
Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why - monort
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2146752-we-seem-to-be-getting-stupider-and-population-ageing-may-be-why/
======
nradov
Some of the decrease may be due to increased obesity and reduced
cardiovascular fitness. Those factors are known to reduce cognitive ability.
They're also correlated with age, although lately even young people have been
getting worse on average.

------
Ygg2
I don't get it. Why is population ageing affecting Flynn effect? Don't they
test each new generation at same time? Or is this longitudinal study of a
single generation (which is weird, since we can't measure IQ correctly at
later ages).

Alternative hypothesis. Presence of computers/phones reduces need for working
memory, so it doesn't get exercised and leads to decline of it.

~~~
danieltillett
Each generation is not a 1:1 descendant of the previous generation. Which
individuals of the current generation that have children determines the
attributes of the next generation. Now for 100 points guess which people (and
what attributes they share) have been biggest contributors to the next
generation.

~~~
CPLX
I suppose I'll be the one to post the canonical recap of this concept:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E)

~~~
danieltillett
There is a reason Idiocracy has been described as a documentary :)

~~~
thaumaturgy
...because the people describing it that way are ironically ignorant of world
statistics?

[https://www.gapminder.org/](https://www.gapminder.org/)

~~~
Ygg2
I'm very wary of statistics. As the saying goes, there is lies, dirty lies and
then there is statistic.

A typical example is GDP is going in country X, which means X is doing
better!!!

Except mean salary is going down, which is a typical for a rich get richer,
poor get poorer scenario.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Well, that's true, data is sometimes misleading, mis-reported, or manipulated.
It really is much better to just stick to what we believe in our guts to be
true.

Belief in the face of evidence to the contrary has been accomplishing great
things all over the world lately.

------
subroutine
It seems like with just a bit more effort the authors could have made a
stronger case for their theory that aging is significantly impacting IQ scores
by comparing IQ scores among people of the same age (e.g. 20-30 year olds)
from decade to decade. They could also look at how IQ changes over a lifespan;
there must be some within-subject data available where the same people took an
IQ test when they were <30 then again when >60.

~~~
Alex3917
> They could also look at how IQ changes over a lifespan

It doesn’t because it’s a bell curve. You literally can’t figure out your
score until you already know the distribution.

~~~
subroutine
Nonsense. If I administer an IQ test to 1000 people in their 20s, and then
retested them in their 60s, I'd be performing a classic within-subject test,
where I could easily assess whether test performance increases, decreases, or
doesn't significantly change.

~~~
Alex3917
My point was that let's say all 1,000 people in their 20s got every question
correct, and then you retested them in their 60s and they all got every
question wrong. Assuming the sample was representative of the overall
population, the group's average IQ would have remained constant at 100.

~~~
KGIII
That's not quite accurate. The score adjustments are periodic, not constant.
The 100 average is from some years ago, and will be adjusted some time in the
future. It is not constantly changing to reflect current scores.

------
vixen99
OECD 2016

"Young people in England are the most illiterate in the developed world with
many students graduating with only a basic grasp of English and maths, an in-
depth analysis by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
has found. The OECD report rated English teenagers aged 16 to 19 the worst of
23 developed nations in literacy and 22nd of 23 in numeracy.

In contrast, pensioners or those close to retirement were among the highest-
ranked of their age group."

~~~
jrimbault
But most people back then didn't go to university. And the OECD compares
across 23 developed nations.

Though, in my _opinion_ , education quality _has_ gone down.

In France, 2010ish?, in my last year of high school (in one of the best
parisian high school) there was a boy who couldn't read aloud a text without
stumbling. I don't know if this would have happened in the past. But back then
only 20k students reached that stage and now it's 200k.

edit: stumbling/stuttering

~~~
Clubber
>Though, in my opinion, education quality has gone down.

What would you think if I told you I graduated in the 1990s and I felt the
same way? Where would that put you?

>there was a boy who couldn't read aloud a text without stumbling.

There could be other reasons for that, like fear of public speaking.

~~~
jrimbault
Maybe you were in a pessimistic period in your life and I am the same way now.

