IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries

This is the kind of study where I expect in a few months to see headlines about IQ NOT dropping, and then more headlines about how IQ is dropping and in the end the whole thing is inconclusive.

The more attention grabbing the headline is the more skeptical I am of the study.

>Substantial gains in GA were apparent from the mid 1950s (test years) to the end 1960s–early 1970s, followed by a decreasing gain rate and a complete stop from the mid 1990s. [...] It is concluded that the Flynn effect may have come to an end in Norway.

The single and/or the first children have higher IQ, so the Flynn effect is a reverse to the number of children per family, ie. it is a reverse to that graph:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

And on the other side of the world - the "one child” policy results are in:

"An increase of intelligence in China 1986–2012" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961...

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

I wish that I saw more of these comments on HN links to science articles that explain some research paper. From now on, every such comment that analyzes the underlying study's power and significance, I'm going to upvote, as a general policy.

If it is in fact happening, perhaps carbon dioxide levels during pregnancy and early brain development are critical?

We know that elevated CO2 is negatively correlated with cognitive scores: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2016/07/indoor-co2-du...

So it's reversion to mean which is often seen in nature. If we see that today we don't really need high IQ to navigate our way through the cities, nation or even continent because we've GPS and other technologies which drastically reduce the amount of complexity we need to keep up with. Why should a higher IQ exist then?

If we look at the past and see when and where the IQ increase took place, we see it increasing when when we were required to complex terrain and protect ourselves from harsh climate.

i see 'outrage culture' being a big part. instead of thinking and talking, it's easier to just say 'bigot-racist-homophobe'.

Correlation does not allow you to draw conclusions about causation.

And there are other plausible explanations. Intelligence is highly heritable and negatively correlated with fertility. Also, there has been an overall increase in measured intelligence since IQ tests were first invented. Nobody really knows why. But this could be a reversal of that trend. And, importantly, people have been getting more sedentary during the entire extent of the increase. So it would be hard to square that with the hypothesis that this recent decrease being caused by less activity.

How do you know that the causality is flowing in that direction and not the other way? It could also be that we are getting physically worse because our IQ is declining.

My guess would be that we are too rushed, munching way too much information that scatter our brains, too prone to use shortcuts to get ahead (can't afford being deep), too busy to let ourselves sink into the very much needed meditative state, paradoxically too result-oriented to have time for quality, too fast-paced to let ourselves relax, get bored, and sleep enough. We are too reactive, too shallow, too busy, too stressed. We are constantly in an overexcited, coffee-pumped state following the patterns required to grind the results that meet the deadlines. And that's the opposite of a happy, alert, fresh, calm, sensitive state of being, in my opinion, that leads to good IQ results.

I would bet on too much screen time for the whole family; seen it first hand. Parents sitting on their devices all evening and not interacting with their children. It's a missed opportunity for learning, especially at a young age.

I suspect it means that kids today are a little bit less interested in logic puzzles than their parents, who were themselves turn a lot more interested in them than their grandparents, and IQ testing simply isn't robust enough to accurately capture generational differences in cognitive performance if there actually are any. Instability of IQ testing over time seems a less contentious hypothesis than earlier generations being on average too stupid to accomplish anything...

Is there large wealth inequality in Norway? That is one of the studies this article references.

Why would IQ be explained by wealth inequality? I thought the literature was pretty conclusive - there's a benefit to rising above poverty but beyond that wealth doesn't buy much IQ. Poverty rates are falling, I'm not sure we would expect a person whose nutritional needs are met to be more or less smart because someone else is fabulously wealthy.

IQ, flawed as it may be as a measure, is sometimes touted as one of the best predictors of success in life. It's just conjecture, but maybe there's a feedback loop there.

wealth inequality doesn't mean more poor people. I know it's a lot to ask nowadays but please be informed enough about economics to at least know the very basics if you are going to bring it up.

The idea that the food availabe to people is getting worse or less, in Western Europe of all places, is absolutely ridicolous. If anything the opposite is the case. As regards jobs we also have the opposite problem: too few simple jobs.

> decrease in quantity of healthy food consumed

Far as I can tell, this is the opposite of the trend, in the U.S. and Canada.

> I wonder if the drop in IQ is related to the increase in wealth inequality in these past 50 years as well.

