People ARE getting dumber (14 I.Q. points dumber)

[KalCyan]

This is like poking a bear but I can't resist

All right after looking at the article the first thing that springs out is their measure of IQ. They are using reaction times as a measure of general intelligence which is NOT what is typically understood as IQ. Reaction times are exactly what they sound like Ie how fast you react to a stimulus. The idea that reaction times are linked to a persons general intelligence has been pointed out as flawed for the last 40 years. The argument goes something like this, reaction times measure your reflexes, speed of thought is part of intelligence therefore reaction times can be used to test someone's intelligence. The counter argument goes something like this, what if someone doesn't need to think fast only well?

An example being the difference between a soldier and a astrophysicist. On the surface who do you think is smarter? we will all say the astrophysicist however reaction times will say the soldier is smarter.

Next considering their time frame 1889 to modern times the only reaction time records from that time are likely to be from Francis Galton who firmly believed that the upper class were genetically superior and tried to use reaction times to prove it and tried to explain away anything he got wrong.

Overall the study is using a flawed method to investigate a concept that is separate to their study. using flawed data. and finally IQ has only been studied on mass post WW2 and didn't even exist in its current form until just a bit earlier making it confusing that they are claiming its gone down since 1889.

Source of information: 5 years of psychology study at university (equivalent of college)

 

[Hagi]

Fun fact.

IQ is defined as the average being 100. As such it's utterly impossible for the average person to get either a higher or lower IQ over time. The average person always has an IQ of 100.

Also is this thread a joke? It is right? There's no way you could possibly link sources stating the following with a straight face:

There are four basic I.Q. testes; these testes test the four lobes of your brain.

My IQ has four testes? Holy! I've only got two myself! Damn, my IQ's got balls.

Evidence found by doctors states that another possible explanation for the decline in average I.Q. is via blood transfusions They found that the blood not only carried a small amount of the person but it also carried the information that allowed them to think. They did a transfusion between two people, one was intellectually very advanced and the other was one person who was considerably lower on the I.Q. ladder. The recipients of the blood became confused over time and their ability to maintain their previous level of I.Q. was indeed noted to be in jeopardy.

Wow! Who knew, it's not my brain that thinks. It's my blood!

Now the real question is does giving a blood transfusion decrease the number of testes my IQ has? Will getting a blood transfusion give my IQ more testes?

 

[DrOswald]

Here is the study I meant to link to (its peer reviewed up the ass) -> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000470

Don't bother reading it, I didn't. I assumed that this study was a supporting the above, this is crap->University of Hartford published a study on population growth and IQ. ]]http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/BRBAKER/

Results show the the average person in the western world today is dumber by a significant margin than he was 100 years ago. So to all the naysayers who think that people are just as dumb today as they were back then, it looks like the evidence isn't with you. I think someone even said that people were getting smarter? Maybe if you live in sri lanka.

The fact is Americans and the cushy european nations have gotten lazy, and laziness breeds stupidity. Its a bitter pill to swallow, and maybe ignorance is in this case bliss, however I just can't help myself. I'd like to see someone rebut in an intelligent way.

The validity of reaction time based intelligence tests is questionable. The validity of simple reaction time as a reliable measurement of g, which is the basis for the study you linked, is especially questionable.

This is one study. Peer reviewed does not mean its conclusions are correct and should be taken as fact.

But why bother with rational thought or actual research the when confirmation bias and jumping to conclusions is so much easier?

 

[aba1]

IQ is only a way to try and get a idea of how quickly someone can intake or understand information. Someone could have a very low IQ and still be smarter than most people. Just tossing that out there.

 

[Kurai Angelo]

I'd like to see someone rebut in an intelligent way.

I would like to see you use intelligent grammar and punctuation; I suppose neither of us are going to get what we want.

 

[The_Echo]

Results show the the average person in the western world today is dumber by a significant margin than he was 100 years ago.

Guess what also happened in the past 100 years?

We grew like two billion more people or something. Of course this means more stupid people, and evidently a lower average. (Far as I know the "smart ones" have always been a minority anyway.)

What I'd like to see is a comparison of the ratios between smart people and stupid people then and now.