He didn't fear much. He was a bully.

~~~
Clubber
Honestly I never bought into the stories that the current generation is full
of dummies. It's mostly news hype made to make you feel superior about
yourself. Those stories are amping up here in the US about Millenials. It's
all BS.

------
titanix2
I can’t access the original study (sci-hub too slow), which countries are
affected by the effect and which aren’t?

It would be interesting if China, Japan, Korea aren’t affected while Western
countries are.

~~~
Sean1708
Maybe I'm being really naive here but (other than all being Asian countries)
what attributes do China, Japan, and Korea all share that Western countries
don't?

~~~
jchb
Let me take a guess. Comparatively low immigration rate. Hardly accept any
refugees (28 individuals accepted by Japan in 2016). Be able to support
yourself or be (quite literally) kicked out. High barriers to citizenship.

~~~
0xFFC
Are you serious?

Let me ask you how many of immigrants are grad students or prople with high
tech jobs?

Is it one of the stupidest thing to say drop in IQ is connected to immigrants!

It is greatly disappointing to see this kind of nonsense in HN which is kind
of home for many hackers and programmers. Hearing these kind of stupid ideas
in C-Span? Who cares? But HN, that shows how low our societies has become.

~~~
swsieber
What percentage of immigrants are grad students or people with high tech jobs.
I don't know, and I'm genuinely curious.

~~~
jchb
There are statistics on education level. For example "Share of the population
aged 25-64, by educational attainment level, by place of birth and by sex,
EU-28, 2016". [http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
explained/index.php/...](http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
explained/index.php/File:Share_of_the_population_aged_25-64,_by_educational_attainment_level,_by_place_of_birth_and_by_sex,_EU-28,_2016_\(%25\)_MI17.png).

Now let's say that you make it difficult (either deliberately or due to
language barriers) for individuals in the left-most part of that graph to
stay. What happens long term? I don't know.

------
lsd5you
The premise of this article is flawed (to put it kindly). Surely no rigorous
statistical study would fail to take age into account. So why is it even an
issue (beyond a measuring technicality) being raised in a 'science' journal? I
think it is clear that as a society we don't want science to be undertaken in
this area and so consequently we end up with obscurantism (willingly or
unwillingly). Or maybe we have already become to stupid to engage in science?

------
rwnspace
Well... So what? As long as people are happy, literate and nice to one another
I think fluctuations in IQ are not a huge problem in themselves. It's only a
problem if you think democracy the system can't be improved upon, because you
have to improve people to improve the output of democracies.

I've seen some things mentioned here that utterly baffle me, and confirm my
bias that IQ is good for understanding but has little relation to wisdom or
'overstanding'.

I am very worried about what will happen if we start doing rash things like
mass removal of autistic embryos from the gene pool. I've seen it suggested
too often, compared to the amount of people I imagine are actually deeply
informed enough about both to speak on such things. It's strange to me that
such an idea is not automatically considered risky, or obviously married with
unintended consequences.

On the surface of it, you might increase the median IQ by a few points. But
you'd also miss out on the next Newton, Turing, Einstein, Kant, Cavendish, etc
etc (I've plenty of other speculatives). There's no free lunch. Shaking the
Tree of Life and hoping something tasty falls out sounds very unwise to me. As
far as I'm concerned the major problem for humans is not their absolute IQ
levels - it's arrogance relative to engineering capabilities.

Lastly: if we ever make it through climate change and out the other side with
powerful AGI, I guess high IQ won't be as central compared to EQ or
creativity, except as something that roughly correlates with both.

Edited for clarity.