Not sure what mechanism you think would enable that. Thinking that the richest people in society are, in relative terms, more rich than you than before has no obvious effect on anything related to IQ. Average and median PPP wealth and income continue to grow.

We have about 75 years of testing on that, don’t we? Communist states such as China, USSR, and were a living laboratory. You could meet wide swathes of society with essentially the same income, but there was still the same kind of range in IQ you see in wealthier societies. I recall no studies showing different IQs vs. the free market (and hence more unequal) cohorts.

I think it's because intelligence doesn't help when it comes to earning money. The luck and social component is so strong that there is very little incentive for people to be intelligent.

I also do think that wealth inequality correlates with lower average IQ. Rich people want to keep the majority of people dumb; breed them like cattle, hook them up to machines and milk them.

While the link to is might not be clear, it certainly has been shown to improve empathy, which in itself is an important ability for success in life. Alos of course knowledge, awareness of the world, expressiveness/language skills/vocabulary, ...

If the biases are consistent on average then a change still matters. If I added or subtracted a random number between 0 and 100 to every reported IQ score in the world it would become virtually useless as a measure of each person, but the global average IQ would hardly change.

Why stop there? Maybe the decline started with the invention of writing. Here's Socrates:

But when it came to writing Theuth said, 'Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories; my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom.' But the king answered and said, 'O man full of arts, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them. And so it is that you, by reasons of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.'

(from Phaedrus)

Lots of things that are obvious are wrong. You'd have to show a) we're getting worse at things that we've started offloading to phones (maybe probably true? but demonstrating causation would still be difficult), and if true, b) that IQ tests measure those same things.

Unless you show both of those you haven't shown that dropping IQ rates are related to the proliferation of mobile devices.

>proliferation of mobile devices makes people dumber

In the very 1st week of my PhD studies, we had a host of eminent researchers advising us on how to succeed in graduate studies. One of those professors put up a slide that had a giant 1-line “Don’t use smartphones”

The entire audience - all 30 fresh PhD students, simply took a picture of that slide with their smartphone, just as they did the previous slide & the next one & so on. Not even a hint of irony.

That’s when I thought - that ship has sailed.

Since the drop that they are talking about began in 1975, that would not seem like a good fit as an explanation.

There was video here recently linking rising test scores to increases in prevalence of abstract thinking.

Having the answers to "everything" at your fingertips may be blunting that for us.

Carbon monoxide pollution has decreased (or been stable) in the countries I've bothered to check over the last decades (while the Flynn effect was in full swing):

https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/carbon-monoxide-trends

https://www.epd.gov.hk/epd/english/environmentinhk/air/data/...

https://iir-de.wikidot.com/emission-trends-carbon-monoxide

Ashes Ashes did a podcast on this: https://ashesashes.org/blog/episode-07-last-gasp

And a related episode on air pollution in general: https://ashesashes.org/blog/episode-38-dead-air

Reversing, not declining.

Wow we got really different interpretations out of that quote. In the context of a math textbook, I take that quote to be emphasizing the importance of abstractions and symbols for reasoning effectively.

I don't know if "thinking" in the context of that quote requires high IQ. I think that a high IQ person does less conscious thinking and "just gets" complex problems easily.

I think Alfed Whitehead is supporting IQ rise as civilization advances, since baseline abstractions, problems solving techniques, and patterns are taught to us by our parents / community, and are accumulated over time. We have observed this to be true continuously.

An IQ test is timed and requires pattern recognition and selection for the most part. These things are exactly the type of "operations we perform without thinking" that general intelligence supports. Being good at finding and acting on general patterns without deep thought is extremely helpful and is probably (at least loosely) associated with high IQ.

The further the complexity of civilization exceeds the population's ability to understand it, the more fragile it becomes. People absolutely should cultivate the habit of thinking, because thinking helps us survive disasters.

Not really. He’s talking about the power of mathematical formalism. With a good formalism you just push symbols around following easily memorized rules without thinking about what they mean until you reach your final result.

> One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term). Alternatively, widening immigration might be bringing less-intelligent newcomers to societies with otherwise higher IQs.

> However, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families. In other words, the issue is not that educated Norwegians are increasingly outnumbered by lower-IQ immigrants or the children of less-educated citizens. Even children born to high-IQ parents are slipping down the IQ ladder.

