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https://slate.com/technology/2018/09/iq-scores-going-down-research-flynn-effect.html

It starts with a London-based researcher, Edward Dutton, who has documented decades-long declines in average IQs across several Western countries, including France and Germany. “We are becoming stupider,” announces Dutton at the program’s start. “This is happening. It’s not going to go away, and we have to try to think about what we’re going to do about it.”

It’s wrong to hint that scores on tests of memory and abstract thinking have been falling everywhere, and in a simple way. But at least in certain countries—notably in Northern Europe—the IQ drops seem very real. Using data from Finland, for example, where men are almost always drafted into military service, whereupon they’re tested for intelligence, Dutton showed that scores began to slide in 1997, a trend that has continued ever since. Similar trends have been documented using data from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. At some point in the mid-1990s, IQ scores in these countries tipped into decay, losing roughly one-fifth to one-quarter of a point per year. While there isn’t any sign of this effect on U.S. test results (a fact that surely bears on our indifference to the topic), researchers have found hints of something similar in Australia, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Edit: I won;t speak for anyone else, but I know i have been getting dumber since 1997. Once I left College, it has been all downhill!

 Easy E wrote:
Dutton showed that scores began to slide in 1997, a trend that has continued ever since.

 Easy E wrote:
began to slide in 1997,

 Easy E wrote:
1997

The year King of the Hill came out. Co-created by Mike Judge, also co-creator of Idiocracy.

Did he open Pandora's Box, or was this his plan all along?

I blame reality TV, and it’s hellbent crusade to make the most vapid and moronic people famous.

It's always been there.

Bread and circuses.

IQ is junk science. I am extremely skeptical of any study involving it.

I swear the only thing more unoriginal than Idiocracy are all the "idiocracy is happening now" thread topics XD

 nels1031 wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
Dutton showed that scores began to slide in 1997, a trend that has continued ever since.

 Easy E wrote:
began to slide in 1997,

 Easy E wrote:
1997

The year King of the Hill came out. Co-created by Mike Judge, also co-creator of Idiocracy.

Did he open Pandora's Box, or was this his plan all along?

Nahh its all due to the catastrophic release of vast amounts of stupid following a car accident in a Paris tunnel...

 LordofHats wrote:
I swear the only thing more unoriginal than Idiocracy are all the "idiocracy is happening now" thread topics XD

Hey! At least mine had some studies and such in it!

I can't find it but I recall reading a quotation by a member of the clergy about how the modern children and particularly teenagers and young adults of his time were drunken louts. Too stupid and lazy to achieve anything; to drunk and intoxicated with lust to ever amount to any decent human being.


And it was written several hundred years ago.

So if we are getting dumber and amounting to nothing then we've been doing it for a long time.

I believe this. There are tons of morons on this planet. But I think there has always been, its just now they have the tests to prove it.

 Easy E wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I swear the only thing more unoriginal than Idiocracy are all the "idiocracy is happening now" thread topics XD

Hey! At least mine had some studies and such in it!

That's fair

I just think the premise is weird. People have always been idiots. Arguably all democracies are idiocracies because expecting laymen to understand the complexities of the national economy, foreign policy, and social ills is a completely asinine prospect. There's a saying in either law or medicine (maybe both) that clients/patients fundamentally are incapable of being fully informed because they can't understand the procedures and methods that surround them and I think democracy functions in a similar odd spot.

It's simply not very insightful to point out the 'idiocracy' and at this point I feel like threads about it being real are more common than people who've even seen the movie XD

If you dig hard enough, you'll find enough studies that say the opposite, that IQ is steadily climbing year after year.

I'm with Peregrine. I'm a very average individual, yet always tested relatively high. (YMMV, anecdote vs. data and all that jazz) I call shenanigans.

I agree that IQ is an inadequate measure of intelligence. However, it is a conventional measure and in some European countries the measure we use shows a decline.

Well, we DO have a former reality star, who's been in pro wrestling, and at least one porno star for president. Not sure how far off the suped up trike as the presidential motorcade is really.

I.Q. tests are generally written by people who consider themselves intelligent, and thus are written in such a way that people who think like the writer score higher than those who do not. That alone makes them highly suspect.

I knew a guy who tested poorly on IQ tests - around 90, below average. His grammar was atrocious, and he claimed to be terrible at math. But give him a real-world problem and he was VERY good at coming up with an answer... and would re-calculate baseball statistics on the fly while we watched a game.

