
The Great Endumbening - prostoalex
https://slate.com/technology/2018/09/iq-scores-going-down-research-flynn-effect.html
======
exDM69
As a Finn who served in the military, I wouldn't put much weight on the data
gathered from the conscripts.

If you do well on the test, you might get assigned to officer training which
means an extra 6 months of service. Many people intentionally answer wrong to
get home earlier. I certainly did.

Apart from that, I do believe there is a grain of truth in the article.

~~~
DoreenMichele
That could readily explain the drop in IQ for younger siblings: Their older
brother clued them in on this detail.

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mjevans
Outside of environmental factors, social factors should also be considered.

Oversimplified: Maybe everyone is being too safe and not exposing children to
stimuli that promote better development.

I suspect several factors are contributing to this. 1) As more toys are
discovered to be 'dangerous' or 'have small parts' children have less exposure
to complex objects or it is deferred to later ages. 2) Adults have less, or
are less inclined to, time to properly care for children and thus don't
understand that judgement and supervision can allow 'supervised' use of toys
that can be dangerous if not properly used, but would be fine if used while
supervised. 3) I wonder how strongly this correlates to all parents within
child rearing units being in the workforce (single parents, dual income
parents, etc)? 4) Or how it relates to decreasing access to natural areas to
explore as a child?

These are only some of the social influences that could also be part of the
cause.

~~~
drb91
Why isn’t this effect visible in America, then?

~~~
roel_v
From TFA:

"As Flynn and Shayer note, Scandinavian IQ declines might well presage future
trends in other countries. It may be that, once we’ve made our schools as good
as theirs, we’ll see our Flynn effect max out, and then whatever channels feed
their anti-Flynn effect will show up in our data, too."

~~~
olavk
Amazing that the same pet hypothesis can explain both rising and falling IQ.

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glangdale
Given how broad this effect, it seems like an amazingly good mechanism to
attribute to a pet peeve of your choice: screen time, chemicals, lack of good
old-fashioned memorization, boring playgrounds/toys, lousy education, lack of
exercise, the decline and fall of practically everything, etc. Couple that to
a golden opportunity for older people to self-praise ("In my day we weren't as
dumb/sheltered/poisoned as you folks") and you have the perfect storm.

Making these fond arguments slightly more awkward is the fact that this effect
doesn't seem to be happening in America, but I suppose all you youngsters
lacked the attention span to read all the way to the end of the article. Now
get the hell off my lawn.

~~~
hyperpallium
One day, in the far future, it will be discovered that ubiquitious plastic has
profound but subtle effects on intelligence, fertility and general health.
Amending that will be like moving out of the slow zone.

The roman civilization used lead pipes for drinking water.

~~~
freddie_mercury
> Scarborough wrote that Nriagu's basic premise couldn't be trusted because of
> sloppy work. He also concluded that the Romans were aware of the harm lead
> could cause, that lead poisoning wasn't endemic in their society and that
> Rome did not fall because of it.

> Yet French researcher Hugo Delile and his team, reporting in the Proceedings
> of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, concluded that such
> concentrations were "unlikely to have been truly harmful." The group also
> claimed that enough criticism of Nriagu's theory had been amassed over three
> decades to largely debunk it.

> "Lead is no longer seen as the prime culprit of Rome’s demise," Delile
> wrote.

~~~
madaxe_again
It wasn’t the pipes, it was the wine, which they sweetened with lead acetate.
Delile’s paper only touches on water supply, rather than lead as a deliberate
addition to diet.

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hn_throwaway_99
My own personal hypothesis on this: it's clear that one skill that used to be
important is now _much_ less important, and that's memory. When I was a kid I
remembered dozens of phone numbers, now I know about 3. My fear, though, is
that other higher order thinking skills are still very dependent on memory,
and as we need to exercise our memory less frequently, other parts of our
cognitive abilities suffer.

