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surrealitycheck
lonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered User regular
lonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered User regular
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if your grandparents had enjoyed today's education they would have scored far better on the IQ test.
But basically twelves years of education for eight hours a day is going to increase a generation's intelligence. Not to mention that modern life has way more abstract complexities for us to play with outside of school than did prior decades. Just look at video games. Kids are spending hours and hours a day essentially solving puzzles.
Another awesome thing to think about: group differences in IQ are on the decline. For example, the IQ differences in America between Whites and African Americans has decreased from about 15 IQ points thirty years ago to about 7 IQ points today. From all the fretting and hand-wringing you hear today about unequal educational opportunities, it's easy to get the idea that things are getting worse. They're not! There's a lot left to do, but we actually have some really encouraging results over the past few decades, presumably for reasons similar to what's happening with the Flynn effect.
But I'm also horrifyingly bad at math and I have no idea if that was true or not. If I had to take a guess, it looked like shit a mathematician student would be working on, it was complicated.
I think going "hurr hurr I'm smarter than Grandpappy is/was when he was my age!" is dumb because he probably had to quit school in the 8th grade so he could help keep his family from dying which is something you whippersnappers never had to deal with, bunch of pampered babies.
I doubt this Flynn effect. If according to that chart, our grandparents were literally retarded then I guess people in the 1400s should have been in a vegetative state? I also wonder how accurate IQ numbers are because something doesn't feel quite right here.
EDIT: Nevermind, I was thinking posting at 4am was a good idea again.
Got a citation for this?
The data I've seen implies it's narrowing, but only at about 2-3 points over the past 30 years (although it's better if you use only children IIRC).
You're misunderstanding what the Flynn effect is arguing. Since IQ is normalized for each population, there weren't any more "retards" in our grandparents' generation than there are in our generation today. But if you were to somehow teleport your average IQ 1930s citizen into 2010, he'd have such comparably little experience with abstractions that he wouldn't be able to function or thrive at the level we've trained our average IQ citizen today. According to the maaaany tests we've run over the decades, he'd actually function at a mentally retarded level today.
But nobody's saying our grandparents had any less potential than anyone born today. If they'd had our resources, of course they'd be just as smart. That's the exact point of the Flynn effect: our huge investments in education and the practice of abstract thought are paying pretty significant dividends.
From Flynn himself: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full
There are similar papers out there, they all put the gap closure between 4 and 8 points.
This makes those time travel movies kind of sad actually, the one where it's actually a stupid romantic comedy and they bring back some medieval guy for Meg Ryan to make out with.
I have a feeling I better make an edit in my post so people don't keep quoting me and making smart ass comments.
Arguing our grandparents weren't retarded is not a stupid point. It really gets at the heart of the debate around the Flynn effect.
A more difficult question might be what would happen if you were somehow able to teleport your average IQ 2010 citizen back to the 1930s. Would he be a genius, or would his practice with abstract thought just be wasted in a time when more concrete thinking made the world go 'round?
For example, I'm pretty sure my grandpa dropped out of high school to go and fight the Koreans. Don't ask me why. Guy really hates communists I guess?
But he can build a house.
And because I hear birds chirping I'm going to sleep now.
Seriously speaking though, what Aldo said.
Anyway, we can all agree that human genes are basically the same now as they were 100 years ago, right? That's just too little time for a significant change to happen.
Diet. I mean even our grandparents were fairly malnorished (rationing, food shortages etc). This whole 'eating exactly as much as you need' lark is fairly recent.
And no you can't really learn to 'take the test' for something like the Weschler, or Katel, at least in any meaningful sense. Yes they're culturally normed, but that doesn't make them useless.
and I'm not saying you could take someone really dumb, put them in a test prep class, and have them pull off a 150 IQ score. I'm just saying that it will boost their scores a little, and if more people are doing that (or just taking more tests in general) that might be enough to explain the slow rise in scores.
Actually. a saw an article in Scientific American talking about how several recent studies have shown the the rate at which the human genome is changing and diversifying is increasing at an incredible rate.
I'll see if I can find the paper for this, but I think the average effect of test prep on SAT scores (for which it's maybe a thousand times easier to "learn the test" than for real IQ tests, especially for allegedly "culture-free" tests of intelligence like Raven's Progressive Matrices) is something like a 10% increase for the really expensive programs.