But because the IQ test said he was below average, he believed it and played the role...

Really? People have literally been saying this all the way back since the invention of writing (and they were probably saying it before that as well, but that hasn't been recorded). Well, not entirely literally since they did not use the concept of IQ, but they did say that youngsters "these days" were stupid and badly mannered. Literally every human generation ever since the dawn of time has said that. And if even a bit of that is true, then humans must all have been unimaginable geniuses back in the Stone Age.
It must be said that Neanderthals had bigger brains than Homo Sapiens though...

Also, as a sidenote, IQ is only a relative measurement. You can only compare IQ if the people involved take exactly the same test. With "studies" (really more pseudoscience) like this, that is virtually never the case. Different IQ tests are calibrated and set up differently, so comparing between different IQ tests is meaningless since you can't know whether the difference is due to a difference in IQ or a difference in the calibration or the specific questions.
For example, there is something called the Flynn effect in IQ tests. Since IQ tests are all supposed to average out at 100 (which is the 'default' IQ), test makers adapt their tests when they start to fall outside of the accepted range. This has, over the past decades and centuries, led to IQ tests getting progressively harder. It is estimated for example that an average person from 1910 who got a score of 100 on his test, would only be able to get a score of 70 on a present-day test (although again, it is hard to be precise on this since you can't be sure how much of the difference is due to differences in the test and how much of it is due to a difference in intelligence).

Anyways, none of it is going to matter since we will all be cyborgs in the future anyways. Complete with fully automated luxury gay space communism. We could just get an extra processor implant or something to increase our brain output, which already would be like a supercomputer.

Or difference in education, too. A college professor from 1910 would seriously struggle with a lot of concepts that the modern college freshman takes for granted. A factory worker from 1910 would be sunk without a trace.

Medical advances keep idiots from being killed off by natural selection. Then they have a bunch of kids that are also unable to be killed by their own stupidity.

Idiocracy is real.

I'm with LoH and Peregrine here.

However, one thing I will say, is that I've read a number of pretty damn good studies on the nature of intelligence (not IQ tests) and how it is changing. A number of the studies I've personally come across and read via my university library have stated that while many people are getting "smarter" we as a whole are losing certain elements of our memory. Basically, there are segments of the population wherein aspects of short term memory are less robust compared to similar populations of bygone eras. One of these studies did note certain specializations are affected differently. . .Ie, highly specialized trades, higher degree holders (usually focusing on PhD holders) are much more pronounced in the variations on what is remembered vs. what is not.


So, I'd say that on the whole, the educated population is getting smarter, however it may not appear like it because with things like google, we do not "need" to remember information for longer periods of time than it takes to satisfy whatever drove us to look up the information in the first place.

Yeah, it boggles my mind how crap my short term memory is especially when I think that people of older generations must have had great short term memory because they could not simply write everything down.

How many phone numbers does anyone remember these days?

However, memorisation is a skill that one can improve if necessary. I don't know how much it has to do with general intelligence.

Psychologists view general intelligence as the capacity for abstract thinking. I don't think anyone claims there is a reliable test for this, unless they have some kind of axe to grind. (Like "proving" that white people are naturally cleverer.)

I think one thing people overlook is that today there is VASTLY more information access and bloat than there ever was in the past. You've got news going 24 hours a day; the internet; a very wide social range; driving (that's one solid period of information and processing and choice making that you've got to make in one constant stream until its over) etc..

I would say that the average person today is bombarded by way more information and a lot of which is very casual or throw-away, but its still here. A lot of the time one sees stupid people its actually possible to find that they know a reasonable (or somethimes a lot) about a very specific subject; just that they don't have the wider splatter of knowledge.

In the past this might well have been more muted because many people trained in a craft or skill or worked within the family line of work. There was far less the idea that you'd move from being a factory worker to a shop manager to a farm labourer to a manager again and then something else etc....




I'd also say that a lot of "stupidity" can be wrong prioritizing. Take phone numbers, most people choose not to remember them today because we don't have to, we prioritize that we don't have to remember the string of numbers and thus repeat them over and over etc...; because its in the phone book or in the digital phone book. However its just as possible that people can prioritize, say, the name and address of superstars and their significant others instead of mathematics and sciences. We might consider that person stupid, however what it more correctly is is that they've prioritized in information that many of us would consider non-essential (or which would only be essential within a limited range of work placements).