 

[KeyMaster45]

Do you really think that Girls is a mental step down from I Love Lucy? There have been smart TV shows in the past but really, now is the first time when idiocy hasn't overwhelmed the broadcasting schedule.

HEY! I'll have you know that The Flintstones and The Jetsons are bold and provocative documentaries about prehistoric man and the revolutionary technological advancements brought about by the nuclear age. Likewise I Love Lucy is dark and damning tale about the brutal soullessness of the entertainment industry, how it forever keeps aspiring immigrant entertainers from ever achieving success, and subsequently turns their home life into a living hell from which they cannot escape lest they face deportation. Further, Gilligan's Island is the tragic tale about a group of struggling shipwreck survivors who fight everyday with giving into their primal urges, and thus lose their last shred of humanity, by killing the one mentally challenged crew member who's disability time and time again prevents their salvation.

Leave it to Beaver was about a dystopian future where America had become so lost within lie of the American dream during the Red Scare that it became a totalitarian, white-supremacist, misogynistic, dictatorship where any signs of nonconformity were crushed under the iron heel of the US government.

The Honeymooners was about an abusive, alcoholic, racist husband who had completely and utterly broken the spirit of his wife while his neighbors turned a blind eye to it all.

The Brady Bunch was a bold feminist drama in support of abortion and birth control.

He-Man was an artistic exploration into America's fear of homosexuality and the AIDS pandemic.

Married with Children was about the ultimate death of the American dream and the castration of the patriarchy by the feminist movement.

Monty Python's Flying Circus was an in-depth and repeated examination of the British cultural psyche as their country became marginalized as a world power, the empire crumbled around them, and that their identity as a people was being shattered by internal, centuries old grudges.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Research is very, very serious business!

Indeed it is. In fact, I'm in the middle of writing up an experimental design proposal that involves alcohol, energy drinks and a driving simulator. Identifying and eliminating/accounting for confounds is a pain in the arse.

 

[SuperUberBob]

Kind of laughed when I thread the title.

The second member down from OP posted exactly what I was about to post. Well done.

 

[Neofishie]

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/22/the-wisdom-of-the-ancients/

Already been analyzed and pretty well refuted. Turns out that yes, the upper class Victorian Academia WAS smarter than the average person today. That's... not really surprising, but this study does NOT show that the average Victorian was smarter.

Well, I think this just about wraps this thread up.

"Victorian-era studies suffered from selection bias? Egad." Still, I'm really glad someone compiled the message in an appropriately sized package.

 

[kurokotetsu]

So the article you link says that general inteligence is correlated to simple visual reaction. First how is general inteligence is defined? Hos is it measured? Really that is kind of important. Simple visual reaction I'm guessing that it is reaction times against visual stimuli. How is that correlated to inteligence? What supports that idea? Also, how was that meassured?

Then into other kind of problems, they say they use studies from 1889 to 2004, while using "high quality instruments" in the more modern studies, how was that value meassrued before MRIs and other equipment not aviable in XIX century, which may bias the results. Also, the bias in early medical studies may be present and problematic in showing accurate results. Then they argued they used 14 studies for this 114 years, which is a little more than a study a decade, which is a small sample size of the amount of related studies and feels cherry picked for supporting data.

THe only graph they show has a dispersion that would shame any decent study (and the axis aren't very clear either, but that may be because of the lack of context, that mean effect has no clear meaning) and the linear regression is ridiculous given the data. The plot points do not seem to be fitted for comparison, as they are from varying sizes and not in a per capita or percentile scae that may show a better idea of their effect.

I would have to see better the article, but so far I'm unimpressed by the abstract and evidence they show.

 

[Arrogancy]

No evidence? Look at what passes as entertainment. Shows, movies, games, all are moving toward the worthless bang bang twenty minute long action sequence/setpiece. I've haven't done any hard research, but come on, if you enjoy any of these mediums, you must've noticed the glut of crap that has been elevated into the mainstream.

Films you have more of a case, yes modern Hollywood is a lot stupider than 70's Hollywood. But that's one period brought about by conditions in Hollywood. Modern stuff isn't stupider than the slick MTV blockbusters of the 80's or the epics of the 50's/60's or the utterly insipid romcoms that preceded them. Hollywood has almost always been dominated by crap. There is however still plenty of ultrasmart arthouse movies being made by lots of people in lots of places. So the idea that movies now are dumber than ever just doesn't hold water.

