
IQ scores have been in decline for cohorts born since 1975 - sndean
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dumb-and-dumber-why-we-re-getting-less-intelligent-80k3bl83v
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steve918
There seems to be a lot of negative bias around IQ tests based on social
stigma. IQ tests are far from perfect and I think everyone agrees they are a
woeful indicator of success.

However, I think improving IQ testing for the purposes of documenting human
evolution is just as important as documenting fluctuations in disease,
addiction, obesity and the like.

For example, there has been considerable scientific research that points to a
noteable increase in IQ in America in the twenties due to increased iodine
intake. If we are in-fact getting less intelligent, I think it would behove us
to purse potential causes.

~~~
dnomad
> IQ tests are far from perfect and I think everyone agrees they are a woeful
> indicator of success.

I don't know many people that agree with this. At least in my bubble, the
great majority regard IQ tests as bunk and the rest regard IQ as just a very
roundabout way of measuring the education level of a child's parents. (There's
some disagreement whether the father's level of education is the most
important factor [1] or the mother's education level is [2]).) It's only in a
select few internet forums dominated by a select few types of people where IQ
is taken seriously and even obsessed over.

Putting aside the wholly made-up _g factor_ , what we've been seeing in the
West for the last 30 years is rapidly increasing inequality in educational
attainment. Severe cuts in education at both the public level and the private
level (see, eg, the extraordinary rise of single mothers in both the US and EU
and parents with multiple jobs) means that many children are simply getting
less education than they did 30 years ago.

Note that this does not apply to the knowledge elite who go to extraordinary
measures to educate their children. It's quite likely that the children of
today's elite are the most educated children in the history of the planet. I
know a few parents who have budgeted a million dollars for the education of
each of their children.

The Flynn Effect was likely nothing more than the result of the extraordinary
and broad-based increase in wealth we saw from 1900 to 1980. Since 1980
virtually all of the growth is being captured by the elites so it's not
surprising at all that we'd see a similar reversal in the Flynn Effect.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/23/fathers-
educ...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/23/fathers-education-
child-success-school)

[2] [http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/mothers-education-level-at-
time...](http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/mothers-education-level-at-time-of-
birth-determines-her-childs-achievement)

~~~
throwaway37585
“Putting aside the wholly made-up g factor”

Why do you stoop to blatant lying?

“Research in the field of behavioral genetics has established that the
construct of g is highly heritable. It has a number of other biological
correlates, including brain size. It is also a significant predictor of
individual differences in many social outcomes, particularly in education and
employment. The most widely accepted contemporary theories of intelligence
incorporate the g factor.[1]”

“The practical validity of g as a predictor of educational, economic, and
social outcomes is more far-ranging and universal than that of any other known
psychological variable. The validity of g is greater the greater the
complexity of the task.[2][3]”

[1] Neisser et al. 1996

[2] Jensen 1998, 270

[3] Gottfredson 2002

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AltVanilla
IQ is the last taboo. We don't want it to matter for socioeconomic success in
life. We don't want it to be inherited to such a high degree that
environmental factors like parenting and education hardly matters. Its all too
depressing. People are born unequal, and there is little that can be done
about it.

IQ correlation studies:

Same person (tested twice) .95

Identical twins—Reared together .86

Unrelated children—Reared together—Adults .04

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlations_between_IQ_and_degree_of_genetic_relatedness)

------
foobaw
The article is pay-walled for me - but based on the title: people that take IQ
tests also have changed. The value and significance of IQ tests have
definitely shifted since 1975 so that could be a big reason.

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yontherubicon
If it's true, as the article said, that this is occurring within the same
families, that is to say within Norwegian families, rather than within new
migrant families, then this result is highly disturbing.