Not sure about that, aren't immigrants (on average) more educated than the native population?

There is a documentary about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

Were that the case, the highly regimented asian educational system would have yielded significantly sub-standard average IQs.

>My first thought was that kids are spending more time on schooling and homework, and less on creative play and unsupervised time outdoors.

In America, unsupervised time outdoors is illegal in many states.

While that may be true, it also seems to me (anecdotal) that schooling today involves a lot more 'creative play' and self guided exploration, and lot less rote learning than it did 50 years ago. I wonder if it's possible to untangle the effects.

Unlikely. We’ve had very good data from conscription registers, especially in the Nordics.

I can't agree with that conclusion. There are plenty of brilliant idiots and idiotic geniuses in the world and it can often be more difficult to change the mind of a "smart" person who has drawn the wrong conclusions than a simple person who has done the same. Individuals who draw their sense of self-worth from their perceived intelligence a more likely to stand their ground, argue semantics, and log every cheap rhetorical grenade they can until they are blue in the face.

For evidence of the irrationality of intelligent people, I proffer the example of every pointless university faculty departmental meeting, ever.

This is just standard stupidity as we have always had. What has changed is the scope of the problem. While a few generations ago, stupidity affected ones local environment, now stupidity can have a global impact. People back then could not do any better. This isn't about intelligence, this is about intelligently working together. Something humans don't do a great job at in large numbers.

Eh, is there any evidence that being smart and being 'nice' are necessarily correlated? Seems like there are quite a lot of intelligent people who do morally questionable things or threaten humanity.

Becoming a corrupt government official and lining your own pockets at the expense of the rest of the population isn't necessarily a dumb thing, nor is working in an oil company or developing weapons for the military. Every dictatorship through history has had scientists and academics working for them on all kinds of horrific things.

That's not saying intelligence can't help fix problems or that being dumb is good. But being selfish or evil or sociopathic doesn't seem to have a lot to do with your intelligence, and the issues often come down to selfishness, greed or a lack of morals more than anything else.

> Can you properly analyze the reasons behind this without going into ethnic differences in IQ?

The article mentions a Norwegian study [1] measuring an IQ decline within families.

So it looks like the cause must be environmental.

My pet theory is that reading as an activity has been replaced by the consumption of audiovisual content.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf

That head-in-the-sand approach doesn't make these issues go away.

> 2. Consumption, consumption, consumption. Most consume but don't create.

That's where I'd put my money. All of a sudden, the need to consume crappy pop culture has exploded around us, and people simply don't do things any more -- "Netflix and chill" has simply pushed other activities aside.

This is, of course, nothing new; it's just that modern streaming services deliver makes it so much more available than it was 30 years ago.

I'm pretty sure the same arguments were made about television, radio, and yes, even books.

If you look at social media today, it's all about creation. You create posts or photos or clever tweets and share them with your peers. This is the opposite of sitting down in front of the television for a few hours to watch corporate-generated programming.

The statement that "We have access to all human knowledge at the palm of our hand" is a profound error that I'm seeing repeated more frequently of late. Getting a search result with the text of some learned document is not equivalent to actually reading the document and digesting it mentally and emotionally so that you have some understanding of it.

This illusion of having all human knowledge at hand is one of the reasons people are becoming dumber, not smarter.

The most interesting part is that it hasn't affected the US (yet). The US is probably the leader among developed nations in bad environmentalism, blue screens, bad sleep, opioid addiction, etc... so unless there's a reporting issue in the US, that kind of rules out a lot of those conclusions.

The causal link between obesity and low IQ does not seem to be through systemic inflammation. The research I came across suggests that people with lower IQ are more likely to become obese.

> We observed no evidence that obesity contributed to a decline in IQ, even among obese individuals who displayed evidence of the metabolic syndrome and/or elevated systemic inflammation.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3813310/

> Overall there was an inverse FIQ/obesity association, except in pre-school children. However, after adjusting for educational attainment, FIQ/obesity association was not significantly different. A lower FIQ in childhood was associated with obesity in later adulthood perhaps with educational level mediating the persistence of obesity in later life.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19780990

Opioids, obesity and lead pipes are not common in Europe.

