? There are some amazing and compelling anecdotes, but ignoring the stats is a bad idea if you’re trying to decide whether to go to college or not.
Look at patents in the US as an example of how people might succeed with or without a degree. There is no degree requirement and nothing stopping people from inventing without a higher education, nonetheless the overwhelming majority of patent holders have degrees, the majority are advanced degrees beyond bachelor.
https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/most_inventors_have_g...
I feel like the better measure would be comparing their productivity, rather than the base rate at which society, on average, appears to value degrees.
Productivity could be seen as the social return for a social (tax based) investment in education, and indeed we do measure things like GDP and compare nations on a global scale. In that sense, education appears to be a good investment socially. Countries that have high rates of education also have high GDP.
Aside from that, unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to measure “productivity”. You might want to take a stab at trying to define what that even means for people in various careers. It’s easy to measure the productivity of factory workers, but insanely hard to measure productivity for doctors or writers or advertisers or nearly any white collar job. Is productivity measured by how much output there is, regardless of quality? Is productivity measured by how much money exchanges hands? These things could be even worse than valuing education, no?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with requiring that a job applicant meet minimum standards, in fact most people are wildly in favor of requirements when it comes to, say, doctors & lawyers, not to mention our infrastructure designers and safety inspectors, etc.. It’s certainly within the purview of the employer to define those requirements, and okay for them to require some well rounded ness and non-vocational skills, right?
The selection effect has, like I mentioned earlier, been studied extensively, and many researchers have come to the conclusion that despite the credentialism, college degrees also do impart useful knowledge and skills on the degree holders, even when attempting to adjust for many possible confounding factors such as family income, family education, and the filtering weight of the credential system. It’s not that hard to accept that the majority of people who spend 4 or more years trying to learn actually do learn something and achieve some general skills, right?
It’s complicated, but I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing that society & business widely agree to allow the bachelor’s degree to represent a certain level of preparedness. Yes, it’s a wildly blunt measure, often inaccurate, and it may be commonly misinterpreted too, since we’re really talking about minimum standards, and not a measure of skill, but I see reasons why the state of things might have evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a first approximation.
I'm not assuming this. I have independent reason to consider universities to be corrupt, extractive institutions. This is downstream of their oligopolistic position wrt the labor market, but a hypothetical set of less-evil institutions than our current universities would still be an efficiency problem to be solved.
The early steps places like Google have taken towards accepting certification programs are an example of (attempting to) cleanly separate the value that a degree confers, without cutting off access to large swathes of the population or condemning them to mountains of debt.
Ie, there's a lot of signal in degrees, but there's a LOT of noise, and there's a massive amount of economic and moral value in finding better-quality signal.
> I see reasons why the state of things might have evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a first approximation
Yes, I hope this comment makes it clear that I'm not assuming that degrees are literally useless for hiring. But that is an extremely low bar, and I think it's similarly difficult to justify the claim that degrees are a remotely efficient bar for a big chunk of what they're currently used for.
I grew up rich enough that I was able to deeply enjoy four years of intellectual exploration and partying, but that's cold comfort for the people locked out from being a firefighter or starting medical school or a thousand other productive pursuits, because they couldn't surmount the barrier of an additional tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars that the inefficient degree requirement confers.
This isn't just theoretical: the choking-off of opportunity is IMO a massive tragedy relative to a world that was less enamored with the degree. That doesn't suggest we can simply burn the job market's credentialism down, but we can be clear-eyed about the current system's flaws and set our headings correctly for incremental change.
Thank you for providing measured, balanced, and considered explanations, expansions, and clarifications.
First rate.
From the article:
> [Article] These environmental factors could include changes in the education system and media environment, nutrition, reading less and being online more, Rogeberg said.
> [Article] The earlier rise in IQ scores follows the “Flynn effect,” a term for the long-term increase in intelligence levels that occurred during the 20th century, arguably the result of better access to education, according to Stuart Ritchie, a postdoctoral fellow in cognitive ageing at the University of Edinburgh whose research explores IQ scores and intelligence and who was not involved in the new study.
> [Article] Access to education is currently the most conclusive factor explaining disparities in intelligence, according to Ritchie. In a separate study that has not been released, he and his colleagues looked at existing research in an effort to demonstrate that staying in school longer directly equates to higher IQ scores.
> While I realize you’re talking about social investment here, the idea that TV and media are better investments of your time than earning a degree seems problematic at best. TV & media will, generally speaking, not help you get a better career, right?