------
jeffdavis
If the reversal of the Flynn effect can be described as just a changing
definition of intelligence, why are we so sure that the Flynn effect
represented real intellectual gains?

~~~
oerpli
Flynn himself does not believe that the Flynn effect represented real
intellectual gains.

For any test, your grade is usually based on: * Your form on that day (good
day/bad day whatever) * Your competence * Test taking ability (TTA)

The first one can result in pretty large fluctuations, though on the
population level (what the Flynn effect measures) it should not matter.
Competence usually means "knows the subject", for an IQ test this would
(ideally) be "is smart". TTA is either "is prepared for the test" or "knows
how to make educated guesses".

It is believed that the Flynn effect largely results from two factors: * Some
parts of the population were severely malnourished 50-100 years ago which
hindered their brain development. * Improved TTA

The first one would be a real gain (of intelligence), though with limited
capability to expand upon, as these days almost no one (in US/Europe at least)
is malnourished enough to allow for further gains at the population level

The second is not a gain of intelligence though it is a gain of competence,
just not the kind that we want to measure with an IQ test.

As there are not many reasons to believe, that the current decline is due to
nourishment/TTA, it may be that those are constant but actual intelligence is
on decline.

------
mirceal
Setting aside the click-baity title.

The world today is way different than when we came up with IQ tests. Yes there
might be a corellation between how good you do on an IQ test and how “smart”
you are but I think over and over again your background/upbringing had been
show to influence that more than your “smartness”.

If the question is: do we think in different way than we did 50 years ago? I
think the answer is a stong yes.

The technology and the tools we have today enable us to do things that were
unconcievable 50 years ago.

Is this good? Is this bad? The truth is that human beings are (and always
were) pretty limited. Our hardware sucks. The things that enables us are tools
and our use of tools. As we get better tools we do better and better and our
attention is focused on different things. I would argue that today we are
smarter than we’ve ever been and we are getting smarter each day by using more
and more powerful tools.

~~~
cgag
I thought it had been shown over and over again that Iq had more to do with it
than your upbringing?

~~~
oculusthrift
it has. there’s twin studies where they are adopted to differnt families and
yet end up scoring the same on IQ tests later in life and end up with similar
levels of educational attainment and income etc

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creep
Haha. "IQ". A numbered score given after answering a few short problems
administered in a high-pressure situation. Oh, IQ; woe.

If I take a second to sit down with my peers (20's) and really _talk_ , all
sorts of funny things come out of their mouths which really invite me to think
about intelligence in a different way. You wouldn't believe the insights--
from every angle possible.

Who gives a damn about IQ anymore? Who is anybody to equate it with
intelligence? What is intelligence? I say: you don't know and I don't know,
and who cares!

~~~
mzl
A real IQ test (i.e., WAIS-IV or similar) is a lot more than just a few short
problems, it takes several hours and is done one on one with a trained
psychologist.

The test used by Mensa (as an example many think about when they hear IQ test)
is a simple test that has shown reasonably stable correlation with IQ, but it
is not a real IQ test.

------
rzzzt
I'm confused. Is the 100 IQ value's meaning, "average intelligence" (it's also
supposed to be the median value, half of the population has an IQ around 100)
stuck to a single point in the past for a certain cohort? How can IQ scores
decline?

~~~
Camillo
Scores are periodically renormalized to a new sample to keep 100 the median,
but you can normalize to a single baseline to compare across time.

------
merricksb
Other discussion in the past 1-2 days:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302830)

------
fulafel
Paywalled link.

Source seems to be:
[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/06/05/1718793115](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/06/05/1718793115)

Key piece from abstract: "Using administrative register data and cognitive
ability scores from military conscription data covering three decades of
Norwegian birth cohorts (1962–1991), we show that [...]"

There may be some changes in what kinds of people sign up for the military as
the cold war cooled down and disappeared.