~~~
SomewhatLikely
I imagine if you peeked over a teenager's shoulder as they went about their
routine phone habits you'd have little idea what was going on through all the
memes, inside jokes, cultural references, and slang. I have a hard time
believing our ability to memorize is so rigid that it peaked in the period
after operators routed calls and before phone books, rolodexes, and contact
lists in flip phones. We just put memory to different uses throughout time.

~~~
tralarpa
> We just put memory to different uses throughout time.

I agree. Just look how many site names, youtube channels, game rules, game
item stats, memes, pokemon names (is that still a thing?), anime slang, etc.
young people can memorize.

No /s, I am serious.

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jhoechtl
I attribute that to the lack of boredom in young people. When I was young I
was bored at least from time to time. This led to doing mischief but also to
use the brain and invent something entertaining to waste time.

Now distractions are all around us (play stations and TV on demand) or with us
(smart phones). No more need for being imaginative.

There is also this interesting correlation of declining crime rate which can
be attributed to kids wasting time with play stations rather than hanging out
in the street.

have discussed this with close friends. In the past we perceived that and
considered declining intelligence as an assumption, with recent articles like
that it seems to be a fact.

~~~
olavk
So why is this happening in Scandinavia but not in the US? Doesn't the US have
just as many play stations and smartphones?

~~~
molmalo
It's hinted in the article,

Basically, as this is an average for societies, the average environmental
factors are better in Scandinavia than in America. But those factors already
peaked, and now are starting a downwards trend:

>The authors note several possible factors, among them worsening health and
nutrition, a decline in the quality of education, detrimental changes to media
exposure, and the indirect effects of immigration.

OTOH, America's average environmental factors are still improving, so, it's
still on the rise:

> It may be that, once we’ve made our schools as good as theirs, we’ll see our
> Flynn effect max out, and then whatever channels feed their anti-Flynn
> effect will show up in our data, too.

~~~
olavk
So again a pet hypothesis which can explain both rising _and_ falling IQ. So
what observation could theoretically _disprove_ this hypothesis?

Note that you can state exactly the opposite hypothesis and still claim the
numbers support it. The use of gaming consoles and smartphones _improve_ IQ,
but this effect have maxed out in Scandinavia.

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roel_v
Is it just me or was the knee-jerk 'racism!' on everything immigration-related
in the article off-putting? I mean, is it racist to say that immigration might
cause a decline of average intelligence, if it's clear that there are physical
factors in play in the countries where the immigrants come from that could
cause a decreased iq (lower nutrition etc, as noted in the article)? I'm not
claiming that it's the case, but the prima facie dismissal of any theory like
it because 'it's racist!' that anything might be influenced by immigration
made the whole piece feel just very intellectually dishonest.

Again, just to be clear and lest I'll get dragged down into 'you're racist'
myself, I'm not claiming one way or the other. My point is that apparently
some conclusions are off-limits from the start; any evidence in that direction
must be wrong because of the conclusion it leads to. It's this sort of thing
that makes real racists go 'see how we're being censored'.

~~~
naasking
> Is it just me or was the knee-jerk 'racism!' on everything immigration-
> related in the article off-putting?

Agreed. Impartial evaluation of facts seems to be dead.

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wycs
I don't think we can rule out an evolutionary explanation so quickly. We are
starting to get firm genetic evidence that something like dysgenics is
occurring in Iceland, for
example:[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/10/1612113114](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/10/1612113114)

There is also a plausible mechanism of action, intelligent people tend to get
an education proportionate to their intelligence. Educated people have
ridiculously low birth rates. Intelligence is heritable.

Just like conservatives will have to overcome their global warming denial,
those of the progressive tradition may well have to start accepting what
cognitive genomics is making increasingly obvious: intelligence is hereditary
and this has policy implications.

Should it prove to be a genetic decline, we have solutions, such as embryo
selection, in the wings that can work now with little research. This will get
us ~3-8 IQ points per generation:[https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-
selection](https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection)

Iterated embryo selection and genetic engineering will be able to offer much
more, several standard deviations in multiple traits simultaneously.

But we cannot repair problems we refuse to look in the face.

