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posted by mrpg on Wednesday October 24 2018, @09:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-care-I'm-getting-intelligenter dept.

Slate:

In November, the European TV channel Arte aired an hourlong documentary, Demain, tous crétins?—Tomorrow, everyone’s an idiot?—on a topic that would seem to be of great importance. 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.

Are we becoming dumber, as in losing cognitive function, or merely less-well read?


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @03:03PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @03:03PM (#753005)

    Asia is a huge place, only small part of Asia has the smart people (according to testing anyway). Rest has averagly to abysmally dumb, with a mix of con artists. Mixing with "smart" Asians won't make your kids smart, especially if the genes responsible for the discreprancy are recessive.

    Secondly, (according to tests) even though the "smart" Asians are smarter on average, the distribution of intellect on either end is much different. So even though the average person is smarter according to current trst, the number of geniuses and idiots is much smaller. We really want the geniuses to be as high as possible, as tgey are the ones that make a lot of tge innovative leaps tgat drive the soxiety forward.

    Lastly, I added the "according to tests" caveat because we are not sure if China is not cooking the numbers by allowing only testimg in select districts. This kind of fudgery could be right up their alley.

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 24 2018, @06:29PM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 24 2018, @06:29PM (#753177) Journal

    Those typos look odd. Are you using a different keyboard layout than you normally use? It just looks odd . . .

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 25 2018, @06:05AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 25 2018, @06:05AM (#753545)

      Mentally week: Runaway cannot be the cause of this, since he has had the same low Intelligence Quotient since he was tested in 1956. Must be his spawn, in that case.