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Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why

newscientist.com

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Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why

#142
post #104
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have seen any scientific IQ test other than fakes ones on internet? The portions are well discrete. IQ test has nothing to do with linguistics ability (at least we don’t know it) and most of IQ test don’t require you to read or write anything.

> Have seen any scientific IQ test other than fakes ones on internet? ... IQ test has nothing to do with linguistics ability ... The most widely used IQ test has explicit verbal testing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_...

Why you think you should answer when you don’t have answer?

Verbal testing is different than spatial ability testing? Do you see the logic? Verbal testing is separate skills. And spatial skills are different too.

>The most

Completely false.

Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if countries like Korea and China weren't poised to exploit embryo selection and genetic modification for increased health and IQ" Increasing IQ could only make sense for me if the society would know how to integrate people with High IQ. But for now we are far from it with 50% of high IQ people failing their education cursus and having issues interacting socially

We will soon have the selection power to select for many traits simultaneously. Also, much of the problem super high IQ people have is the result of being surrounded by people much less capable than themselves. If we seize the high-IQ alleles and distribute them to the proletariat this would not be an issue.

being parent of high-IQ children is quite tiresome compare to average IQ children. So you would need a big bang in term of school reorganization and support to parents.

Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why

#144
post #76

Earlier 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.

> Let me ask you how many of immigrants are grad students or people with high tech jobs? Depends on the country of entry and the country of origin. The majority of latin America immigrants in the US, or African immigrants in France for example will be nothing like "grad students" and "high tech jobs". > Is it one of the stupidest thing to say drop in IQ is connected to immigrants! It's actually a pretty decent explan…

>This is not a reasoned argument against the parent's argument.

FYI the parent comment was not reasoned argument either. The notion of relation between education and IQ is questionable.

>It's actually a pretty decent explanation.

No it is not at all. Since it requires rigorous calculation and estimation of how much immigrants have come, what is their average IQ, how much drop we see in population and so many questions.

This is what “pointing finger without any evidence” looks like. I don’t understand why you would consider your approach scientific when I am the one basically asking and questioning all the moving parts.

Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why

#145

Or maybe it's because, somewhat depressingly, IQ is highly hereditary, as research has shown for decades and new gene research is currently confirming, and people with lower IQs tend to have more children.

Please educate yourself in heritability studies before repeating this line. The amount of confusion on this issue is baffling. I'm currently a PhD studying in this very field, and the word almost certainly doesn't mean what you think it means. Heritability, in the abstract, refers to the _variation_ in a trait that is explained by genetics. It is not a measure of how much genetics influences the underlying trait. "Having legs" is a trait with 0 heritability, because variations in leg-ownership are largely explained by environment. Heritability also crucially depends on the population you're studying -- hair color has a heritability score of 0 in African and Asian populations, but is much larger in European populations.

More worrisome, the methods for establishing heritability are methodological dubious (twin studies, for example, violate an enormous number of statistical assumptions heritability models rely on). This is simply ignored by the bulk of researchers in this area. For a really good treatment of this phenomenon read this post: https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/03/the-trouble-with-twin-s...

Even the notion of "intelligence" as a meaningful construct is in question. Really: the literature on intelligence is just so nauseatingly bad you should doubt nearly everything you read.

Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why

#146
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let me ask you how many of immigrants are grad students or people with high tech jobs? Depends on the country of entry and the country of origin. The majority of latin America immigrants in the US, or African immigrants in France for example will be nothing like "grad students" and "high tech jobs". > Is it one of the stupidest thing to say drop in IQ is connected to immigrants! It's actually a pretty decent explan…

>This is not a reasoned argument against the parent's argument. FYI the parent comment was not reasoned argument either. The notion of relation between education and IQ is questionable. >It's actually a pretty decent explanation. No it is not at all. Since it requires rigorous calculation and estimation of how much immigrants have come, what is their average IQ, how much drop we see in population and so many question…

>FYI the parent comment was not reasoned argument either. The notion of relation between education and IQ is questionable.

Questionable based on ethical considerations is not the same as non-rational.

It's a very logical thing to consider. A mechanism for example would be that people with higher IQ also tend to succeed in completing more higher education degrees. The inverse is also possible, and it's also a perfectly valid thing to suggest and study. In fact it's studied e.g. in this paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/2/425.full.pdf

>No it is not at all. Since it requires rigorous calculation and estimation of how much immigrants have come, what is their average IQ, how much drop we see in population and so many questions.

That's what's required to get a full result. It's not however required for merely putting forward the argument as a possible explanation, or for judging whether the argument is rational or not.

It seems that your concerns are more tied to a priori axioms and emotional resistance than actual methodological issues in the questions.

Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why

#147
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and the reason is idiots who consider it so.

It’s telling that critics of the film never have an argument more coherent than “your dumb!”.

It's telling that some people believe that:

(a) elevating a Hollywood comedy into some sort of social study / prophecy status is "smart",

(b) calling the majority of people on earth idiots (which the parent did) is also OK,

but that only "idiots" would call them out for doing so.

Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why

#149

It doesn’t take much to bring eugenics supporters out of the woodworks these days does it.

Yep. Whole lotta people not knowing just how many shoulders they are standing on.

A while back someone asked Warren Buffet what he would be under more primitive circumstances. Buffet's reply was... "lion food".

Re: Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no evolutionary pressure Please take another look at my second link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_epidemiology#Overall... If there's some analysis of evolutionary pressure over time I'd be interested to see it, although I'm not sure it can really be quantified like that.

Whatever the truth, that section is poorly and contradictory. 'A strong link between cognitive ability and the risk of death.' 'A 15-point increase in intelligence was associated with a decreased risk of mortality of 32%.' Wikipedia suffers a bit from not trying to be too neutral!! Local cases of intelligence not helping with mortality/reproduction in todays society are not contradictory. This is the (dysgenic) thesi…

I agree that it feels intuitively true, but intuition is often wrong, as that wikipedia section shows. Pay more attention to the sources than the wording of the article. All of the sources demonstrate an inverse correlation between intelligence and mortality, meaning that intelligence does help.
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