If you look at socioeconomic success (education and occupation), there is an extremely high correlation with IQ.

http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intellige...

There are a lot of reasons you would expect divergence when just looking at salary. A Reporter is averaging 41k, a Postdoctoral Research Associate is averaging under $48k while a nurse makes $65k and a elevator repairman is making 79k. Higher status jobs don't necessarily pay more.

Other possible explanations:

- Intelligence is not correlated with salary

- Intelligence is negatively correlated with materialism

- Intelligent people get paid more for doing work that requires I but less for having an unpleasant job (given equal pay, would you rather be a programmer or a garbage collector?)

- Intelligence is negatively correlated with other abilities (brain areas specialized in reasoning can't be specialized in social skills, energy spent on the brain can't be spent on the immune system)

- Intelligence is negatively correlated with mental health (Less Intelligent people don't notice or understand problems more intelligent ones do – ignorance is bliss; the things that make one intelligent also make one less stable – the genes that make one less intelligent haven't died out because evolution hasn't progressed that far yet but because the brain designs intelligent people have are buggy.

IQ is a valid measure of a certain kind of intelligence. And it most certainly correlates with salary and success at an individual and a national level.

The higher your IQ, the greater the odds of you making more money. The higher the collective IQ of a nation or group, the greater the odds of that nation or group being successful or wealthy.

https://brainstats.com/average-iq-by-country.html

If you look at the list of successful and wealthy countries and the list of national iqs, they tend to correlate fairly well. Barring war or some external impediment, the nations with the highest iqs tend to be wealthier and the lower iqs tend to be poorer.

> One reason to doubt this is that above a low threshold (80 IIRC), IQ has no correlation with salary.

Do you have a source for this? Everything I have read suggests IQ is highly correlated with income (without considering a threshold).

Not sure what salary has to do with it. Salary is not intelligence.

I'm not saying that assumption is not wrong; I certainly have my doubts about the validity of IQ tests. But salary isn't a valid measure of intelligence either.

Honestly, I don't think we can even really agree on what intelligence is, and as long as that's the case, we can't really know what we're supposed to measure either.

IQ measures intelligence, not how much the market values intelligence.

Perhaps what you're getting at is 'how much does IQ matter' which is an interesting question.

In modern society the answer is probably a lot. And when you factor in the negative correlation between intelligence and aggression / self-control, probably a lot more.

IQ's not the most robust measurement, but it is one of the best we have for predicting overall success in life.

It is a little risky assuming correlation - hopefully salary is correlated with a sort of general economic contribution rather than intelligence. Intelligence isn't a prerequisite for contributing mightily.

If intelligence was correlated with salary that would be a symptom of bad outcomes in the economic system. I'd expect that, but wouldn't be happy to see it. Eg, whoever is running the local plumbing small business is in a position to make a lot of money. The plumber might be smart or might not be, really shouldn't matter.

I've seen situations where truck drivers make a higher salary than engineers. More intelligence almost correlated with a lower salary.

I agree with other replies that salary is a very flawed indicator of intelligence, but it was a simple data point to share. My only point is that it's not at all obvious that IQ is a valid measure of intelligence.

If you think about what is involved in an IQ test and all the ways someone's intelligence manifests itself, it seems clear to me that IQ is at best a very distorted and narrow measurement of intelligence.

Because... the higher the salary the higher the intelligence?

> not generally:

> among Swedish men born 1951–1967: evidence from military conscription registers

What's that?

While in this case, I've heard it before and it seems to come from actual scientists, so it's probably not just a journalist's imagination. But in general, I agree that it's frustrating to read articles about trends which don't show numbers, particularly graphs, making it difficult to judge. There are so many articles making scary claims like "X has dropped to half what it was a decade ago!" but it turns out that X fluctuates wildly anyway and the recession or whatever had a massive temporary effect on it.

That said, my 2c is that high IQ causes people to become professionals and being a professional reduces the number of children they have. From my personal observations, poor people seem to have children as their purpose in life while professionals have other purposes and don't feel as much need for children.

Contrast this to most of the last couple of millennia where the highest status men had lots of children to multiple mothers, and famines were common, which would wipe out the poorest people. The poorest people would have included those least able to climb the class hierarchy by being merchants or intelligently winning the games of politics. There also wasn't social welfare to enable the poorest people to support as many children as they want. It sounds like a breeding ground for intelligence.

