Online Tests Suggest IQ Scores In US Dropped For the First Time In Nearly a Cent...

Online Tests Suggest IQ Scores In US Dropped For the First Time In Nearly a Century

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• Gravity vs IQ

  That's gravity, not IQ results though.

  Still, one would expect IQ to eventually stabilize, and that would generally mean fluxuations in test results.

  Assuming that IQ tests measure *something* vaguely related to intelligence, that, like how BMI tracks with obesity even if it isn't 100% accurate, and all that, we very well should have been on an upwards track over the last century or so.
  I mean, balance improved nutrition, including quite a few measures that reduced damaged brains, up until like the 70s, when w

  • Re:

    No. IQ tests intelligence. As our society and our civilization gear more and more towards an inventive, knowledge based, scientifically driven society, we should be getting smarter. Each generation has enabled the following generation to have greater access to knowledge on a more constant and pervasive basis, with higher levels of nutrition and better environmental conditions to foster higher brain development, our IQ scores should be on a never-ending upward trajectory. The turn of the last century, we had

    • 1. IQ is supposed to test intelligence; from the reports I've read, it's fairly lousy at it, at least on the individual level.
      2. You're mixing up knowledge and intelligence. We're increasing the prior, certainly, but "intelligence" is supposed to be our ability to process knowledge. That is something that can only be slightly trained, and thus evolution is probably going to be the biggest driver once we max out environmental factors. And evolution doesn't work that fast.
      3. You miss that nutrition and environmental conditions, both of which I mentioned, do logically have ceilings.
      4. Access to books is something that IQ tests try to avoid being a factor. It was actually one of the problems with early IQ tests, because they hadn't eliminated the cultural factors. So somebody from elsewhere than Europe or the USA would tend to score worse, because they didn't have the cultural background.
      5. Dewey decimal system is knowledge, not intelligence. IQ tests deliberately try to avoid testing knowledge.
      6. IQ tests, not being supposed to be knowledge based, shouldn't be affected by schooling.

      Instead, what I see occuring:
      1. Nutrition factors have maxed out and leveled off
      2. Environmental pollution has dropped and leveled off(further fixes for this are going to take longer for relatively less benefit)

      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @01:06AM (#63368755)

        This isn't the individual level.

        IQ stands for "intelligence quotient." It is defined as how well you perform on specific types of tests, divided by how well you're expected to do (at your age, etc.).

        It doesn't measure "intelligence" because we don't know what that is. Instead, it measures your performance on cognitive tasks relative to your peers.

        • This isn't the individual level.

          Perhaps not. But IQ does measure something strongly correlated with success in life (income, health, longevity), and things that raise IQ also raise those measures of success.

          Some things that raise IQ: Reducing environmental lead and other heavy metal neurotoxins. Better prenatal nutrition, especially folic acid. A mom who doesn't drink while she's pregnant. Parents who don't smoke. Breastfeeding. Etc.

          So whatever IQ is measuring is a good proxy for measuring a lot of things we should be fixing and identifying which subpopulations aren't fixing those problems.

          Black kids have the lowest IQ scores. They also have the highest blood lead levels, parents who are most likely to smoke and drink, and the least likely to breastfeed. Asian kids have the highest IQ scores and are on the opposite end of all those other criteria.

          • Re:

            Yep. Looks like your assessment is in line with mine. Reducing environmental exposure to lead, other neurotoxic heavy metals, hell, other neurotoxic stuff in general. The single biggest reduction being banning leaded gasoline.

            Improved nutrition, including/especially prenatal. Including breastfeeding and such when possible, and using a high quality replacement if necessary*. Not doing various drugs with negative effects, though I wonder if those should be under pollution.

            And yeah, we have subpopulation

          • Re:

            > Some things that raise IQ: Reducing environmental lead and other heavy metal neurotoxins. Better prenatal nutrition, especially folic acid. A mom who doesn't drink while she's pregnant. Parents who don't smoke. Breastfeeding. Etc.

            If you look at the literature, the lead thing is getting a bit suspect. There's a persistent IQ gap it's being used to explain and to do so the effect size has been creeping up higher and higher in the literature, yet there are lots of confounders here. It probably has some

          • • Republicans

              Looks like the Republican plan is working.

        • Re:

          Yeah, the problem with IQ tests is that they test select cognitive functions, while "intelligence" is one of those things that if you ask a half dozen experts to define, you'll get around a dozen answers. Everybody has their own weighting.

