What's even more worrying is that I've heared plenty of people defend it as, "Younger generations are just intelligent in different ways compared to older generations."
I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.
Halfway through 30's means you were born in the 90's though, but other than that you're right, the advent of the internet, google, and rapid fire short form content has messed with our attention spans; the following generation grew up on the internet and saw the advent of high intensity videos and then short-form mobile-only infinite-stream short-form dashed-words videos.
The anti-intellectualism is so weird to me, it feels like people get overly defensive and angry (a secondary emotional response to shame) when confronted with their own lack of knowledge / intelligence or when asked or challenged to use their own brain.
People love to say this, but the whole point of IQ is that it happens to correlate well with many other, more practical measures of cognitive capability. That’s why it is used.
What's even more worrying is that I've heared plenty of people defend it as, "Younger generations are just intelligent in different ways compared to older generations."
I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.
Halfway through 30's means you were born in the 90's though, but other than that you're right, the advent of the internet, google, and rapid fire short form content has messed with our attention spans; the following generation grew up on the internet and saw the advent of high intensity videos and then short-form mobile-only infinite-stream short-form dashed-words videos.
To add, less articulate and somewhat overtly anti-intellectual. Why even learn something when you can ask the slot machine?
The anti-intellectualism is so weird to me, it feels like people get overly defensive and angry (a secondary emotional response to shame) when confronted with their own lack of knowledge / intelligence or when asked or challenged to use their own brain.
You should point out then that "border collies are just intelligent in different ways, too"
The benefits are increased productivity, consumer satisfaction, and shareholder profits
IQ is calibrated so that the average IQ is 100. If the average IQ is going down, something has gone very wrong somewhere
IQ is a relative measure not an absolute one. 100 IQ in 2026 can be massively different in absolute terms to 100 IQ in 1956.
If you look at old test papers - the lack of intelligence in modern times is very stark.
Yes, but the comment was about IQ, not absolute intelligence. The median intelligence is, by definition, 100 IQ, so the median IQ cannot be decreasing
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Look up the Flynn effect. You're right in the first paragraph, but wrong about the direction.
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IQ is a measure that tests how well people can do IQ tests, I don't think it's an objective measure at all.
People love to say this, but the whole point of IQ is that it happens to correlate well with many other, more practical measures of cognitive capability. That’s why it is used.
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I wonder why is that, what the point of having a score that you can not compare them without external context (the day of taking exam)
IQ gets manually recalibrated downwards when people get stupider so it's mean 100 by construction.
Hmm, who does the calibration, and how scientific are they about it? Can we check their work?
I feel like this post unironically proves the point.
i’m not doubting this, but do you know if there are any studies on this already?
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-online-iq-scores-century.html https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2023.101734
US centric data, absolutely useless. This is just measuring american decline, not civilisation changes.
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that's a study published in 2023, analyzing data that ended in 2018.
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Hard not to see what you’ve just done here as an analogue of what the article is arguing against
I am the lazy human today, but this one is listing a few references:
https://www.pressenza.com/2025/07/the-decline-of-the-intelli...