As a Finn who served in the military, I wouldn't put much weight on the data gathered from the conscripts.
If you do well on the test, you might get assigned to officer training which means an extra 6 months of service. Many people intentionally answer wrong to get home earlier. I certainly did.
Apart from that, I do believe there is a grain of truth in the article.
Outside of environmental factors, social factors should also be considered.
Oversimplified:
Maybe everyone is being too safe and not exposing children to stimuli that promote better development.
I suspect several factors are contributing to this. 1) As more toys are discovered to be 'dangerous' or 'have small parts' children have less exposure to complex objects or it is deferred to later ages. 2) Adults have less, or are less inclined to, time to properly care for children and thus don't understand that judgement and supervision can allow 'supervised' use of toys that can be dangerous if not properly used, but would be fine if used while supervised. 3) I wonder how strongly this correlates to all parents within child rearing units being in the workforce (single parents, dual income parents, etc)? 4) Or how it relates to decreasing access to natural areas to explore as a child?
These are only some of the social influences that could also be part of the cause.
> 2) Adults have less, or are less inclined to, time to properly care for children
Rather the opposite, I suspect: the amount of time (well-off) adults spend tutoring, coaching, and otherwise interacting with their kids has gone through the roof in the past few decades.
When I was a kid (in Europe), both my parents worked. Starting in first grade, I walked to and from school unsupervised and was responsible for keeping myself entertained in the afternoons until they got home, which generally meant roaming the neighborhood with a pack of friends. This is pretty much inconceivable today.
Given how broad this effect, it seems like an amazingly good mechanism to attribute to a pet peeve of your choice: screen time, chemicals, lack of good old-fashioned memorization, boring playgrounds/toys, lousy education, lack of exercise, the decline and fall of practically everything, etc. Couple that to a golden opportunity for older people to self-praise ("In my day we weren't as dumb/sheltered/poisoned as you folks") and you have the perfect storm.
Making these fond arguments slightly more awkward is the fact that this effect doesn't seem to be happening in America, but I suppose all you youngsters lacked the attention span to read all the way to the end of the article. Now get the hell off my lawn.
One day, in the far future, it will be discovered that ubiquitious plastic has profound but subtle effects on intelligence, fertility and general health. Amending that will be like moving out of the slow zone.
The roman civilization used lead pipes for drinking water.
Well, one potential way that one could determine if this could yet be down to environmental contaminants would be to look at diet.
Nordic and Northern European states have far more seafood, particularly bottom feeding seafood like plaice and sole, which are fantastic bioaccumulators of nastiness, in their diet than the average American [1] - and marine environments ultimately accumulate a large proportion of fun things like micro plastics, and therefore BPA and phthalates, which have been shown to have a negative impact on gestatory brain development. [2]
It would be illuminating to see what correlation exists, as it may well be causative.
My own personal hypothesis on this: it's clear that one skill that used to be important is now much less important, and that's memory. When I was a kid I remembered dozens of phone numbers, now I know about 3. My fear, though, is that other higher order thinking skills are still very dependent on memory, and as we need to exercise our memory less frequently, other parts of our cognitive abilities suffer.
I imagine if you peeked over a teenager's shoulder as they went about their routine phone habits you'd have little idea what was going on through all the memes, inside jokes, cultural references, and slang. I have a hard time believing our ability to memorize is so rigid that it peaked in the period after operators routed calls and before phone books, rolodexes, and contact lists in flip phones. We just put memory to different uses throughout time.
There’s a long tradition of speculating about this going back to Socrates, who famously never wrote because he considered it lazy when memory is the real strength of intellect.
I also don’t think that Socrates would have been any stupider had he learned to write, and it’s only through Plato we have a record of him at all.
I attribute that to the lack of boredom in young people. When I was young I was bored at least from time to time. This led to doing mischief but also to use the brain and invent something entertaining to waste time.
Now distractions are all around us (play stations and TV on demand) or with us (smart phones). No more need for being imaginative.
There is also this interesting correlation of declining crime rate which can be attributed to kids wasting time with play stations rather than hanging out in the street.
have discussed this with close friends. In the past we perceived that and considered declining intelligence as an assumption, with recent articles like that it seems to be a fact.