I think it depends on the content. I had a book in front of my face for about 6 hours a day for 13 years in grade school. Not counting college.

A majority of the content I watch on YouTube gives me more knowledge, from Programming to Fishing. A chunk of what I look at is absolutely junk and I feel like it rots my brain if I watch/read too much.

Top global economy indeed! With people having to choose between life saving medicine, food and rent. /s

America is a 3rd world nation in many aspects.

US infant mortality rate exceeds that of numerous "third-world" countries. Recently we were just ahead of Belarus, but they now have pulled ahead, well out of reach.

The US matches third-world countries in numerous other indicators, and is declining in most of them. This is not accidental; it is a direct consequence of choices made by those in power.

The US on a large range of measures has never quite joined the ranks of the mainstream West. It has the largest GDP, sure, but with inequality rates approaching 3rd world levels, that wealth isn't sufficiently distributed to bring its human development on many measures up to that of other nations. It's very obvious to W. Europeans, Canadians & Australasians who spend much time in the US that life is harder and poorer and less socially mobile for vast swathes of the population.

Not particularly plausible. If you wanted to go that route, then linking rising temperatures to more uncomfortable learning and testing environments would probably be more plausible, but even that is a stretch.

The concentrations required for such effects are way higher than atmospheric CO2 changes that'll happen any time soon.

... you’re describing an IQ test?

Another obvious explanation. We know that large increases in the CO2 in our indoor environments can decrease results on IQ tests. Is there a reason to think that small increase in the CO2 in the atmosphere wouldn't produce a proportionally smaller decrease in IQ scores? Or, hopefully, that better insulation causing higher levels of CO2 indoors in testing places wouldn't produce lower scores as another possibility.

Sorry, I fail to see how asking to choose a specific geometric figure out of four can be culturally biased.

Unless we embrace the culture of "there are no wrong answers".

I feel like you'd have to content with test reliability, correlation with other measures of intelligence, and the general multi-decade upward trend (not specific to 1970s, the Flynn effect).

It's possible there is something to this.

What does 2019-smart mean though? People's brains are optimized for better handing of super-stimulating entertainment? Does that translate into better problem solving and other important skills? Have the importance of those smarts related to those skills changed in 50 years? If not, adjusting the IQ tests to match these doesn't make sense.

I took an IQ test recently. It was all finding patterns in shapes. Very different from, say, the SAT.

What about this would be culturally biased? The test could literally be administered in any language or even orally to someone who couldn’t read.

IQ is probably one of the closest tools we have to measuring intelligence, at least in terms of a person's ability to process information and reason about it.

IQ is not intelligence, but it's the closest thing to approximate it for certain cognitive aspects.

I agree it's a measurement and does not encompass every aspect of intelligence, but I thought they developed tests which had no cultural component, using symbols and patterns.

I think what you’re saying could be posed as a question. Is an IQ test a useful measure of intelligence in the same way in 2019 than in 1970?

If IQ isn't intelligence, then what is?

Have you seen an IQ test? It's the most neutral thing there is, culturally-speaking.

Also what does it mean to be 1970/2019-smart?

How does “culture” play a biasing role? Is there an example of a question that someone 1970-smart will answer correctly but someone 2019-smart will get wrong? Curious.

I'm surprised how many people here don't understand the inherit biases IQ tests have.

In order for something to test intelligence you shouldn't be able to improve your score by learning, practicing, or studying. Scores should be reproducible. I've yet to see an IQ test that didn't test skills you could improve by practicing.

They also assume knowledge. For example, the IQ test I had when I was young included word comparisons. This tested vocabulary more than intelligence. Someone who didn't have a formal education or didn't know English well would score lower regardless of their intelligence.

IQ is not highly regarded in psychology. It's more reliable than garbage like Meyers-Briggs but is not a true test of intelligence.

Obesity is hardly a factor in Norway, where one of the studies was conducted.

This explanation isn't nearly as fun as all the wild speculation we're all posting below you.

+1 for actually hunting down the original study and interpreting it.

-1000 for spoiling our self-righteous party.

