This is just statistics. Those 3 things are distinct things in statistical parlance. The 112 number is the sample mean of a given sample. The 100 is the estimate of the population mean.
If you give a subset of a population an IQ test, the average of all those results isn't going to be exactly 100, because sample means differ from population means due to sheer noise not to mention sampling bias. You might get 98 or 112. Assuming no bias (such as selection bias), the expected value of the sample mean will asymptote to 100 as you increase the sample size.
Likewise if you measure the average height of a group of people, you may get a sample mean of 5'9.6, but it won't be exactly 5'10 or whatever the population mean happens to be in the country at large, again due to noise or sampling bias.
I think it has more to do with the very low quality of remote instruction.
Zoom and friends are generally speaking a terrible way to teach children. The medium is more or less limited to auditory and visual learning. With some preparation and parental involvement you can do some hands on learning, but it is much more limited than in a classroom.
The average IQ is 100 by definition. Any time you see someone claiming the average IQ is something other than 100, they either don't know what they're talking about, or they are trying to deceive you about something.
This is also why people who say that the average IQ has been rising or falling over time are mistaken.
IQ doesn't really mean what most people think it means. What it really means has been a matter of disagreement ever since it was introduced, but it is a poor proxy for "intelligence" at best, and can't be used to compare intelligence differences over time.
Because the scale itself shifts over time. For the sake of argument, let's say that IQ really does measure "intelligence".
By the definition of the IQ scale, 100 is always whatever the average intelligence is. So the average intelligence of people in the 1960s was 100. Let's say people have become dumber (or smarter, doesn't matter) in the time since then -- the average IQ of people now is still 100.
How much absolute intelligence "100" represents now is not the same as how much intelligence "100" represented then. IQ is about measuring differences in populations at a moment in time. It is not suitable for (or intended to) measure differences over time.
You didn't answer my question. Above, you said that IQ tests cannot compare intelligence differences over time and I asked why. The fact that the average is always normalized to 100 doesn't make your statement true. Researchers can simply not normalize it to see the difference over time.
There's a good reason that IQ works the way it does -- it's because IQ tests are affected by lots of things other than intelligence, and those things are not constant over time. How well you do on an IQ test is affected by societal factors, for instance.
This goes back to why I said that IQ tests are a poor proxy for intelligence at best. IQ test do not measure intelligence (there's not even any consensus on what "intelligence" actually is, and if you don't know what it is, it's pretty hard to measure). IQ tests measure competency in things that roughly orbit intelligence, but are also influenced by your cultural upbringing, your socioeconomic status, and even strange things like what type of thinking (not how good it is) your brain happens to engage in.
The one thing that IQ seems to correlate well to is how well you'll do in college. But even there, the correlation is pretty loose.
> Is this because increase social media/internet use?
This was the first thought that came to mind, and I also wonder if this goes further to increased media consumption and phone use/dependence across the board.
Smartphone adoption and use was already on a hockey stick trajectory, but adding lockdown to the mix added to many people’s screen time massively. And for kids growing up in that setting, learning that knowledge comes from these magical slabs of glass seems like a good way to stunt certain kinds of curiosity quite early.
To whatever degree phone and social media use is a factor, it does seem highly likely that lockdowns accelerated/magnified this effect.
yup, according to my anecdata, every waking moment is now spent at the screen and it's impossible to change because there are no interests outside of that.
If the difference between the 2012 and 2020 cohorts is roughly the same as between the 2012 and 2002 cohorts, why should I suspect this isn't just a failure to pick comparable cohorts across the decades?
So the main opposition to Labour should be dismissed off hand?
The conflation of 'the political left's perception of reality' with 'the truth' is outrageous, and nothing more than an attempt to delegitimize views that conflict with the political left's agenda, which corresponds with polls showing in the US, registered Democrats are increasingly gravitating toward authoritarianism:
The evidence for harm from lockdowns is at this point overwhelming, but this issue has become so politicized that the worst policy decision perhaps in history is being swept under the rug.
Absent a feasible zero-COVID strategy, which for most countries was never in the books due to their geographical situation, lockdowns have been found to have virtually no impact on reducing the spread of COVID.