Is it just me or was the knee-jerk 'racism!' on everything immigration-related in the article off-putting? I mean, is it racist to say that immigration might cause a decline of average intelligence, if it's clear that there are physical factors in play in the countries where the immigrants come from that could cause a decreased iq (lower nutrition etc, as noted in the article)? I'm not claiming that it's the case, but the prima facie dismissal of any theory like it because 'it's racist!' that anything might be influenced by immigration made the whole piece feel just very intellectually dishonest.
Again, just to be clear and lest I'll get dragged down into 'you're racist' myself, I'm not claiming one way or the other. My point is that apparently some conclusions are off-limits from the start; any evidence in that direction must be wrong because of the conclusion it leads to. It's this sort of thing that makes real racists go 'see how we're being censored'.
I don't think we can rule out an evolutionary explanation so quickly. We are starting to get firm genetic evidence that something like dysgenics is occurring in Iceland, for example:http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/10/1612113114
There is also a plausible mechanism of action, intelligent people tend to get an education proportionate to their intelligence. Educated people have ridiculously low birth rates. Intelligence is heritable.
Just like conservatives will have to overcome their global warming denial, those of the progressive tradition may well have to start accepting what cognitive genomics is making increasingly obvious: intelligence is hereditary and this has policy implications.
Should it prove to be a genetic decline, we have solutions, such as embryo selection, in the wings that can work now with little research. This will get us ~3-8 IQ points per generation:https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
Iterated embryo selection and genetic engineering will be able to offer much more, several standard deviations in multiple traits simultaneously.
But we cannot repair problems we refuse to look in the face.
This is the crux of any inter-generational change in average intelligence in a population. Human assortative mating patterns and the inverse relationship between intelligence and fertility account for some of the effect and some is due to shifts in the gene pool. While we can't and shouldn't discount environmental effects (goodbye lead paint!), the latest genetics research tells us that only 15-25% of variation in intelligence can be attributed to the environment.
> We have solutions, such as embryo selection , in the wings that can work now with little research. This will get us 3-8 IQ points per generation.
Can you provide some links to support this? I wasn't aware a trait as complex as intelligence was anywhere close to being selectable in embryos. You name a very specific "3-8 IQ points ours generation" though so I'm assuming you got this value from somewhere.
I used to subscribe to this kind of simple genetic determinism.
I've since had cause to pursue a path in life in which I've become deeply aware of the other influences on intellect, cognition and judgement, which include the emotional environment (trauma, abuse, chronic fear/anxiety) and the nutritional and chemical environments.
From researching this topic extensively over several years, I'm confident in the belief that even if embryo selection were to help at all, it won't help enough to overcome these other factors.
Conversely, there’s a lot than can be done to help people improve their cognitive ability, regardless of their genetics, by altering these environmental factors.
Although there is still one possible genetic cause, which is people (both women and men; in fact, some studies show the effect is stronger for men: https://www.nature.com/articles/gim200868) having children later in life.
Or, the things the tests select for are gradually falling out of favor in our education system and society at large. Pollutants don’t seem like an unreasonable hypothesis either, though.
Pollution might make sense if the decline was measured worldwide, but it's localized to Northern Europe, where pollution has generally declined over the last several decades.
I have barely managed to come to terms that I will never accomplish anything of value in my life. I suspect this is true for most people. As a society, we inherently value diligence and hard work over intelligence because most labor implies more of the former than the latter.
The elites will still be elites. The general population gets a little dumber over time on average, but this matters very little.
We've outsourced memorising facts to knowing how to google it. Factor in calculators, spelling and grammar checkers - yoy can outsource a lot of memorising.
Which doesn't help when you're sitting an IQ test.
I saw a Sherlock Holmes quote on here once, I liked it and I think it's relevant to your comment so I'll post it here.
"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
Grammar checkers being perhaps the most malign of the lot. When I swipe o,f,i,t,s into Google keyboard now, out comes "Of it's". The alternatives bar does not even present "its". Even single-tapping i,t,s results in auto-corruption to "it's".
