

Were the Victorians cleverer than us? - jrabone
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000470

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jimrandomh
The answer to the question in the headline is "no". The line of argument used
is extraordinarily tenuous: first it argues that reaction time is a good proxy
for intelligence, then it collects different reaction-time studies, weights
them by sample size, and computes a correlation. Unfortunately, if you look at
the main graph of the paper, it looks like a trend-line drawn through noise.
But! Because of the sample-size weighting, the data is dominated by a single
study in 1889, which had 3410 participants (the largest out of 16) and an
unusually fast reaction time (the fastest). They then use frequentist
statistics to sneak in the assumption that reaction time varies only with
different subjects and populations, and not with different test-apparatus and
methodology, arriving at a "significant at p=.003" result which I have no
confidence in.

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WiseWeasel
We'll never know, because it's behind a pay wall. It's hard to consider the
cause of the supposed effect without access to the methodology used.

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RyanMcGreal
How does this square with the Flynn Effect? Alas, I'm not clever to figure it
out myself.

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senorgomez
Read the second paragraph of the introduction.

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RyanMcGreal
Alas, I don't have paid access to the Elsevier racket.

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Millennium
I'm not confident that you can really correlate simple reaction times with
intelligence in general. But if our reaction times are indeed getting longer,
that's interesting for other reasons.

Consider the relatively recent development of video games, many of which
depend heavily on reaction time as a basic skill. We spend our childhoods
immersed in these twitch-critical tasks: training the Victorians would have
envied, if they had been all that concerned about simple reaction times. Yet
our reaction times continue to go up, seemingly unabated. Why would that be
the case? Shouldn't the extra practice at least slow the decline?

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cantos
I think linking to journal articles is a good thing even when they are
paywalled like this but please give some context and a summary of the results.

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gotofritz
As a Republican and cultural relativist, I dislike the use of the term
"Victorians" to refer to Industrial Revolution.

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cdent
They may have been, but then they put lead in everything. Since then everyone
has been dumb.

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MrDOS
Well, they certainly might've had better grammar than us. “Cleverer” my foot.

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continuations
"Cleverer" is absolutely correct:

<http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/clever>