Criticising the Telegraph has nothing to do with dismissing the opposition to the Labour party. If anybody’s IQ dropped significantly after 2012, it is the target readership of this paper, that went from being a respectable newspaper to a news outlet peddling anti-immigrant, anti-eu and, more recently, anti-lockdown rhetoric.
It has become a Daily Mail with slightly less idiotic headlines and more conventional graphics, with a mission to get Johnson back to Number 10. I don’t think it is by chance that they decided to publish Hancock’s irrelevant leaks the day after Sunak solved the problems that Johnson created in Northern Ireland.
>>Criticising the Telegraph has nothing to do with dismissing the opposition to the Labour party.
The OP specifically mentioned being pro-Tory
"a mouth piece for Tory anti-lockdown "reporters"
And the fact that you also list a number of Tory positions that they support, including the opposition to lockdowns, as if it's self-evident that holding those positions disqualifies them as a respectable source, is exactly what I'm talking about.
It is true that they are a mouth piece for the Tory party, particularly for Boris Johnson. It is also true that they are not a respectable source since at least 2014, when they started publishing idiocies such as:
Finally, it is also a fact that they are currently a mounth piece for anti-lockdown "reporters". We put that in quotes because (1) none of them would be able to understand any of the random papers they cherrypick and (2) they actively contributed to Johnson's electoral campaign in 2019, knowing that he would make a mess (as he did with lockdowns and covid management).
None of that addresses my point, which is that implicit in your argument is the premise that being pro-Tory, or supporting Tory positions like opposing lockdowns, makes one not respectable.
A lot of this stuff was really politicized so yes, I believe it's possible to be anti-lockdown for bad reasons. This doesn't seem to be the case with this study though.
At some point most covid-related conversations departed the realm of logic and turned into a sort of religious/political war, which also caused a bunch of people say things they didn't believe or care about just to score some points for themselves.
My "favorite" one was that if, in 2020, you for one second doubted that it was some mysterious bats, some people automatically labelled you as a conspiracy theorist and possibly racist. I think those people behaved that way not because of logic but because of hysteria or some other motives of their own. Now the lab leak theory is often described as a likely candidate (to me as a layperson it was the most likely explanation from day one when i read about gain of function research), it's a mainstream point of view published by Bloomberg and for some reason no longer considered tinfoil or racist, probably because you can't score too many political points bashing it anymore.
Similarly, some people made a point to violate or otherwise shit on every single covid precaution not because of some firm scientific beliefs but just to piss people off and potentially score some PR points. That doesn't make me love the lockdowns, but there was plenty of sad behavior all around.
> Similarly, some people made a point to violate or otherwise shit on every single covid precaution not because of some firm scientific beliefs but just to piss people off and potentially score some PR points.
There's plenty of grifting on every side these days. Let's just ignore that.
But the core of the issue is a question about whether scientists have the right to settle political disputes about what we should do.
We argue that they do not. Science tries to tell us what is, but political will decides what ought to be done.
We argued that the government has no moral right to confine us to our homes, regardless of the circumstances. - this was a decision for individuals.
In our society, we treat scientists (or people who pose as scientists) as truth tellers ("trust the science") - an all-knowing priestly caste. However, this never was a scientific question. There's no science experiment that says the police should have harrassed people for sunbathing in the park. It was a political decision. We're not ruled by scientists - as we have seen, for very good reason.
Now of course, there are widespread problems in science: the reproducibility crisis, financial corruption, social bias, overselling speculative findings, overselling speculative models, mid-wit interpretations etc. - and for these reasons, a person who adopts a "non-scientific" frame often has superior predictive and interpretive powers to someone who "trusts the science". This is why the "conspiracy theorists" keep getting proven right over and over.
The lab leak theory was always extremely credible, but it was dismissed because it was a way to own the "basket of deplorables", and because it called into question the competance of the medical establishment.
True, but it is not opinion, and is reporting results contained in a paper. The reporting itself looks pretty even handed. (For example, paragraph 5 reads, "At the same time, the results do not prove a direct link between lockdowns and a drop in intelligence among school children.")
The paper itself also looks comprehensive (a French academic partnership, without conflicting interests if the paper's disclosure statement is to be taken at face value). A more substantive conclusion would need quite some reading.
As a parent, is a hugely disappointing finding. It's not appropriate to dismiss it simply on the basis of it being reported in the Telegraph.