          Thus why it's fairly bad at the individual level, but still works at the social level.

          • Re:

            > while "intelligence" is one of those things that if you ask a half dozen experts to define, you'll get around a dozen answers.

            That's why the 'IQ' tests are measuring 'g' factor which the experts understand has one answer, and it's an important one.

      • Re: Gravity vs IQ

        Having access to information is of course important. If you ran an IQ test on a Senegalese island inhabitant who had never had formal training in maths, or understood the scientific methods or basic comprehension skills, they would fail miserably. Having access to information in and of itself is a big determinant BECAUSE it requires comprehension to be useful, which we naturally try to understand and therefore become good and learning and figuring out. Itâ(TM)s like exercising a muscle. You use it and

        • Re:

          Perhaps, but there are IQ tests that are designed to have as little training in maths as possible. Just being alive should give comprehension skills, I mean, they need to comprehend when they're in danger. Scientific methods are, for the most part, not applicable.

          But yeah, primitive people doing worse on the tests is something they've been spending a while trying to work around.

      • Re:

        Innate intelligence? Nope. That's fundamental attribution bias. Sure some people do appear to be born with certain advantageous pre-dispositions & attributes, e.g. larger working memory capacity (WMC), but that doesn't necessarily predict academic performance in real life. There are a lot of very "intelligent" people who don't have large WMC & conversely, people with large WMC who don't perform well on intelligence tests.
        
        A simple analogy, some people are born with physical fitness attributes that

      • Nutrition and pollution are worse

        Fossil fuel use is still increasing, and the effects of the pollution it generates takes many years to manifest. CO2 levels in our everyday lives have increased, which has known effects on cognition. Most people now live in cities, where pollution is concentrated. Food is being manufactured rather than grown while medicine tells us to avoid processed food. These seem like the most obvious reasons IQ scores have dropped over a century of large scale industry. It also explains a lot of the anger and biza

      • Re:

        Yes it is. I have taken MANY IQ tests over my lifetime, and I have always scored between 140 and 148. That by itself is enough to convince me that IQ tests are snake oil, because I know for a fact that I do not have genius-level intelligence. Hi intelligence, yes. Genius intelligence, hell no.

        So this report tells us exactly nothing of use. Its fear-mongering for some unknown ulterior motive. That motive is typically money, so that's a safe first bet.

    • Re:

      And? I think a more relevant debate is should we be prioritising turning people into smart utter cunts who treat everyone not like them with distain, or maybe the world would be a better place if people learnt a bit of VERY MUCH NEEDED empathy.

      You want to talk "for crying out load", the USA is currently split into two political realms with so little tolerance that each side thinks the other side are borderline sub human. Maybe science isn't the right thing to be teaching right now.

    • Re:

      "Social issues" is the catch-all scapegoat for people like you, isn't it?
      With all the wild correlations going on, you could probably also show that the IQ drop among adults has a good correlation with the FOX News ratings.
      
      A News network whose opinion of their viewers is that they're dumb cousin fucking terrorists. So they keep feeding them what they want to hear to keep the ratings high, like "social issues" and making up all kinds of shit that children are taught despite themselves not even believing in

    • Re:

      Left out, of course, is the effects of importing massive numbers of 3rd world immigrants. As usual, the most obvious and logical answer is the one we're not allowed to discuss.

      More dumb people = lower average IQ.

      Pretty simple, really.

      • Re:

        That's begging the question. It's as easy to speculate that the folks from third world countries are under greater selective pressure than the poor in first world countries, which would mean they would be bringing superior genetics with them, and in the superior nutrition/pollution environment of a first world setting their second generation offspring would perform better than the natives and further admixture would have a positive aggregative effect. Although it probably isn't that simple either. There

        • Re:

          Actually being a genius in a hardscrabble life is pretty miserable. It's the reason neurons are pared in children who are in abuse or difficult environments. You only need enough brains to survive in your environment.

    • Re:

      The difference is in education, and while we can all sit here on./ and debate the merits and drawbacks of our modern educational system, the obvious answer is that schools are more focused on social issues today than they have ever been, and far less focused on the scientific literature. For crying out loud they are teaching children that biological sexual characteristics are muted by feelings. They are teaching children that the color of your skin does indeed matter, and that the objective in life is to d