------
Will_Parker
Pedantic, but average IQ scores have stayed the same over the years, exactly
100.

~~~
pizza
This is always the case after they adjust the test. But the averages of
generations can differ over time if they use the same test/sans adjustment.

But there is a much stronger way to believe IQ is not the same over time :
intelligence is not normally distributed, _at all_. It really is meaningless
to try to measure intelligence samples and call them independent and
identically distributed random variables, whether the 'population' is an
individual at one snapshot or over time, or an individual in a group (whether
over time or not).

Intelligence is probably better measured by a power-law distribution than the
normal distribution, whose key property is that it is the probability
distribution that maximizes entropy/minimizes information. So maybe there
would be a larger discrepancy (relative entropy aka Kullback-Leibler
divergence) in measuring IQ as a normal distribution over time than expected
(maybe that's the whole reason for the Flynn effect and the author writing
this article..)

------
EGreg
What about the Flynn effect?

Could it be this:

[http://www.advancedsciencenews.com/co2-on-the-brain-and-
the-...](http://www.advancedsciencenews.com/co2-on-the-brain-and-the-brain-on-
co2/)

[https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-
dire...](https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-directly-
affect-human-cognition-new-harvard-study-shows-2748e7378941/amp/)

~~~
sin7
Stopped somewhere around 2000.

------
iam-TJ
Being a long-suffering thoughtful inquisitive type that can turn their hand to
anything I have spent many hours pondering why it seems that most people
around me show traits of 'stupidity'.

I've come to the conclusion 'stupidity' is not the issue; 'unthinking' is, and
the specific sub-type is 'unable to apply logical analytical thinking'.

I have a relation who, when challenged that the way they're doing some task is
the opposite of optimal, responds along the lines "I thought ...". In this
case it is a sure sign that no logical analytical thinking took place.

Maybe the crux of the issue is that in general our societies have become so
complex and fast-moving that technology, standard procedures (best practice),
and fundamental measures of performance are changing so rapidly that very few
individuals have the mental energy to keep up throughout their lifetime.

Some I'm sure have become tired of it and given up thinking altogether.

I would suspect many HN readers may have experienced this in their own highly
technical fields alone.

For the general population who aren't - or don't want to be - interested in
the world in general it's easy to deliberately avoid learning simple tasks and
instead 'leave it to an expert' and continue in ignorance, or to expect
someone else to have done it for 'convenience', or not want to attempt it
because of the dangers due to 'health and safety'.

Here in the UK at least there's a very simple example of the culture behind
this: the electric plugs on AC mains-powered equipment.

In the 1970s when a new item of white-goods for the kitchen arrived it was
unlikely to have a plug fitted to the cable although some equipment came with
a plug - you fitted it yourself and were expected to have the basic knowledge
required to unscrew, strip the insulation from the cores, attach wires to
poles, screw-down, insert fuse of specified rating, and screw back together.
It often had a piece of card slid over the prongs with a diagram to help.

In the 1980s the cable almost always arrived with the cores cut to length and
stripped and if you were buying a premium item the plug fitted by the
supplier.

By the 2000s the plug was always fitted and more often than not it was molded
onto the cable; and yet some of these still have the wiring diagram card
attached. The plugs mostly no longer required the 'lid' removing to get to and
replace the fuse - there is a captive sliding carrier that pops out when pried
with a flat-blade screwdriver.

By the late 2000s the three metal prongs (earth longest, live and neutral
slightly shorter) were encased in a plastic sheath which you have to remember
to remove or else it won't fit into the wall socket.

Now, all of these incremental creeping changes can be seen as product
improvements to provide greater convenience.

But the result is we now have several generations that have no idea about even
the basics of the second most important technology in their lives: electricity
(after water and food). They need an 'expert' to do it for them.

Ditto for basic plumbing skills, routine car maintenance, and more and more I
notice even preparing basic meals, cooking and baking from raw unprocessed
ingredients.

Oh, and a humorous anecdote on the subject of food: about 15 years ago a 17
year-old friend of mine was visiting for a week and I asked if she would like
fish and chips (fried potatoes to the North Americans!). I grew up on a farm
and so fetched the 25kg bag and selected some potatoes ready for peeling and
chipping.

This 17 year old (who ate chips from chip-shops frequently) had no idea that
to make chips required peeling and slicing raw potatoes and was incredulous at
the process; she 'thought' chips just grew as long square pieces of potato -
see: "unthinking".

I was left speechless that something that I considered so obvious and
fundamental had escaped her for 17 years!