It will hopefully be a catalyst for further work, and inform future NPI-based responses.
It's a little known fact among the MENSA populace that IQ varies across your lifetime, too. Friend of a friend did IQ testing 4 times. First time failed, second time succeeded, third time failed, fourth time succeeded...
I feel like that's a stronger indicator in test inconsistency rather than anything about the mysterious quality that they are attempting to measure.
Similarly I have always felt that it's strange that SATs get changed periodically but then compared en masse across generations routinely, makes little sense to me.
Without reading the article nor being an expert in intelligence (but hey, I'm a certified HN commenter), probably the reduced stimulation (reduced interaction with friends and the wider world outside the home) is what was detrimental to intelligence development.
To use an extreme comparison, children who were locked up in basements also come out being less mentally capable than their peers.
46 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadhttps://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Edit: Also, how can the average IQ be 112? I thought it was always 100?
Sample mean (112) != population mean (unknowable) != an estimate of the population mean (100)
If you give a subset of a population an IQ test, the average of all those results isn't going to be exactly 100, because sample means differ from population means due to sheer noise not to mention sampling bias. You might get 98 or 112. Assuming no bias (such as selection bias), the expected value of the sample mean will asymptote to 100 as you increase the sample size.
Likewise if you measure the average height of a group of people, you may get a sample mean of 5'9.6, but it won't be exactly 5'10 or whatever the population mean happens to be in the country at large, again due to noise or sampling bias.
Zoom and friends are generally speaking a terrible way to teach children. The medium is more or less limited to auditory and visual learning. With some preparation and parental involvement you can do some hands on learning, but it is much more limited than in a classroom.
This is also why people who say that the average IQ has been rising or falling over time are mistaken.
IQ doesn't really mean what most people think it means. What it really means has been a matter of disagreement ever since it was introduced, but it is a poor proxy for "intelligence" at best, and can't be used to compare intelligence differences over time.
By the definition of the IQ scale, 100 is always whatever the average intelligence is. So the average intelligence of people in the 1960s was 100. Let's say people have become dumber (or smarter, doesn't matter) in the time since then -- the average IQ of people now is still 100.
How much absolute intelligence "100" represents now is not the same as how much intelligence "100" represented then. IQ is about measuring differences in populations at a moment in time. It is not suitable for (or intended to) measure differences over time.
There's a good reason that IQ works the way it does -- it's because IQ tests are affected by lots of things other than intelligence, and those things are not constant over time. How well you do on an IQ test is affected by societal factors, for instance.
This goes back to why I said that IQ tests are a poor proxy for intelligence at best. IQ test do not measure intelligence (there's not even any consensus on what "intelligence" actually is, and if you don't know what it is, it's pretty hard to measure). IQ tests measure competency in things that roughly orbit intelligence, but are also influenced by your cultural upbringing, your socioeconomic status, and even strange things like what type of thinking (not how good it is) your brain happens to engage in.
The one thing that IQ seems to correlate well to is how well you'll do in college. But even there, the correlation is pretty loose.
This was the first thought that came to mind, and I also wonder if this goes further to increased media consumption and phone use/dependence across the board.
Smartphone adoption and use was already on a hockey stick trajectory, but adding lockdown to the mix added to many people’s screen time massively. And for kids growing up in that setting, learning that knowledge comes from these magical slabs of glass seems like a good way to stunt certain kinds of curiosity quite early.
To whatever degree phone and social media use is a factor, it does seem highly likely that lockdowns accelerated/magnified this effect.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/...
If the difference between the 2012 and 2020 cohorts is roughly the same as between the 2012 and 2002 cohorts, why should I suspect this isn't just a failure to pick comparable cohorts across the decades?
The conflation of 'the political left's perception of reality' with 'the truth' is outrageous, and nothing more than an attempt to delegitimize views that conflict with the political left's agenda, which corresponds with polls showing in the US, registered Democrats are increasingly gravitating toward authoritarianism:
https://rumble.com/vnwyhz-the-mountain-of-data-showing-how-a...
The evidence for harm from lockdowns is at this point overwhelming, but this issue has become so politicized that the worst policy decision perhaps in history is being swept under the rug.
Absent a feasible zero-COVID strategy, which for most countries was never in the books due to their geographical situation, lockdowns have been found to have virtually no impact on reducing the spread of COVID.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19...