~~~
User23
> Intelligence is heritable

I believe parent is getting downvotes because of this, but this isn't a matter
of opinion or social science. It's hard quantitative genetics:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ)

This is the crux of any inter-generational change in average intelligence in a
population. Human assortative mating patterns and the inverse relationship
between intelligence and fertility account for some of the effect and some is
due to shifts in the gene pool. While we can't and shouldn't discount
environmental effects (goodbye lead paint!), the latest genetics research
tells us that only 15-25% of variation in intelligence can be attributed to
the environment.

~~~
buboard
But how does assortative mating account for it? One would then expect at least
neutral relationship between fertility and intelligence.

~~~
User23
Smart people tend to reproduce with other smart people, but they reproduce an
awful lot less. Interestingly, smart people having low fertility is a rather
recent phenomenon. Lots of famous scientists came from huge broods.

~~~
buboard
famous scientists are probably exceptional enough to not be accounted into
statistics. The questions is why _they_ breed less.

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flatline
Or, the things the tests select for are gradually falling out of favor in our
education system and society at large. Pollutants don’t seem like an
unreasonable hypothesis either, though.

~~~
tptacek
Pollution might make sense if the decline was measured worldwide, but it's
localized to Northern Europe, where pollution has generally declined over the
last several decades.

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Shaddox
Forgive my impudence, but why does this matter?

I have barely managed to come to terms that I will never accomplish anything
of value in my life. I suspect this is true for most people. As a society, we
inherently value diligence and hard work over intelligence because most labor
implies more of the former than the latter.

The elites will still be elites. The general population gets a little dumber
over time on average, but this matters very little.

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dwd
"Never memorize something that you can look up."

We've outsourced memorising facts to knowing how to google it. Factor in
calculators, spelling and grammar checkers - yoy can outsource a lot of
memorising.

Which doesn't help when you're sitting an IQ test.

~~~
curious_fella1
I saw a Sherlock Holmes quote on here once, I liked it and I think it's
relevant to your comment so I'll post it here.

"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a
little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you
choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so
that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best
is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying
his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what
he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may
help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in
the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has
elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time
when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew
before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts
elbowing out the useful ones."

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
Elsewhere Conan Doyle had Holmes explain that he did not know, or care,
whether the Sun circled the Earth or vice-versa, because that fact was
irrelevant for his activity.

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buboard
What if the sperm counts cause the IQ drop or vice versa?It's not clear how
much of this research is male-only. I wonder if testosterone levels link the
two.

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Tue23Oct
The great endumbening is that we're still trying to measure intelligence with
this IQ thing.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Works well enough for all practical applications, and we don't have anything
better.

------
keyle
We've been slowly transitioned from a life of creativism and questioning to a
life of consumerism.

We're already cretins.

~~~
jodrellblank
What else is there to do? Everyone is a creator now, and their creations never
go away. Right up until the year 19nntp or so, your written creations were
either adding to the world or they went out of print and were forgotten. Until
the year 19youtube or so, your musical contributions either added to the world
or they went out of production and were lost to the aether.

Now, everything is an endless library-cum-sewer filled with content, you can
never run out of it, you can't clear out "worse" things, you can't
meaningfully filter it - only on a superficial keyword match or vote score.

What point is there to be creative to add a drop to this ocean of content?

Why be creative when society says the purpose of it is to get followers and
extract coins from them, and nothing more?

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dschuetz
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy)

~~~
olavk
So why is IQ increasing in the US while declining in Northern Europe?

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dschuetz
Because in the US the IQ scores are taken more seriously than in Europe.

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horatiocain
Been around the world and found That only stupid people are breeding The
cretins cloning and feeding And I don't even own a tv