So syntactic distinction between the possessive and the contraction is being driven to extinction, by Google's half-smart AI.
What if the sperm counts cause the IQ drop or vice versa?It's not clear how much of this research is male-only. I wonder if testosterone levels link the two.
Why is it so many otherwise bright-enough individuals persist in the dogma that any single integer can meaningfully aggregate all the vastly diverse skills of a human brain -- when they would hesitate to do the same with an object as simple as a bottle of red wine?
This remains to me a deep mystery of human psychology, one I've pondered off and on for some years now.
What else is there to do? Everyone is a creator now, and their creations never go away. Right up until the year 19nntp or so, your written creations were either adding to the world or they went out of print and were forgotten. Until the year 19youtube or so, your musical contributions either added to the world or they went out of production and were lost to the aether.
Now, everything is an endless library-cum-sewer filled with content, you can never run out of it, you can't clear out "worse" things, you can't meaningfully filter it - only on a superficial keyword match or vote score.
What point is there to be creative to add a drop to this ocean of content?
Why be creative when society says the purpose of it is to get followers and extract coins from them, and nothing more?
[+] [-] exDM69|7 years ago|reply
If you do well on the test, you might get assigned to officer training which means an extra 6 months of service. Many people intentionally answer wrong to get home earlier. I certainly did.
Apart from that, I do believe there is a grain of truth in the article.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjevans|7 years ago|reply
Oversimplified: Maybe everyone is being too safe and not exposing children to stimuli that promote better development.
I suspect several factors are contributing to this. 1) As more toys are discovered to be 'dangerous' or 'have small parts' children have less exposure to complex objects or it is deferred to later ages. 2) Adults have less, or are less inclined to, time to properly care for children and thus don't understand that judgement and supervision can allow 'supervised' use of toys that can be dangerous if not properly used, but would be fine if used while supervised. 3) I wonder how strongly this correlates to all parents within child rearing units being in the workforce (single parents, dual income parents, etc)? 4) Or how it relates to decreasing access to natural areas to explore as a child?
These are only some of the social influences that could also be part of the cause.
[+] [-] jpatokal|7 years ago|reply
Rather the opposite, I suspect: the amount of time (well-off) adults spend tutoring, coaching, and otherwise interacting with their kids has gone through the roof in the past few decades.
When I was a kid (in Europe), both my parents worked. Starting in first grade, I walked to and from school unsupervised and was responsible for keeping myself entertained in the afternoons until they got home, which generally meant roaming the neighborhood with a pack of friends. This is pretty much inconceivable today.
[+] [-] ehnto|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drb91|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glangdale|7 years ago|reply
Making these fond arguments slightly more awkward is the fact that this effect doesn't seem to be happening in America, but I suppose all you youngsters lacked the attention span to read all the way to the end of the article. Now get the hell off my lawn.
[+] [-] hyperpallium|7 years ago|reply
The roman civilization used lead pipes for drinking water.
[+] [-] madaxe_again|7 years ago|reply
Nordic and Northern European states have far more seafood, particularly bottom feeding seafood like plaice and sole, which are fantastic bioaccumulators of nastiness, in their diet than the average American [1] - and marine environments ultimately accumulate a large proportion of fun things like micro plastics, and therefore BPA and phthalates, which have been shown to have a negative impact on gestatory brain development. [2]
It would be illuminating to see what correlation exists, as it may well be causative.
[1] https://www.greenfacts.org/en/fisheries/figtableboxes/figure... [2] https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/common-plastic-chemicals-aff...
[+] [-] wpietri|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SomewhatLikely|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drb91|7 years ago|reply
I also don’t think that Socrates would have been any stupider had he learned to write, and it’s only through Plato we have a record of him at all.
[+] [-] jhoechtl|7 years ago|reply
Now distractions are all around us (play stations and TV on demand) or with us (smart phones). No more need for being imaginative.
There is also this interesting correlation of declining crime rate which can be attributed to kids wasting time with play stations rather than hanging out in the street.
have discussed this with close friends. In the past we perceived that and considered declining intelligence as an assumption, with recent articles like that it seems to be a fact.