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...
Lockdowns have devastated education:
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/schools-more-168-milli...
https://www.economist.com/international/2022/07/07/covid-lea...
The cost to lifetime earnings is estimated to be $17 trillion:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/12/06/l...
Which will massively exacerbate poverty and all of its associated illnesses.
The education losses have been worst for the poor:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/remote-learni...
Social distancing and other COVID control measures, which became mandatory with lockdowns, have been associated with a surge in childhood obesity:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...
97 million more people are estimated to be in poverty due to the social reaction to COVID, the most drastic and disruptive of which were lockdowns:
https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/updated-estimates-impac...
It has become a Daily Mail with slightly less idiotic headlines and more conventional graphics, with a mission to get Johnson back to Number 10. I don’t think it is by chance that they decided to publish Hancock’s irrelevant leaks the day after Sunak solved the problems that Johnson created in Northern Ireland.
The OP specifically mentioned being pro-Tory
"a mouth piece for Tory anti-lockdown "reporters"
And the fact that you also list a number of Tory positions that they support, including the opposition to lockdowns, as if it's self-evident that holding those positions disqualifies them as a respectable source, is exactly what I'm talking about.
- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/11599609...
- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/mayday-i-have-a...
- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/02/watch-eu-vaccine...
- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/brexiteers-can-now-sh...
Finally, it is also a fact that they are currently a mounth piece for anti-lockdown "reporters". We put that in quotes because (1) none of them would be able to understand any of the random papers they cherrypick and (2) they actively contributed to Johnson's electoral campaign in 2019, knowing that he would make a mess (as he did with lockdowns and covid management).
IQ dropped during the pandemic, if you needed any proof
My "favorite" one was that if, in 2020, you for one second doubted that it was some mysterious bats, some people automatically labelled you as a conspiracy theorist and possibly racist. I think those people behaved that way not because of logic but because of hysteria or some other motives of their own. Now the lab leak theory is often described as a likely candidate (to me as a layperson it was the most likely explanation from day one when i read about gain of function research), it's a mainstream point of view published by Bloomberg and for some reason no longer considered tinfoil or racist, probably because you can't score too many political points bashing it anymore.
Similarly, some people made a point to violate or otherwise shit on every single covid precaution not because of some firm scientific beliefs but just to piss people off and potentially score some PR points. That doesn't make me love the lockdowns, but there was plenty of sad behavior all around.
There's plenty of grifting on every side these days. Let's just ignore that.
But the core of the issue is a question about whether scientists have the right to settle political disputes about what we should do.
We argue that they do not. Science tries to tell us what is, but political will decides what ought to be done.
We argued that the government has no moral right to confine us to our homes, regardless of the circumstances. - this was a decision for individuals.
In our society, we treat scientists (or people who pose as scientists) as truth tellers ("trust the science") - an all-knowing priestly caste. However, this never was a scientific question. There's no science experiment that says the police should have harrassed people for sunbathing in the park. It was a political decision. We're not ruled by scientists - as we have seen, for very good reason.
Now of course, there are widespread problems in science: the reproducibility crisis, financial corruption, social bias, overselling speculative findings, overselling speculative models, mid-wit interpretations etc. - and for these reasons, a person who adopts a "non-scientific" frame often has superior predictive and interpretive powers to someone who "trusts the science". This is why the "conspiracy theorists" keep getting proven right over and over.
The lab leak theory was always extremely credible, but it was dismissed because it was a way to own the "basket of deplorables", and because it called into question the competance of the medical establishment.
The paper itself also looks comprehensive (a French academic partnership, without conflicting interests if the paper's disclosure statement is to be taken at face value). A more substantive conclusion would need quite some reading.
As a parent, is a hugely disappointing finding. It's not appropriate to dismiss it simply on the basis of it being reported in the Telegraph.
It will hopefully be a catalyst for further work, and inform future NPI-based responses.
ad-hominem attack?
My school when I was growing up tracked you based on an IQ test at age 4. How does that type of test vary as you age?
Similarly I have always felt that it's strange that SATs get changed periodically but then compared en masse across generations routinely, makes little sense to me.
To use an extreme comparison, children who were locked up in basements also come out being less mentally capable than their peers.