On: American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the 'Reverse Flynn effect'

[ndriscoll]

> Will the results be correlated? Of course, some people are more athletic than others. Does that mean there's a quantity called 'athleticism' that we can objectively measure with a number? No

Admittedly I haven't really studied statistics, but can't you do something like measure those abilities for a population, do a PCA, and define athleticism to be the first principal component?

[AstralStorm → ndriscoll]

And then you find out that the first component is height x age. :)

PCA/CCA almost never tells you what the components are. ICA is a bit better at that but still not great.