There are also those who refuse to learn, you can see this groups like farmers (yes sorry I'm going to say it!). It's not that they are stupid, but that many of them simply consider a lot of school based academic work as non-essential when they've already got a lot of work (real work) at home on the farm, which they consider to be a higher priority. So they might not be able to do maths or english or science to a high level - but they can hook up a 3 point linkage, clean out the sprayer, birth lambs, handle livestock and rebuild half the engine of a basic tractor.



Intelligence tests try to avoid all this by being abstract, but that in itself can be a skill. I'd wager many people could boost their intelligence test scores if they were aware of the test content (even if only roughly what it would entail) and then practised before hand. So a smart person who takes quite a few tests might well appear smarter than they are because they've started to learn how to game the system. They know there's going to be that bit about remembering shapes so they spend time practising remembering random shapes from a selection etc...

I'd also say that a big cornerstone of learning is repetition and that modern school environments don't push repetition of learning as much as they possibly should. Things like times tables that many older generations know by heart, they know because they did them every single day repeating over and over for years. It was "drummed into them" and because they had to use them all the time (no calculators) it stuck

Something people overlook is that this is an average. However intelligent people by and large do not have children with less intelligent people. What is happening is that the lower end of the intellect spectrum in responsible for a greater portion of population growth. This means that while the average is indeed falling, that people are getting dumber is questionable--rather the less intelligent are the same they were before, there are simply more of them.

And honestly, intelligence is a skill. Some people have more talent for it than others, but I imagine we can all think of someone who squandered their capacity or someone who is not particularly bright but has learned to compensate by applying critical thinking & rational thought.

Ultimately I find the idiocracy idea great for comedy but in real-world application it is sensationalist nonsense that does not represent a real problem.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I swear the only thing more unoriginal than Idiocracy are all the "idiocracy is happening now" thread topics XD

Hey! At least mine had some studies and such in it!

That's fair

I just think the premise is weird. People have always been idiots. Arguably all democracies are idiocracies because expecting laymen to understand the complexities of the national economy, foreign policy, and social ills is a completely asinine prospect. There's a saying in either law or medicine (maybe both) that clients/patients fundamentally are incapable of being fully informed because they can't understand the procedures and methods that surround them and I think democracy functions in a similar odd spot.

It's simply not very insightful to point out the 'idiocracy' and at this point I feel like threads about it being real are more common than people who've even seen the movie XD

Well, at least they put some research behind the thesis. IQ tests are a terrible measure of intelligence, but it is a conventional measure that has been used for sometime and that we can compare over time. You could easily make a "garbage in, garbage out" argument against it and I would not disagree.

However, this article at least uses the conventional benchmark to show that in some European countries where everyone is tested the same for military service, there has been a decline in the IQ score results over the course of time. Therefore, people are in general in these countries and in the demographics they represent getting "dumber".

Therefore, this is not the same as Socrates saying "Kids today!" or that people have always been idiots argument. This one is backed up by some form of conventional measure, a significant sample size, and actual data comparison to come to a conclusion. Therefore, this is way better than "Trump's election= idiocracy" type thread.

Thing is there are also other things to consider. First up is the quality of education, its no lie that the amount of bureaucracy has increased significantly in a lot of western schools and that the way many now operate there might well be a significant reduction in overall teaching quality and capability.

Another aspect is that whilst many people are drafted into the military, the scores are weighted on a segment of the society only. It could be that the overall picture isn't changing, but that those who are ending up enlisted represent a segment of society that is not as smart as others (ergo that there are ways out of enlistment for those - say - in further education*)

So part of it might not be a biological change, but a social aspect; both in the training of new youngsters and in the selection of samples for study. Personally my first instinct would be to look at education and how it is operating and what has changed over the years. I'd wager one would find more gaps and issues there than in the biological aspects.

Especially as the time frames involved are tiny when compared to genetic changes in society (esp for humans who breed very slowly compared to dogs, cats or other species that might more readily show such genetic migration over such a span of years)

*I've no idea if this is the case or not, its purely an example to illustrate that there might be selection bias in the samples.

 Easy E wrote:

However, this article at least uses the conventional benchmark to show that in some European countries where everyone is tested the same for military service, there has been a decline in the IQ score results over the course of time. Therefore, people are in general in these countries and in the demographics they represent getting "dumber".

