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IQ is rising in many parts of the world. What's behind the change and does it really mean people are cleverer than their grandparents?
It is not unusual for parents to comment that their children are brainier than they are. In doing so, they hide a boastful remark about their offspring behind a self-deprecating one about themselves. But a new study, published in the journal Intelligence, provides fresh evidence that in many cases this may actually be true.
The researchers - Peera Wongupparaj, Veena Kumari and Robin Morris at Kings College London - did not themselves ask anyone to sit an IQ test, but they analysed data from 405 previous studies. Altogether, they harvested IQ test data from more than 200,000 participants, captured over 64 years and from 48 countries.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @04:37AM
IQ is a meaningless indicator of intelligence to begin with; pure pseudoscience.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:37PM
You might want to actually look at the several tens of thousands of papers correlating IQ with various actions we mere humans perceive as being intelligent. Any one would prove you wrong. Sure it is not an objective measure of intelligence and that is why the second word is Quotient. Often relative measurements are the best science can do. That does not mean it is pseudoscience.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2015, @04:00AM
You might want to actually look at the several tens of thousands of papers correlating IQ with various actions we mere humans perceive as being intelligent.
I am not interested in completely arbitrary definitions of intelligence. I am interested in good science. The field of physics, for example, has lots of good, objective science. The same can't be said for the social 'sciences', where most of the studies are biased, subjective, never replicated, and where arbitrary conclusions are drawn based on often poorly-collected data (which is often gathering using subjective questions).
Tens of thousands of studies or millions of studies makes no difference if they are faulty. And IQ is still in question.
Any one would prove you wrong.
No, they wouldn't, as you later state: "Sure it is not an objective measure of intelligence and that is why the second word is Quotient."
It's not an objective measure of intelligence; it's completely arbitrary and unscientific, much like much of psychology.
Often relative measurements are the best science can do.
Bad science is still bad science even if that's the 'best' we have. It's better to admit that you don't know what intelligence is or have a good way of measuring it rather than relying on trash like IQs.
The idea that you can measure someone's intelligence using a simple number and arbitrary tests might seem great to the simple-minded, but I suspect the real answer is far more complex than that. We have a long way to go. And I'm tired of hearing about trash like IQ in the media; it's time to put it to rest.