I'd actually like to point something out about the dumbing of films. Modern films are worse and less intellectually stimulating, generally speaking, of course, because of the Chinese and the Russians.

No, I'm serious.

Americans only make up 20% of the film going market these days. The big money is in developing markets, like China and Russia. These nations are totalitarian and authoritarian (de facto, Russia is technically a republic, but come on) respectively (there is a difference, but it's not worth going into) with powerful propaganda ministries. Any media coming into their nations must be checked for signs of subversive messages, and any films that might have some subversive message are instantly banned. As such, films are made more for spectacle than substance, more about appeasing watchful government bureaucracies and crafting impressive displays than actually creating movies of more intelligent material.

 

[AuronFtw]

Funny how I just discussed with my father how I think it is a stupid way of measuring intelligence.
As far as I know, is it not just a way of measuring memory and recognising patterns etc. you know, logic stuff?

That's what "intelligence" is. Take this definition from Mainstream Science on Intelligence (1994): "A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings?"catching on," "making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do."

It's not knowledge, it's not experience, it's not wisdom. Those can all be acquired by people even of lesser intelligence... by definition, however, those people won't have as solid a grasp on complex ideas, they won't learn from their past experiences as well, etc.

 

[Kolby Jack]

Ummm, what exactly does this have to do with gaming? Shouldn't this be in off-topic?

Anyway, this isn't a study published by some fancy university, this is a poorly written paper somebody did for their introductory sociology class. So I don't think I would call this primo scientific research. And let's not forget that the only thing IQ tests have been shown to accurately measure is how good somebody is at taking an IQ test, so even if IQ levels have dropped a bunch (which I have not seen any evidence of one way or another), that doesn't really mean anything.

Here is another guy affiliated with "Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, Jan te Nijenhuis of the University of Amsterdam and Raegan Murphy of the University College Cork in Ireland. that came to this conclusion" : http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/researchers-western-iqs-dropped-14-points-over-last-180634194.html
No evidence? Look at what passes as entertainment. Shows, movies, games, all are moving toward the worthless bang bang twenty minute long action sequence/setpiece. I've haven't done any hard research, but come on, if you enjoy any of these mediums, you must've noticed the glut of crap that has been elevated into the mainstream. People used to lineup for hours to go see Doctor Zhivago or Gone with the Wind, now, neither of these movies are particularly mind blowing, but they were at least cerebral to an extent, and I'm talking about the mainstream here. Gaming had a period where it embraced the cerebral, partially because of technical limitations but the lion's share of the credit goes to the passionate, inspired minds of the early period who saw all the potential. At a point, population expansion lowers IQ. It just makes sense. As you broaden the base, you need more chattel to support the pyramid, it's not an opinion, empirically speaking you'd have to be blind not to see this trend in society. Not everyone can be a rocket scientist or a derivatives analyst or a ceo.

"It just makes sense" isn't an argument. I find it hard to believe that people are dumber than ever before while more information than was ever available before is pounded into our heads on a daily basis. Dumb people exist. Ignorant people exist. But people were much dumber and more ignorant in the past. And even if they weren't, as you claim, who cares? If the downfall of society is truly caused by stupid people, well, it was inevitable anyway.

 

[gavinmcinns]

Girls is drivel, as is most of breaking bad, the pacing in that show is really bad, but there are moments that elevate it to goodness. Back when pcs were dominant in the market, there were more roguelikes and strategy games.

 

[EternallyBored]

No evidence? Look at what passes as entertainment. Shows, movies, games, all are moving toward the worthless bang bang twenty minute long action sequence/setpiece. I've haven't done any hard research, but come on, if you enjoy any of these mediums, you must've noticed the glut of crap that has been elevated into the mainstream.