I'm saying that higher education has never been a worse investment. Not that it's a bad investment. It's just higher risk and higher cost than ever.
> The Fed has published very recent stats in the US that people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income of people without a degree.
That's really tiny considering that it costs 4 years of income + potentially a huge amount of debt with serious compounding interest.
> That seems like a pretty good investment, doesn’t it?
It seems like it can be a fine investment for some people. If you're rich and won't take on debt it's a great investment.
I'd really like to see a breakdown by major and institution. I don't think going and getting just any 4 year degree is going to make you a success.
So don't. Read little bits here and there as you get a chance. I frequently read a few pages while I'm waiting for people to get ready, stuck in waiting rooms or sometimes in a slow moving queue.
Paperbacks travel just fine.
That's literally the opposite of what any empirical research on IQ shows.
I've seen many of the claim correlations of IQ with "success" like career trajectories, divorce rates, better health and longevity, etc.. However, I've yet to see any strong correlations. Does IQ have a correlation stronger than 0.5 with anything?
IIRC, I am pretty sure parental income, or lack thereof, is a better predictor of "success" than IQ.
My understanding is that IQ researchers invented a lot of the statistical techniques used across the social sciences today, and I think faired the "reproducibility crisis" fairly well. It's about as empirical as the social sciences get.
> I've seen many of the claim correlations of IQ with "success" like career trajectories, divorce rates, better health and longevity, etc.. However, I've yet to see any strong correlations. Does IQ have a correlation stronger than 0.5 with anything?
0.5 correlation is pretty big in the social sciences. I mean, think about: there are probably hundreds or thousands of factors that influence your life outcome. Much of the differences we see tends to come down to what researchers call "non-shared environment", which is just a fancy term for all the random stuff that happens in your life.
For a single factor to have such a large effect is pretty amazing.
> IIRC, I am pretty sure parental income, or lack thereof, is a better predictor of "success" than IQ.
A lot of which can be explained by the parents' IQ.
IQ doesn't explain everything, not by a long shot. It just explains more than any other single factor, and should generally be something researchers should control for whenever they attempt to measure some other phenomenon.
Reading books. So at Stanford nobody watched TV. I think later Netflix, a bit. The only time I knew a peer was watching television was some girls in my dorm getting together to watch Gossip Girl, and only that. Just that show. And it was a very abnormal thing, nobody else anything at all. Keep in mind you can play eg Super Smash Bros at the library, there's a video game section in the library and you can play video games if you want. You can try out new titles. I did that.
If you watch TV, you won't get into Stanford, basically.
The ideas and ideals of Asian academics produced very strong results, but were not unassailable. And in this case there was adherence to tradition, sticking to what works, so the ideas and ideals were similar to other East Asian cultures. So generalization was possible, at a first approximation.
Well there's differences but they are hidden from first view, so for instance there's differences in study habits between North and South Choson Korea, the North students were systematically were scored adversarially but passed the Confucian Exam all the more. Those Koreans from the North (especially in the most mountainous regions) were doing exactly what Asian students are doing now in American Universities: "the more you push us down, the stronger we'll be, and the more success we will attain, the tighter the quota the more we'll fuck the quota."
Same goes for Jews before the Holocaust. Hard, hardcore, especially with medical schools, I heard a story of Columbia (or NYU?) medical school refusing their own college valedictorian just because he was a Jew. Simple as that.
But then...it got watered down, unconstitutional, I don't know, things just ain't the same. Still work like fuck, but...just not the same desperation. The muse that helped me most.
The best muse.
Yes, I thought it was explicit in the conversation that we're talking about averages. The claim that spatial intelligence is European also doesn't mean an eg individual black person should feel disadvantaged in the realm of spatial intelligence.
So it sounds like these are things that make no money but Africans can be good at but that's just a glitch in the economy. For instance an American President really has to be very very frosty. 10 Hertz at least. In that capacity Barack Obama Jr. was among the best presidents, perhaps the best in clock speed. Yeah his policy persecuted me from the first month to the absolute end of his term, but I can still look at the bigger picture. Trump also, look at him in the Ali G show DVD, that's how frosty he is. Steve Jobs, and Ross Perot. Ross Perot outclocking Steve Jobs, Perot would have made a great president. I would say faster than Obama or Trump.