[+] [-] olavk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roel_v|7 years ago|reply
Again, just to be clear and lest I'll get dragged down into 'you're racist' myself, I'm not claiming one way or the other. My point is that apparently some conclusions are off-limits from the start; any evidence in that direction must be wrong because of the conclusion it leads to. It's this sort of thing that makes real racists go 'see how we're being censored'.
[+] [-] naasking|7 years ago|reply
Agreed. Impartial evaluation of facts seems to be dead.
[+] [-] squish78|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wycs|7 years ago|reply
There is also a plausible mechanism of action, intelligent people tend to get an education proportionate to their intelligence. Educated people have ridiculously low birth rates. Intelligence is heritable.
Just like conservatives will have to overcome their global warming denial, those of the progressive tradition may well have to start accepting what cognitive genomics is making increasingly obvious: intelligence is hereditary and this has policy implications.
Should it prove to be a genetic decline, we have solutions, such as embryo selection, in the wings that can work now with little research. This will get us ~3-8 IQ points per generation:https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
Iterated embryo selection and genetic engineering will be able to offer much more, several standard deviations in multiple traits simultaneously.
But we cannot repair problems we refuse to look in the face.
[+] [-] User23|7 years ago|reply
I believe parent is getting downvotes because of this, but this isn't a matter of opinion or social science. It's hard quantitative genetics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
This is the crux of any inter-generational change in average intelligence in a population. Human assortative mating patterns and the inverse relationship between intelligence and fertility account for some of the effect and some is due to shifts in the gene pool. While we can't and shouldn't discount environmental effects (goodbye lead paint!), the latest genetics research tells us that only 15-25% of variation in intelligence can be attributed to the environment.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|7 years ago|reply
Can you provide some links to support this? I wasn't aware a trait as complex as intelligence was anywhere close to being selectable in embryos. You name a very specific "3-8 IQ points ours generation" though so I'm assuming you got this value from somewhere.
[+] [-] tptacek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ywdj|7 years ago|reply
I've since had cause to pursue a path in life in which I've become deeply aware of the other influences on intellect, cognition and judgement, which include the emotional environment (trauma, abuse, chronic fear/anxiety) and the nutritional and chemical environments.
From researching this topic extensively over several years, I'm confident in the belief that even if embryo selection were to help at all, it won't help enough to overcome these other factors.
Conversely, there’s a lot than can be done to help people improve their cognitive ability, regardless of their genetics, by altering these environmental factors.
[+] [-] scythe|7 years ago|reply
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325704105_Flynn_eff...
Although there is still one possible genetic cause, which is people (both women and men; in fact, some studies show the effect is stronger for men: https://www.nature.com/articles/gim200868) having children later in life.
[+] [-] flatline|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shaddox|7 years ago|reply
I have barely managed to come to terms that I will never accomplish anything of value in my life. I suspect this is true for most people. As a society, we inherently value diligence and hard work over intelligence because most labor implies more of the former than the latter.
The elites will still be elites. The general population gets a little dumber over time on average, but this matters very little.
[+] [-] dwd|7 years ago|reply
We've outsourced memorising facts to knowing how to google it. Factor in calculators, spelling and grammar checkers - yoy can outsource a lot of memorising.
Which doesn't help when you're sitting an IQ test.
[+] [-] curious_fella1|7 years ago|reply
"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
[+] [-] everybodyknows|7 years ago|reply
So syntactic distinction between the possessive and the contraction is being driven to extinction, by Google's half-smart AI.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tue23Oct|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everybodyknows|7 years ago|reply
This remains to me a deep mystery of human psychology, one I've pondered off and on for some years now.
[+] [-] Proven|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] keyle|7 years ago|reply
We're already cretins.
[+] [-] jodrellblank|7 years ago|reply
Now, everything is an endless library-cum-sewer filled with content, you can never run out of it, you can't clear out "worse" things, you can't meaningfully filter it - only on a superficial keyword match or vote score.
What point is there to be creative to add a drop to this ocean of content?
Why be creative when society says the purpose of it is to get followers and extract coins from them, and nothing more?
[+] [-] dschuetz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olavk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] horatiocain|7 years ago|reply