I do think the reason people today score better on IQ tests is because they're learning what the test is measuring, but not because they're taking tons of standardized tests necessarily. Instead, the amount of time we spend practicing the sort of abstract thought skills IQ tests measure has increased enormously from our grandparents' time.
Also people started taking regular standardized tests in the '60s, and the Flynn effect has been shown to be pretty consistent both before and after that date.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
IQ tests do not measure intelligence, they measure a very narrowly-defined set of skills. The fact we are apparently getting better at those skills (according to the study quoted in the OP which I haven't looked at in detail) does not mean we are getting more intelligent than before.
This. I laughed much harder than I should have at this. My god man.
edit: I can't look away, and I can't stop laughing. Well done, sir.
xbl - HowYouGetAnts
steam - WeAreAllGeth
There's no common definition of intelligence, but whatever IQ test scores are measuring reliably predicts academic success at all levels as well as job performance at both low- and high-level jobs. In fact, they're the most reliable predictor of these measures, far more so than either motivation or personality traits.
The argument that whatever IQ tests are measuring can be called "intelligence" comes from the evidence that a general fluid intelligence exists in the first place and that IQ is the best available approximation for it. While child prodigies who excel in one field but fail miserably at other fields exist, there is a ton of statistical evidence that more commonly high levels of performance in one set of skills (math, verbal, spatial, musical, social intelligence) correlates with high levels of performance in the other sets of skills.
There's an argument to be had that the sets of skills the IQ tests measures isn't necessarily "intelligence," that rather than the ability to think in logical abstractions we should call gut intuition or accumulated life-wisdom or some form of concrete thinking "intelligence." But I'm not willing to buy that argument, and even if there were many different types of intelligence why not call the type that best predicts success and achievement to be the true "intelligence"? And that's exactly what IQ does.
So the Flynn effect isn't necessarily showing that we're getting more "intelligent," it's just showing that our intelligence is more of an abstract-based logical type of intelligence.
I know that you can't teach intelligence but it seems like there were groups of people that had disorders like autism or downs syndrome and now we are able to reach them to some level so instead of going "yeah they can't pick up a pencil, give them a 10" some of those people are getting early help and are able to function in society. We have also medically eliminated some causes of mental retardation (PKU and cretinism).
A small percentage increase in the average could be caused by everyone improving slightly, or it could be cause by taking a much smaller percentage of the population and having them make much larger increases.
That's not necessarily true.
Let us imagine, for a moment, that what was determining IQ was a function of DNA methylation based on chemical exposure of the mother - and for whatever reason, a chemical has become increasingly widespread that causes this type of epigenetic trait to turn up all over the shop. Or a developmental factor that affects the child while still in the womb.
Remember that environment does not mean not innate.
Nice use of effect, bro.
I'm not too sure about that. There are still some twin separation studies out there that are hard to refute. For example, take two low-IQ twins and separate them at birth and they're still going to end up with similar levels of intelligence. Even if you take a really conservative estimate and account for every possible flaw in adoption studies, you still end up with a heritability estimate for IQ that is between 20-50%.
And the Flynn effect is showing that entire populations (generations) are getting smarter, not that the distribution within a population is changing. There is just as much variation in IQ tests scores as there were two generations ago, but everyone's IQ has gone up due to shared national changes.
I see what you're saying, and the Flynn effect does seem to be showing that IQ scores are malleable. And they are malleable. But variations in IQ from birth are very real.
(and of course what IQ tests measure is not innate; people aren't born knowing much of anything. but they are a valid aptitude test assuming everyone gets a bare minimum of socialization).
Don't act like you've never done that before! It happens to us all!
Agreed. I didn't mean to come across as suggesting that IQ level is 100% learned. Rather, there's enough learned component that using it as a proxy for intelligence (whatever that is) is no good.
It's also still a valid measure. After all, all sorts of individuals outcomes (e.g. income) are highly correlated with it.
I agree with most of this. However, studies on expertise (e.g., with chess masters) have shown that genius is created by practicing for many years past the point when the brain stops developing. Expertise in a domain is essentially a function of the number of meaningful hours spent practicing in that domain. His brain may be done developing, but he's still plenty capable of increasing his domain-specific intelligence.