Comment by Mistletoe
1 day ago
I like the spirit of what you are saying but the smart part isn’t true at all. IQ peaked around the mid 1990s and as someone that lived back then that tracks.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
Look at Fig. 3. The world seems to be experiencing a reverse Flynn effect.
The abstract quite literary cautions against the way you're interpreting the data. The relevant quote:
> Notably, these gains do not uniformly translate to a rise in underlying GMA, suggesting the presence of domain-specific improvements and test characteristic changes over time. Conversely, the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests, also reflecting specific abilities not attributable to changes in the latent GMA factor. Our findings further challenge the validity of claims that changes in the general factor drive the Flynn effect and its reversal. Furthermore, they caution against using these scores for longitudinal studies without accounting for changes in test characteristics.
I don’t agree with their interpretation at all and neither do lots of other studies around the world that get the same result.
> the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests
What else would this be but intelligence? Imagine if your AI didn’t know what words mean and couldn’t do math and you still tried to make the assertion that it was just as intelligent.
>What else would this be but intelligence? Imagine if your AI didn’t know what words mean and couldn’t do math and you still tried to make the assertion that it was just as intelligent.
Counterpoint: If I don't teach a kid to read and then ask them to do a test that has reading as a requirement, I can say two contradictory things:
1. This kid isn't intelligent. 2. I don't know what this kid's intelligence is; I gave them a test on something they weren't taught.
What you're describing is in line with 1. That's completely fair and definitely part of what I'd consider intelligence.
This paper is making a statement more in line with 2. I've seen similar conclusions elsewhere; the theories are things like "education is less and less aligned with what IQ tests measure."
In the context of fitness, I feel like 2 is more in line with what we'd be thinking about?
IQ is not a unit, it's a z-score. Z-scores can only be compared within the same cohort against which they are computed and given the same test. Given that the cohorts and tests keep evolving over time, it makes no sense to track IQ across large time periods.
The reversal of the Flynn effect is more likely explained by other factors such as the explosion of social media, endless addictive entertainment, and all the attention manipulation that comes with it. Conception didn’t change that much at a large enough scale during this short time period to explain it.