Multiply these examples up for every major and minor aspect of coping in a
modern technology-based society and the result is the appearance of
'stupidity'.

~~~
adsfqwop
I shudder to think what happens in 20 more years, when the last potato peelers
are gone :-/ The movie "Idiocracy" inevitably comes to mind [1] :(

However I do think it's something more than just the burden or unburden of our
new technology. Logical thinking should be an universal trait, no matter what
the environment is like.

However one thing which is eating into that equation, is logical thinking is
almost never promoted in modern education. Even in a declining IQ environment,
promoting and teaching logical thinking would reverse a lot of the seeming
"stupidity" in our society.

But I still do think there is something more going on. It's not just (lack of)
education.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAqIJZeeXEc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAqIJZeeXEc)

~~~
iam-TJ
Agreed; there are many facets colluding.

I believe others of significance may be the exhaustion and stress many feel at
the pace of life and coping with it.

On the educational side I think it very much depends on what culture, which
country, which region, which politics, which teacher and even who your
contemporaries are.

------
quantdev
Or maybe it's because, somewhat depressingly, IQ is _highly_ hereditary, as
research has shown for decades and new gene research is currently confirming,
and people with lower IQs tend to have more children.

~~~
Will_Parker
And connecting the two dots too loudly makes you into a monster.

~~~
Mangalor
Well drawing strict conclusions in a field that's still highly debated by
researchers does, yes.

~~~
solveinequality
psychometricians largely aren’t debating the existence of intelligence, its
variability, or the fact that it is heritable.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Actually...

[http://www.apa.org/research/action/intelligence-
testing.aspx](http://www.apa.org/research/action/intelligence-testing.aspx)

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-
funda...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-
fundamentally-flawed-and-using-them-alone-to-measure-intelligence-is-a-
fallacy-study-8425911.html)

[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq-
test...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq-test-
controversies-persist/)

If intelligence were simple we'd know how to test for it. It isn't, and we
don't. Not reliably, and certainly not in ways that are absolutely independent
of culture and background.

The UK used to have a concept called "mental agility", which seems to be
closer to the abilities measured by IQ than the much more complex quality
psychologists call general intelligence.

You can have exceptional mental agility - the ability to remember and
manipulate symbols and parse symbolic relationships quickly - and still be an
utter idiot when it comes to dealing with some or all of reality.

A high IQ will not protect you from ideological beliefs, especially if you
grow up with no exposure to other viewpoints, from a lack of mental openness
(not to be confused with a lack of curiosity), from "moral" perspectives that
are self-reinforcing prejudices, from poor socialisation, and so on.

------
ratsimihah
Ageing? How about tech dumbing us down?

~~~
maw
Is "Is Google Making Us Stupid" making us stupid?

------
empath75
It doesn’t take much to bring eugenics supporters out of the woodworks these
days does it.

~~~
jstewartmobile
Yep. Whole lotta people not knowing just how many shoulders they are standing
on.

A while back someone asked Warren Buffet what he would be under more primitive
circumstances. Buffet's reply was... "lion food".

------
air7
I like to play a little game I call "HN matter anti-matter" where I notice
contradicting articles posted on HN and imagine them colliding and erasing
each other...

In this case: Yes, We Get Wiser with Age (nautil.us)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15346635](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15346635)

~~~
terminalcommand
I think being wise and being intelligent are different qualities. You might
solve a puzzle in shorter time if you're intelligent, or remember more things.
But if you're wise you will spend your energy to solve the right puzzle and
remember the right things.

~~~
amelius
How do we measure wisdom? Is there a "WQ test"?

~~~
coffeevradar
There's already the WC test. Which as one gets older one is less likely to
pass.

------
alexasmyths
How on earth can they not figure this out?

I mean testing different age cohorts, should it be that hard?

------
throwaway6737
An aging population is the obvious explanation--unless you can think of some
other major demographic shifts that have occurred in these countries in recent
decades.

------
edko
If IQ = 100 * mental age / real age, how is it measured in old age? If you are
80 and have an IQ of 50, would that mean you have the mind of a 40-year-old?

------
jhoechtl
I attribute it to the incredible stupidity of our mass media. And 'TV' of what
sort ever. It has been a good thing to be forced to watch dull content. At
least it was informative at times.