There's other forms of intelligence too. Like tied to the senses. Intuition. Having beautiful dreams, doesn't matter if they're forgotten when awaking. Autism obviously, but that's too easy. Mental retardation, in particular in how dead on it makes them on the straight and narrow, that's a priceless blessing.
Because the only real worth of a person is if they're good, and not bad. There is nothing else.
Intelligence is ability to build mental models that predict reality. If you see a lightning strike, build a correct mental model of it and use it to create electricity to power a light bulb - that's intelligence. But cracking a clever joke about the lightning strike that rhymes with something doesn't need intelligence - that's a purely mechanical skill.
Intuition is a very different quality. If intelligence lets you build a somewhat accurate map of reality, intuition is a bird's eye view of that reality.
All my money. I can only see it in the reflections off eyeballs. Not even in the mirror. It's a spectator of spectator sport.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/oh6115/perf...
At the least I’d like to see something like an instrumental variables analysis.
Education absolutely increases IQ test scores but wether its an increase in intelligence itself whatever that may be is questionable.
There is some alignment between IQ tests and academic work; an academic background gives you a few tricks for solving those kinds of problems.
It's also not just the case that the "bottom is being raised", but also that the whole distribution was shifting.
I think these kinds of things make it unlikely education is explaining at least the rise part of the curve. To the extent the fall is in a subset of these types of measures of settings it also might not be (but it could be).
The more recent decline has been less well-documented although there are multiple studies using multiple measures that have shown this, so I believe it is a trend at least in some regions of the world (developed, western). I have a fuzzy memory that the decline is stronger with verbal measures (as opposed to nonverbal) but I might be misremembering that.
Education is strongly related to IQ/g/general cognitive ability but they're not perfectly correlated. I think when I looked this up a week ago or so, the best estimates were like 0.50 in a general population sample.
Clinically a discrepancy between IQ and educational achievement is important, as it points to someone not getting resources they need etc.
So yes, they're related, and yes, education could explain general population trends over time, but no they're not the same.
"I'm not sure what an I.Q. is. Dr. Nemur said it was something that measured how intelligent you were--like a scale in the drugstore weighs pounds. But Dr. Strauss had a big argument with him and said an I.Q. didn't weigh intelligence at all. He said an I.Q. showed how much intelligence you could get, like the numbers on the outside of a measuring cup. You still had to fill the cup up with stuff."
Maybe that stuff is education.
And it turns out that IQ mean quite a lot, no matter which way you believe the causality goes.
The fact that IQ test scores are somewhat useful as a ranking mechanism amongst a cohort is completely consistent with it being just being a collection of standardised tests calibrated to score in a particular way, not an actual "thing" where apparent subtle generational changes might represent genuine changes to our physiology or intellectual potential and not just inconsequential differences in our preparedness to solve paper puzzles.
Sure, except it strongly correlates with pretty much every single measure of fluid intelligence you can think of. And with a billion real life outcomes, besides.
It just so happens that the best statistical distillation of intelligence measures happens to take the form of "paper puzzles". We can, I guess, do a 12 hour barrage of 50 different intelligence tests, but what's the point, when one does the job.
>So two hypotheses
There are plenty of other hypotheses.
Sure, test scores correlate with other test scores (surprisingly badly) which correlate with other proxy measures of intelligence. Quelle surprise!
There's a massive difference between acknowledging a test is somewhat useful in ranking peers and agonising over whether one cohort getting scores in a particular test a couple of points lower than another cohort from a completely different background represents some real world shortcoming of the latter cohort in anything other than that particular set of puzzles. The research establishing a lack of support for supposed "dysgenic" trends (though absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence) because the drop happens within families might be superficially interesting, but we're looking at tiny points of difference in a noisy series. There's typically more variation between Weschler and Raven tests adminstered to the same individuals than the measured generational "IQ decline" the headline is encouraging us to agonise over. When all the points of data other than IQ tests suggest that subsequent generations haven't struggled intellectually compared with their forebears, there's not much reason to suspect the trends in paper puzzle scores are a signal and not just noise.
And while IQ is not too much related to education, we let kids do what ever, when ever for a so call peace of mind, so yeah a kid who is never challenged can't have broad skills. I would dare to say that video games are saving IQ scores but for all the wrong reasons (fast pattern recognition and spacial movement related tests).
So in my mind it's a welcome change.
If the number doesnt have any rigorous meaning then who cares if it changes, up or down, could mean anything.