I guess there's a part of me that wonders (and I'll admit I'm too lazy to actually look it up) whether Finland's military "IQ" test resembles anything like the US's ASVAB. . . As far as I've seen in other articles about our military test, is that it isn't measuring "IQ" at all. There's been a few places where I've seen people stating that there are a wide range of questions on our ASVAB that actually do not have a "correct" answer, because the various line scores are there to determine "how" the test taker processes thoughts and processes information. Which if that is actually true, goes a long way to explaining the 2 main/big circles of the "population groups within my MOS" (MOS being military job, for those who aren't aware). Basically, in my job in the military, there were guys/gals who were crazy book smart but lacked what you might call common sense or street smarts or, whatever term. The other main group were those who weren't what you'd call book smart, but DID have all the common sense/street smarts or whatever. . . And being that our job was a maintenance one, it always interested me to watch how the different "type" of intelligence went about troubleshooting a down system. . . . The hyper intelligent guys started in the book, very logical thinking A to B to C. The "street smart" guys started in the system, often taking things apart until things started looking "right" and then finding the problem by process of elimination.


With that big long story, I guess my point is, with the military ASVAB, it gave my job plenty of "smart" people (it was one of the tougher MOSs to qualify for in the first place, and there are almost no waivers for it), but that the ASVAB doesn't seem to measure IQ, but rather differentiates a person who can do a job from a person who cant, regardless of "how" they end up at a solution.

 LordofHats wrote:
I swear the only thing more unoriginal than Idiocracy are all the "idiocracy is happening now" thread topics XD

Anyone else driven nuts that the movie is really just a replotting of 'Million Marching Idiots' yet gets the credit? Like it's the first time anyone ever thought of the premise.

The movie is a low-brow, unoriginal reboot of another story. You could litteraly argue that it itself is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 Easy E wrote:
I agree that IQ is an inadequate measure of intelligence. However, it is a conventional measure and in some European countries the measure we use shows a decline.

A decline in what, though? You can't just say "IQ going down, therefore everyone is getting the dumbs", there could be any number of reasons behind why, from easy access to knowledge through technology altering the way people learn and think, to stress and anxiety due to changing economic circumstances impacting people when taking the tests. Even if you believe IQ was a useful and accurate measure of intelligence in the past, is it any more in a world with the internet in everyone's pocket?

 Yodhrin wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
I agree that IQ is an inadequate measure of intelligence. However, it is a conventional measure and in some European countries the measure we use shows a decline.

A decline in what, though? You can't just say "IQ going down, therefore everyone is getting the dumbs", there could be any number of reasons behind why, from easy access to knowledge through technology altering the way people learn and think, to stress and anxiety due to changing economic circumstances impacting people when taking the tests. Even if you believe IQ was a useful and accurate measure of intelligence in the past, is it any more in a world with the internet in everyone's pocket?

That's the $64 Thousand dollar question now isn't it. What are the reasons for the decline? Perhaps, we could even discuss theories and hypothesis in this very thread!

 Easy E wrote:

That's the $64 Thousand dollar question now isn't it. What are the reasons for the decline? Perhaps, we could even discuss theories and hypothesis in this very thread!

Well, undoubtedly a lot of it has to do with a taboo subject that starts with a P and ends with an "olitics". I suppose there are other academic means of discussing this as well. Since y'all know I love history and all that, I'd point to how prior to the 20th century, there really wasnt that much need for a hugely literal populace, and so the organized levels of schooling that we see today, simply didnt exist. Even in the early 20th century, it didn't take a rocket scientist to turn a wrench on an assembly line. There did come a point tho, that when we wanted to do things like, I dunno, launch living gak into space, that we needed a more educated workforce (on the whole), and so we saw increased care for educational efforts.


As others have pointed out, when it comes to actual educational stuff, it is no longer the case where one *needs* to memorize names and dates from class 1, so that they can pass a final. . . Control+F works just great. Same goes for using google and other internet functions. On the one hand, I think there is an affect on memory, but at the same time, I kinda disagree. . . For instance, ask a lot of people on this forum for the BS of a random 40k unit, and you'll no doubt find that many/most of them (particularly ones who play the army of the unit you mention) get the answer correct. I've met many people that can get 40k rules down after basically one reading, but cannot use the correct form of there, their, or they're. And this filters out to all sorts of things. Random baseball trivia, Star Trek/Star Wars background stuff, so on and so forth.