> While 63,841 men and women were called in for the examination of persons liable for military service in 2012 (mandatory for men), 9265 were conscripted

Sounds like all men are tested, not all serve.

Wow, that's ridiculous they didn't consider that, or chose to ignore it.

Good find.

Figure 1 A shows a the trends in cohort IQ for the study, and it only goes roughly from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, which is the whole of the comparable period, and it does rise and fall within that period. I just don't know what you're on about.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf

While I think the comparability of IQ test to the past or other countries is very rudimentary, this sounds like this could be a huge factor at least.

We need people like you to be journalists.

Seems like your IQ isn't a problem...

That's basically the main premise of the flawed, yet hilarious, movie Idiocracy.

The article covers this:

> One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term).

> [...]

> However, a 2018 study[1] of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families.

The studies would seem to contradict each other, which isn't all that surprising.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf

As much as a I like the movie it's worth noting that on such short timescales there's probably a more significant impact of nutrition differences and the failure of IQ measures across different society structures ie agrarian, industrialized, service oriented.

The article discussed this but said that even within family's IQ is going down by generation so it cannot be entirely the effect you described.

Sending our smartest women to spend their most productive child bearing years at university is not sustainable if we want to raise or maintain population IQ via the traditional breeding methods. Hopefully these same college women will get us enough skill at manipulating genetics to surpass the incredibly slow optimization process of natural selection. It is currently a race against time. Which will win out, gene manipulation or dysgenic selection?

> And if you're thinking, "Isn't the test set up so that 100 is always the average IQ?," that's only true because researchers rescale the tests to correct for improving raw scores.

One day we'll be one with our devices. True long-term evolution for humanity involves us taking the reins.

It's dropping, not dropped completely. It could take decades before we see a drop in intellectual pursuits as a result in a drop of IQ rates.

The people producing those innovations and discoveries don't represent a random sample of the population as a whole.

Surely IQ increase/decrease over time would give an IQ rate.

From the article: "However, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families. In other words, the issue is not that educated Norwegians are increasingly outnumbered by lower-IQ immigrants or the children of less-educated citizens. Even children born to high-IQ parents are slipping down the IQ ladder."

Wondered about that as well, but another article, linked in the original one, mentions the original study dismisses that hypothesis, since it happens between members of the same family :

https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores-falling-in-worrying-r...

"In the new study, the researchers observed IQ drops occurring within actual families, between brothers and sons – meaning the effect likely isn't due to shifting demographic factors as some have suggested, such as the dysgenic accumulation of disadvantageous genes across areas of society"

Maybe for an individual, but do large cohorts have "moods"? Even if IQ tests only a narrow aspect of human intelligence, it's still something.

Any "widespread misuse" eventually turns into just "use". Linguistic prescriptivism is terrible. What people actually say determines "correct" usage.

Yes. There has been LOTS of studies reporting the end of Flynn effect.

Yeah, that's why countries like Sweden and Finland are at the very bottom of all the PISA rankings /s

You call that thriving?

Is this really the future we want for humankind?

Ah ha. We aren't getting dumber. We are replacing ourselves with robots.

I grunt angrily at this suggestion

As someone designing what could be construed as smart public furniture, I absolutely agree.

Such change is both economically and politically incentivized, and people will almost always err toward convenience. Some recent research[0][1] suggested that purchasing free time (through paying for convenience) makes people happier than material purchases.

Further, potential criticism of such changes is swept under the rug as high end / high tech brands pioneering these services align themselves publicly with the fairytalesque yet disembodied/unassailable image of a "sophisticated" "urbanite" "consumer" who is "time poor" "cash rich" and thereby "successful" because they are "going places" (being content with where you are is unsexy). Moreover, they have "choice" so are "empowered" and can "express themselves" and "their aspirations" through "their choices" (read: spending / conspicuous consumption / subsequent social network image spam). The mythical "successful neighbour" or "keeping up with the Joneses": aspects of human social behavior (and thus capitalist marketing norms) are such a crock of shit sometimes.

A motto for the future? iCaveman: I can't.

[0] http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/18/1706541114.full

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/science/study-happy-save-...