~~~
cbsmith
I believe Norway has had mandatory conscription for all males, so sign up bias
shouldn't be a factor.

~~~
fulafel
Good point.

But then, WP says " In practice recruits are not forced to serve, but if the
armed forces see an unmotivated person fit for military service, they can
force them to serve. About 60,000 Norwegians are available for conscription
every year, but only 8,000 to 10,000 are conscripted."

So in practice my argument stands, with the additional factor that playing
dumb in an iq test might be a good way to escape the "fit but unmotivated"
categorisation.

------
thomk
It's official; this generation dumber! Now get off my lawn and listen to some
real music!

jk, kids today outpace me daily.

PS I wasn't kidding about the music!

~~~
thomk
Sorry was trying to be funny.

------
vengefulduck
Non pay walled link:
[https://pastebin.com/54h7zF0b](https://pastebin.com/54h7zF0b)

------
Camillo
Article is paywalled. How about this for a hot take, based on the title alone:
there is an overlap of an IQ boosting effect from environment (better
nutrition, health care etc.) and an IQ depressing effect from genetics (e.g.
increasing years of education depressing fertility of high-IQ people, or
increased mutational loads from all those carcinogens California tried to warn
us about, or whatever). For decades, the IQ boosting effect dominated
(resulting in the Flynn effect), but now it's basically maxed out, and the IQ
depressing effect drives the trend.

~~~
bloak
Article was not paywalled for me the first time I looked. As I recall, it
claimed that the measured fall in IQ test results cannot be explained by
genetics because the same fall was observed within particular families. In any
case, the fall seems far too big to be explained by genetics, so probably it's
caused by education, I would guess.

There probably is a much smaller, perhaps not yet measurable, fall caused by
genetics. I tried to submit an Economist article on that. (Can you see it
under
[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bloak](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bloak)
?)

~~~
dschuetz
It appears that when an article gets many hits at a time a paywall is
triggered. So, the title is clickbaity, then it gets submitted to HN, a few
people read it, then suddenly it's paywalled. Right. Moving on, nothing to see
here.

------
tzahola
inb4 anecdotes like “I have a friend with a PhD in applied chemistry with an
IQ of 73”

------
dschuetz
Stop submitting paywalled articles. It's really annoying.

------
ggm
Since primary school in the 1960s and 1970s I've refused to do IQ, and I don't
intend doing IQ: I think its bad social policy, the theory may work for some
people but its used in pretty awful ways once it hits politics, school policy
and budget.

That said, I think there are two pretty clear choices which then lead to more
choices

Either this is a thing, and we should worry about it, Or, its not a thing, and
we don't have to worry. The comments in the article about the Flynn effect and
the ability to measure IQ in a changing world of "what is intelligence" goes
to the second case: its too early to worry.

But, if this turns out to be something environmental or educational, much as
(on the positive side) removing lead was for it's effect on behaviour, mood
and intelligence, then we need to worry about this.

Personally, I don't yet think this is a thing. All the signs I see from the
peak of 57 meritorious, unmeasured-in-IQ years, is that younger people are
smarter than me, and more capable than me of applied thought.

"I don't believe it, yet"

~~~
creep
> Younger people are smarter than me

I feel this too. I'm in my twenties and the small children scare me with their
brilliance sometimes. I am excited to see those little guys grow up. I am
convinced they will be the first generation to ask, in full, "what should we
do?" rather than, "what can we do?". Very excited.

~~~
geomark
Does anyone have kids that seem less smart than they were at that age? Asking
for a friend.

~~~
JeanMarcS
It depends if the age of the kids and what you want to measure as smart.

Kids, when growing, learn stuff, but not in the « same order » as other kids.
Some gonna walk early (my sister was 8 1/2 months old), some gonna talk early
(my parents told me I was able to discuss with adults at the age of 17 months)
etc.. And it’s true for all the abilities. Read soon, draw soon.

It won’t mean that they’ll be good at it later. Just they assimilate it sooner
than others.

So some abilities make a kid shines when another might not. Doesn’t mean they
won’t be smart later.

~~~
geomark
That's an interesting concept, that kids naturally learn not in the same
order. Implicates an issue with school systems since curricula are rather
rigidly sequenced.