Films you have more of a case, yes modern Hollywood is a lot stupider than 70's Hollywood. But that's one period brought about by conditions in Hollywood. Modern stuff isn't stupider than the slick MTV blockbusters of the 80's or the epics of the 50's/60's or the utterly insipid romcoms that preceded them. Hollywood has almost always been dominated by crap. There is however still plenty of ultrasmart arthouse movies being made by lots of people in lots of places. So the idea that movies now are dumber than ever just doesn't hold water.

I'd actually like to point something out about the dumbing of films. Modern films are worse and less intellectually stimulating, generally speaking, of course, because of the Chinese and the Russians.

No, I'm serious.

Americans only make up 20% of the film going market these days. The big money is in developing markets, like China and Russia. These nations are totalitarian and authoritarian (de facto, Russia is technically a republic, but come on) respectively (there is a difference, but it's not worth going into) with powerful propaganda ministries. Any media coming into their nations must be checked for signs of subversive messages, and any films that might have some subversive message are instantly banned. As such, films are made more for spectacle than substance, more about appeasing watchful government bureaucracies and crafting impressive displays than actually creating movies of more intelligent material.

weeeell, it's partially that, but it's also that spectacle translates better to foreign cultures in general. Everybody understands a disaster movie or a big gun battle, but a story about changing American values in a small midwestern American town set in the backdrop of modern day pop culture references, probably isn't going to appeal to your average Italian or Brazilian citizen the same way seeing shit get blown up will. For movies, it's similar to when video game publishers talk about, "broadening the audience", they are trying to appeal to as many markets as they can in one go, and the easiest way to do that is to make everything as generic as possible so nothing is lost in translations. Everybody understands what an explosion is, not everybody is going to understand the rules of American football, or a subtle play on words in English, so it gets cut in favor of things everybody does understand.

 

[Altorin]

No evidence? Look at what passes as entertainment. Shows, movies, games, all are moving toward the worthless bang bang twenty minute long action sequence/setpiece. I've haven't done any hard research, but come on, if you enjoy any of these mediums, you must've noticed the glut of crap that has been elevated into the mainstream.

Films you have more of a case, yes modern Hollywood is a lot stupider than 70's Hollywood. But that's one period brought about by conditions in Hollywood. Modern stuff isn't stupider than the slick MTV blockbusters of the 80's or the epics of the 50's/60's or the utterly insipid romcoms that preceded them. Hollywood has almost always been dominated by crap. There is however still plenty of ultrasmart arthouse movies being made by lots of people in lots of places. So the idea that movies now are dumber than ever just doesn't hold water.

I'd actually like to point something out about the dumbing of films. Modern films are worse and less intellectually stimulating, generally speaking, of course, because of the Chinese and the Russians.

No, I'm serious.

Americans only make up 20% of the film going market these days. The big money is in developing markets, like China and Russia. These nations are totalitarian and authoritarian (de facto, Russia is technically a republic, but come on) respectively (there is a difference, but it's not worth going into) with powerful propaganda ministries. Any media coming into their nations must be checked for signs of subversive messages, and any films that might have some subversive message are instantly banned. As such, films are made more for spectacle than substance, more about appeasing watchful government bureaucracies and crafting impressive displays than actually creating movies of more intelligent material.

not to mentioned nuance doesn't translate well to subtitles and redubs. I mean, i wouldn't argue that a part of it is to get past chinese censorship, but I'd wager a lot more of it has to deal with language and content.

Like Bob pointed out a couple weeks back when he talked about this very subject, an eye opening drama about a guy trying to make a life in middle america is going to fall hard in the foreign market, whereas EVERYONE can understand "don't get killed by a big giant monster". Movies these days make most of their big money overseas, so they have to make movies that will appeal to those audiences.. so they have to cast as wide a net as possible, and "big stupid action" pretty much fits the bill every time.

OT: IQ isn't a very good measure of people over time. It's a decent measure for a single person to get a decent idea about where they stand in terms of their own.. but if you're comparing people from different areas or through the course of time (comparing to people in the past for instance) it falls apart. Plus from some of the replies I've read, the study seems a bit shaky from the getgo. I wouldn't put much stock in it.

 

[Quantum Glass]

I'm pretty sure that would break mathematics. :/

 

[Mirrorknight]

Scientists will move to combat this problem, but will end up instead developing new hair growth treatments and erectile dysfunction pills. That's where the money is.