If IQ = 100 * mental age / real age, how is it measured in old age? If you are 80 and have an IQ of 50, would that mean you have the mind of a 40-year-old?
Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why
81–90 of 171 posts
Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you serious? Let me ask you how many of immigrants are grad students or prople with high tech jobs? Is it one of the stupidest thing to say drop in IQ is connected to immigrants! It is greatly disappointing to see this kind of nonsense in HN which is kind of home for many hackers and programmers. Hearing these kind of stupid ideas in C-Span? Who cares? But HN, that shows how low our societies has become.
What percentage of immigrants are grad students or people with high tech jobs. I don't know, and I'm genuinely curious.
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Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me take a guess. Comparatively low immigration rate. Hardly accept any refugees (28 individuals accepted by Japan in 2016). Be able to support yourself or be (quite literally) kicked out. High barriers to citizenship.
you are joking right?
I am not. But two things.
First, in response to the parent, I am pointing out something that Japan, Korea and China has in common. I am not asserting that "I am 100% sure that immigration is bad for the national average IQ".
Second, of course individuals in an immigrant population are very successful and to great benefit to societies that receive them. And if you do not accept refugees, of course you miss out on some Einsteins. That's not what we are discussing here.
Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me take a guess. Comparatively low immigration rate. Hardly accept any refugees (28 individuals accepted by Japan in 2016). Be able to support yourself or be (quite literally) kicked out. High barriers to citizenship.
Are you serious? Let me ask you how many of immigrants are grad students or prople with high tech jobs? Is it one of the stupidest thing to say drop in IQ is connected to immigrants! It is greatly disappointing to see this kind of nonsense in HN which is kind of home for many hackers and programmers. Hearing these kind of stupid ideas in C-Span? Who cares? But HN, that shows how low our societies has become.
The millions of economic and war displaced immigrants flooding into Europe are largely and emphatically not grad student with high tech jobs. That's just reality.
Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why
#85It seems like with just a bit more effort the authors could have made a stronger case for their theory that aging is significantly impacting IQ scores by comparing IQ scores among people of the same age (e.g. 20-30 year olds) from decade to decade. They could also look at how IQ changes over a lifespan; there must be some within-subject data available where the same people took an IQ test when they were 60.
> They could also look at how IQ changes over a lifespan It doesn’t because it’s a bell curve. You literally can’t figure out your score until you already know the distribution.
The distribution of an individual's IQ (as a quantile in the group's aggregate, normalized IQ distribution) is not a dirac delta. It's not constant over a lifespan at one location.
I think there would be significant noticeable losses in IQ due to social factors, too, and to a much greater extent than most people would appear to believe when they talk about the heredity of IQ but then think that means IQ determinism..
For example someone could test at 115 IQ, become homeless, then have something much closer to ~100. (Do not use "but someone that smart would never become..." as a cop-out..)
Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why
#86Being a long-suffering thoughtful inquisitive type that can turn their hand to anything I have spent many hours pondering why it seems that most people around me show traits of 'stupidity'. I've come to the conclusion 'stupidity' is not the issue; 'unthinking' is, and the specific sub-type is 'unable to apply logical analytical thinking'. I have a relation who, when challenged that the way they're doing some task is…
> But the result is we now have several generations that have no idea about even the basics of the second most important technology in their lives: electricity (after water and food). They need an 'expert' to do it for them.
I bet fewer homes burn down from miswired plugs or plugs with improper fuses now, too.
I am occasionally surprised by how non-handy people are, but I also realize that being handy isn't actually that valuable. There is virtually no practical gain to be had from knowing how to replace a plug. At best you'll save a few dollars at some point. I am comfortable with wiring but have never replaced a plug. I doubt I ever will.
> This 17 year old (who ate chips from chip-shops frequently) had no idea that to make chips required peeling and slicing raw potatoes and was incredulous at the process; she 'thought' chips just grew as long square pieces of potato - see: "unthinking".
There have always been dumb (or unthinking) people. This isn't a recent change.
Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why
#87Pedantic, but average IQ scores have stayed the same over the years, exactly 100.
Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why
#88It seems like with just a bit more effort the authors could have made a stronger case for their theory that aging is significantly impacting IQ scores by comparing IQ scores among people of the same age (e.g. 20-30 year olds) from decade to decade. They could also look at how IQ changes over a lifespan; there must be some within-subject data available where the same people took an IQ test when they were 60.
You only do enough research to get the p values just right so you can publish. Scientists are not rewarded for more investigations that might weaken their theory.
And then a lazy journalist publishes a headline inflating the results, and the average person unquestioningly believes it, lowering our collective IQ.
Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why
#89Pedantic, but average IQ scores have stayed the same over the years, exactly 100.
This is always the case after they adjust the test. But the averages of generations can differ over time if they use the same test/sans adjustment.
But there is a much stronger way to believe IQ is not the same over time : intelligence is not normally distributed, at all. It really is meaningless to try to measure intelligence samples and call them independent and identically distributed random variables, whether the 'population' is an individual at one snapshot or over time, or an individual in a group (whether over time or not).
Intelligence is probably better measured by a power-law distribution than the normal distribution, whose key property is that it is the probability distribution that maximizes entropy/minimizes information. So maybe there would be a larger discrepancy (relative entropy aka Kullback-Leibler divergence) in measuring IQ as a normal distribution over time than expected (maybe that's the whole reason for the Flynn effect and the author writing this article..)
Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why
#90OECD 2016 "Young people in England are the most illiterate in the developed world with many students graduating with only a basic grasp of English and maths, an in-depth analysis by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has found. The OECD report rated English teenagers aged 16 to 19 the worst of 23 developed nations in literacy and 22nd of 23 in numeracy. In contrast, pensioners or those close t…
But most people back then didn't go to university. And the OECD compares across 23 developed nations. Though, in my opinion , education quality has gone down. In France, 2010ish?, in my last year of high school (in one of the best parisian high school) there was a boy who couldn't read aloud a text without stumbling. I don't know if this would have happened in the past. But back then only 20k students reached that st…
> I don't know if this would have happened in the past.
Let us assume the answer is no for the sake of argument. Does that necessarily mean the quality of education has dropped? Not necessarily. It could mean that 30 years ago this boy would have failed to graduate.
This doesn't mean that the education was any better then, only that the requirements for graduation are lower now. The top and average students today might be leaving with better knowledge and skills than 30 years ago even if the very bottom looks "worse" because fewer people are pushed out entirely. Perhaps the value of the diploma itself diminishes as a result of this, but that doesn't mean the actual education has diminished.
Of course it's also very likely that there have always been people graduating like this.