121–130 of 171 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Older men having children probably does reduce the IQ of future generations given they will pass on more mutations, but no this is not what I meant. Think of all the people you know, think of how smart each person is, and then count up how many children each person has. Unless you you know a very small number of people I think you will see what I mean.
Statistics about how stupid people are outbreeding the smarts would be way more impressive than anecdotes. Especially given things like the Flynn effect.
But "intelligence" / "IQ tests" are tangled up with a lot of correlating factors and biases so it's hard to say what this means. For instance, simply being poor affects cognitive ability considerably -- https://www.princeton.edu/news/2013/08/29/poor-concentration...
We also know that low fertility is also associated with high education levels -- http://www.jstor.org/stable/2137845 -- and income -- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=838227
I think one key here is, now that infant mortality / childhood diseases are much lower than it used to be, a much larger portion of families really want to use family planning methods to keep family sizes low, globally. This is not necessarily a bad thing. http://www.economist.com/node/14743589
So I would take a statement like "the stupids are outbreeding the smarts" as more that, for multiple reasons, access and knowledge of family planning is not as good for those with less education or income. So rather than making this a moan about dysgenics and Idiocracy, it seems a call to action to absolutely ensure these people at least have the access to the health care they need. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835625/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would this effect suddenly present itself in 2004? Why hasn't it caused average IQ to decline for all of human history? "A recurrent fear during the past century is that the mean IQ level of populations will decline because persons with lower IQ scores have above-average fertility. Most microlevel data demonstrate such fertility differentials, but population IQ levels have risen rather than fallen. In this articl…
Because birth control is a recent invention. Before that, it took smarts to survive in a crapsack world. We have this stereotype of peasants and medieval people as being stupid in general but all the evidence shows otherwise. You had to be smart and capable of making robust plans to eke out a living on hardscrabble.
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.
The book outliers says that research shows roughly half of IQ dictated by genetics. Do you have research that contradicts this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it funny that the 'Great Kingdom' didn't sell electrical appliances with a plug fitted on the 1980s since that was standard in pretty much all the rest of the world. It's not about convenience, it's about selling a functioning and safe product And yes I do agree the knowledge of replacing plugs is important and is getting lost, I didn't learn it by having to fit it to newly acquired equipment (rather by fixing…
I'm fairly sure that the requirement for moulded plugs is an EU directive. The design of UK plugs means that user replaceable ones are the same size and shape as moulded ones. Doing the same for Schuko plugs is harder so it makes sense that they went all-moulded earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power_plugs_and_sockets:_Br...
"UK Consumer Protection legislation requires that most domestic electrical goods sold must be provided with fitted plugs to BS 1363-1. These are usually, but not necessarily, non-rewirable."
It 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.
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.
Or maybe it's not so simple, and IQ can also be changed by environment. It's not a crazy idea that people with more money have better access to education.
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.
Why would this effect suddenly present itself in 2004? Why hasn't it caused average IQ to decline for all of human history? "A recurrent fear during the past century is that the mean IQ level of populations will decline because persons with lower IQ scores have above-average fertility. Most microlevel data demonstrate such fertility differentials, but population IQ levels have risen rather than fallen. In this articl…
So there is no evolutionary pressure. Evolution is a (brutal) system of unfairness that represents everything that modern progressive values work against. This is something that will need reconciling (or many technologists will hope for genetic engineering I guess) or in the long term will not be sustainable.
Consider your children are on average genetically inferior to you. This is mathematically true. A society which uniformly has 2 children per person + 100% survival will regress. In fact it may take something closer to mediaval or even prehistoric reproductive outcomes to have positive evolutionary pressure. This could be many people having 4-5 children, with many other people who are 'unfit' not having children at all (either remaining childless or dying early).
The subsequent improvements in education,environment and nutrition have likely provided a dividend that masked a fall in underlying genetic intelligence. Naturally as those gains have been fully realised the underlying trend will reassert itself.
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.
In his book, Flynn attributes part of the mysterious increase in IQ during the 20th century to the spread of general education and inculcation of scientific and logical modes of reasoning more broadly.
He recounts a story from Soviet anthropologists who travelled through Russia studying peasants at the beginning of the 20th century. An anthropologist presented a villager with a simple syllogism:
All swans are white. If I told you there was a swan in the next village over and sent you over to report its color for me. What color do you expect it to be?
Peasant's response: I don't know. I'd have to go check.
Which makes sense when you exist in a world in which you're operating mostly on the basis of personal relationships and trust is based on a person's word and status and not on abstract and institutionalized forms of knowledge. You'd be an idiot to trust the word of some stranger you just met.
But this guy probably did not do so well on the IQ test he was given.
In fact, check out this statement from Flynn's Wikipedia page:
Women, he argued, caught up to men in these nations as a result of exposure to modernity by entering the professions and being allowed greater educational access.