I think it's really hard to be creative when you spend your time worrying about all of that stuff. Most of my peers spend an inordinate amount of time stressing out about every item you list. They get locked into ways of thinking that are nearly identical to each other and that lockstep voice bleeds out into other unrelated areas. There's a lot of group think.

I don't worry about any of that stuff and have a lot of extra energy to explore random topics and generally more positivity to power my endeavours.

It seems the like overt consumer marketing of the 20th century has morphed into a social/political marketing in the 21st century. Because this is a new phenomena people don't seem to realize it's happening and instead blindly contribute their mind the borg, so to say.

It's an interesting thought but it's really hard to compare societal fears across generations. I grew up knowing that if the US or USSR saw a tactical opening, the world could literally just end in something like 11 minutes. Other generations worried about global cooling, overpopulation, Communism, crime waves, and all kinds of other things we can look back at as silly now but that doesn't mean they weren't equally stressed about them at the time.

Well, you can probably prove the feedback the average person receives from media has become more pessimistic, and if you assume some people respond to that feedback, that's a pretty easy line to draw.

There are tons of socioeconomic factors to consider, but I know a lot more fairly average IQ couples with 4 kids instead of two, and I know a lot more smart people who are either childfree or single than parents.

The ability to use birth control properly requires some intelligence.

The needs/career ambitions of a knowledge work career sometimes push aside the desire for a family.

Not trying to be down on people who have lots of kids! There's just tons of factors, some less obvious.

Current thoughts in research are that there are two major factors, each responsible for roughly half of the decline.

First is that intelligent people tend to obtain more education, and more educated people (especially more educated women) tend to have fewer children on average. This has quite obvious effects from evolutionary perspective.

The second, less obvious, is that evolution works by selecting more fit variants of genes out of the pool, and the pool is made of existing variants and random mutations that happen all the time. These random mutations are typically negative for fitness, so the evolution selects against them. However, humans these days are operating under extremely relaxed selection regime, and gene variants which would have had significant negative impact on fitness in the past, while have the exact same effect today, are no longer as detrimental for reproductive purposes, which is basically the only thing evolution cares about.

For a good reference, see Woodley of Menie & Figueredo, 2013.

Isn't this the plot of Idiocracy...stupid people have more kids?

How much variation is explained by genetics versus environment depends on the range of genetics and the range of environments you're looking at. In the US you've got the the full range of normal h sapiens diversity but all children get to drink pasteurized milk, eat iodized salt, use indoor plumbing, and go to school. If you look at a country like India where that isn't true you'll see a much more pronounced impact of shared environment on IQ.

And it isn't that IQ is all genetic, it's that it's half genetic, half something we don't know how to measure, and very little shared or family environment.

CO2 maybe?

https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/24/graphic-the-re...

political correctness and thought police

This may be more remote than you imagine. These conclusions treat complex multicellular organisms as additive linear functions of (a very low resolution image of) their genomes.

We aren't close to understanding intelligence as it relates to cellular or molecular biology.

Are you sure?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev...

There's good reason to believe most of the "single gene affects complex trait" stories are false.

Why do you use "should" instead of "would"?

I fail to see how it's filled with racism. If you're referring to the theory that it's immigrants and poor people reproducing more, you must not have read the next paragraph before you got angry about it:

>One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term). Alternatively, widening immigration might be bringing less-intelligent newcomers to societies with otherwise higher IQs.

>However, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families.

The article (and study) make it clear that IQs are dropping from parent to child, even.

How is measuring something racist ?

Where? The one sentence mentioning immigration? It seems to me that the article goes over and above to try to attribute this change to environmental factors.

You aren’t wrong, and yet you get downvoted.

SAT tests are rooted in eugenics theory. IQ testing, despite the original developer warning of incorrect application, was weaponized in that direction.

Yet here you find yourself getting voted down.

https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=h...

https://owlcation.com/social-sciences/Intelligence-Testing-a...

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/assessment

It seems to me that many people who have kids early (and often have many kids) are those who got them, even if not by an accident, then at least without thinking much about it. Those who try to learn as much as possible first, often decide that it overwhelms them. Planning ahead also seems to be correlated with better use of birth control.

I agree that there is some evolutionary negative feedback loop but we are doing are best to work against it because that seems like a right thing to do.

The feedback loop we haven't handled yet is automation which is increasing minimum IQ required to get a job.