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from the don't-care-I'm-getting-intelligenter dept.
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?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @09:28PM (1 child)
As pointed out elsewhere, the figures are from the draft results which didn't include those immigrants back in '97.
Other people suggested the internet or media is to blame. The problem is IQ tests were never about intelligence. They were, and are, about testing puzzle solving skills that were found statistically linked to academic success. The premise was that those skills can't be / aren't typically exercised so they have to be innate. Well, correlation does not imply causation was never more right considering the Flynn effect mentioned in the title and the dozen other outliers IQ tests failed to account for over the years. Most damning is the fact the tests had to be repeatedly modified to account for minorities (Jews first. Then Asians. Genders from day 1. Other counties made similar changes to their version of the tests) failing the tests but still succeeding in Academia.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday October 25 2018, @04:50AM
There's also a body of data (going back to the 1800s) that found twitch reflex speed correlates positively with IQ -- basically, if the brain processes faster, that's what higher IQ is. In geek terms, bus speed correlates with apparent CPU performance.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.