I concede most people don't actively train for IQ tests, especially not people who only have to do it once. But one can't exactly claim "IQ tests are flawless measures of IQ" when they can be trained and gamed, which is the point.
This is false. Look a this reddit post[1] for a summary of the scientific consensus.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/oh6115/perf...
The reddit post just shows that some (maybe even a majority of) psychologists accept IQ. I could post an equal amount of links to psychology studies rejecting it. But that doesn't even matter. What's more important is that the field of psychology as a whole is still in it's infancy as a science. Up until about the 90's almost 100% of it was pure bunk. Psychologists were using the DSM up until only a couple of years ago! Recently there has been the revelation of the reproducibility crisis. In short, psychology has a long way to go before it's on the same level as other sciences, I wouldn't be so certain of something from psychology's dark past like IQ.
A phone is what you make of it.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/intention-stop-min...
I absolutely feel that I’ve gotten dumber in the last fifteen years.
I suspect it leaves the guts in place, as Safari is used by the OS, but it should remove the ability to use it as an app.
No idea about android.
One thing, "to each its own", but I would like to /have/ a web browser on my mobile OS devices: no browser I know does text reflow since very many years, which implies, "there is no browser". Maybe you should really assess the quality of your practices: awareness (of the absurdities) will have you manage your actions differently and accordingly.
> Norwegian researchers analyzed the IQ scores of Norwegian men born between 1962 and 1991 and found that scores increased by almost 3 percentage points each decade for those born between 1962 to 1975 – but then saw a steady decline among those born after 1975.
> Similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia have demonstrated a similar downward trend in IQ scores, said Ole Rogeberg, a senior research fellow at the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Norway and co-author of the new study.
its that or there is some common particle that is slowly making us dumb (like lead couple decades ago) and we haven't discovered it yet.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718793115
That sounds weird. Doesn't that mean they're "measuring intelligence" wrongly, as plenty of people without extensive formal education are extremely intelligent?
eg those same people getting further formal education may indeed score higher on these IQ tests, but the education is in no way changing the persons IQ
The farmer with rich soil has the opportunity to out-produce the other one, but only if he works the land. And the harder he works it, the more productive he will be (up to a point).
Or think of top athletes. Only a few people have the inborn talent to become Olympic champions. But no one becomes an Olympic champion unless they work hard—no matter how talented.
Heritable intelligence is best thought of as a potential. Education can increase a person’s IQ scores for the same reason that working out can increase a person’s athletic performance.
We don’t have a way to directly measure inherited potential in people; we can only measure what they do. Even an IQ test is based on what people do as they take the test.
But also the idea that intelligence is fixed at birth does not align with what we know about brain development. We know the brain develops through early adulthood, and that different life experiences result in physically different brains. While inheritance may put a top-end limit on how intelligent someone can become, it does not necessarily fix intelligence precisely on the IQ scale at birth.
Given fertility is negatively correlated with intelligence, and how hereditary IQ is, it's just a matter of time until IQ declines.
This is not so shocking, how many kids does your typical college professor have before 35, is it 0 or 1?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
You're right, who's smarter? The people who manage to reproduce thus pass on their genes or the ones that are "too smart" not to?
- IQ is not as strongly correlated to parents as believed
- IQ is not negatively correlated with fertility
When an article says "we've found evidence against current accepted knowledge" it is not a counter argument to say "Current accepted knowledge says otherwise, therefore you are wrong!"
But we do need better access to the numbers behind both sides in order to participate in the discussion.
> The research suggests that genes aren’t what’s driving the decline in IQ scores, according to the study, published Monday.
> The causes in IQ increases over time and now the decline is due to environmental factors
> It’s not that dumb people are having more kids than smart people, to put it crudely. It’s something to do with the environment, because we’re seeing the same differences within families
But I agree we need numbers, which was the most important thing the article could've provided.
You gain static intelligence (what you’ve learned) using fluid intelligence (IQ). But learning new things quickly relies on a large body of knowledge to draw from.
Lots of poor people denigrate education. “Street Smart” is considered the only useful knowledge. Lots of these parents literally don’t care if their kids fail out of school (after all, they did too and are “just fine”). These kids never build up that critical knowledge early which nullifies their IQ for life.
Bad diet, abuse, crime, high stress, being raised by a single mother, etc also affect IQ. All these things are pervasive in most poor neighborhoods.
Parents don’t affect initial intelligence as much, but they certainly affect whether that intelligence is squandered.