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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/Excellent-Cap1118 on 2024-04-17 09:50:04.
Original Title: TIL about “Flynn Effect”, which shows that the average IQ rises steadily with each generation. IQ tests are made harder and harder to keep the average at 100. Today’s children taking tests from previous decades score well above 100 on average.
Education I getting better, and people are naturally smarter. But don’t trust that IQ tests are very good indicators of actual intelligence, because they aren’t.
Some parts of IQ tests can measure some aspects of intelligence. But they’re limited and so many things can affect how someone might score on the day. Including but not limited to anxiety, restedness, culture, access to education, bias within the test…
Overall the whole concept of boiling down intelligence to one number seems like a relic of the days when people were measuring skulls to predict criminality and inserting their own weird cocaine fuelled incest fetishes into their theories of psychology.
I wonder about that naturally smarter. Humans nutrition is improving so I imagine that’s huge factor and like you said education. My brother was playing RTS at 3 and my sister was taking selfies before she could walk but I think that’s environmental. I didn’t have PCs or smart phones as a child but they did. I bet if you grabbed a neonate from 5k years ago there wouldn’t be noticeable difference in adulthood.
Speculation:
Part of it is probably natural evolution. Smart people have generally bred more.
Part of it is also that everything our parents struggled to learn was just passed down to us as knowledge and we take it for granted that we know it. It’ll happen for the next generation as well.
Part of it is also environmental. Generation after generation has had less reliance on authority to give knowledge, and more reliance on objective truth seeking. There has also been a shift from farming as a career for 90% of households, with women only having housekeeping as their career option. We’ve been training more at the kinds of skills for which IQ tests test. On top of that, in order to learn, we generally have to have confirmation that what we think is accurate. With the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, it’s no wonder we’re able to learn faster. When previous generations had to find a library, we have to simply google it.
Not speculation:
https://www.livescience.com/37095-humans-smarter-or-dumber.html This article interestingly also calls out nutrition, which I didn’t think of.
Lol I always thought dumber poor people bred more since they didn’t use contraceptives or had abortions. Thought maybe that’s a more recent trend. I have uncle with 15 kids that he knows of.