American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the 'Reverse Flynn Effect' (popularmechanics.com) 391
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: Americans' IQ scores are trending in a downward direction. In fact, they've been falling for over a decade. According to a press release, in studying intelligence testing data from 2006 to 2018, Northwestern University researchers noticed that test scores in three out of four "cognitive domains" were going down. This is the first time we've seen a consistent negative slope for these testing categories, providing tangible evidence of what is known as the "Reverse Flynn Effect."
In a 1984 study, James Flynn noticed that intelligence test scores had steadily increased since the early 1930s. We call that steady rise the Flynn Effect. Considering that overall intelligence seemed to be increasing faster than could be explained by evolution, the reason increase became a source of debate, with many attributing the change to various environmental factors. But now, it seems that a Reverse Flynn Effect is, well, in effect.
The study, published in the journal Intelligence, used an online, survey-style personality test called the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project to analyze nearly 400,000 Americans. The researchers recorded responses from 2006 and 2018, in order to examine if and how cognitive ability scores were changing over time within the country. The data showed drops in logic and vocabulary (known as verbal reasoning), visual problem solving and analogies (known as matrix reasoning), and computational and mathematical abilities (known as letter and number series). Not every domain is going down though, notes the report. "[S]cores in spatial reasoning (known as 3D rotation) followed the opposite pattern, trending upward over the 12-year period."
"If all the scores were going in the same direction, you could make a nice little narrative about it, but that's not the case," says Elizabeth Dworak, a research assistant professor at Northwestern University and one of the authors on the study. "We need to do more to dig into it." She adds: "It doesn't mean their mental ability is lower or higher; it's just a difference in scores that are favoring older or newer samples. It could just be that they're getting worse at taking tests or specifically worse at taking these kinds of tests."
In a 1984 study, James Flynn noticed that intelligence test scores had steadily increased since the early 1930s. We call that steady rise the Flynn Effect. Considering that overall intelligence seemed to be increasing faster than could be explained by evolution, the reason increase became a source of debate, with many attributing the change to various environmental factors. But now, it seems that a Reverse Flynn Effect is, well, in effect.
The study, published in the journal Intelligence, used an online, survey-style personality test called the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project to analyze nearly 400,000 Americans. The researchers recorded responses from 2006 and 2018, in order to examine if and how cognitive ability scores were changing over time within the country. The data showed drops in logic and vocabulary (known as verbal reasoning), visual problem solving and analogies (known as matrix reasoning), and computational and mathematical abilities (known as letter and number series). Not every domain is going down though, notes the report. "[S]cores in spatial reasoning (known as 3D rotation) followed the opposite pattern, trending upward over the 12-year period."
"If all the scores were going in the same direction, you could make a nice little narrative about it, but that's not the case," says Elizabeth Dworak, a research assistant professor at Northwestern University and one of the authors on the study. "We need to do more to dig into it." She adds: "It doesn't mean their mental ability is lower or higher; it's just a difference in scores that are favoring older or newer samples. It could just be that they're getting worse at taking tests or specifically worse at taking these kinds of tests."
Seems simple to explain when you pair it with (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Seems simple to explain when you pair it with (Score:5, Informative)
the constant demonization of intelligence in the US.
Always has been [tumblr.com].
Re:Seems simple to explain when you pair it with (Score:4, Insightful)
Harvey Danger has also been saying this since at least 1997.
Been around the world and found
That only stupid people are breeding
The cretins cloning and feeding
And I don't even own a TV
If the last couple of years hasn't made it blatantly obvious, we're clearly living in the Idiocracy timeline. Humanity created the greatest communication network the world has ever seen and what do people use it for? To complain that their beer is now too "woke".
Re: Seems simple to explain when you pair it with (Score:4, Insightful)
I personally suspect it has to do with our conflict driven root of ambition. Life gets comparatively too easy due to too much success, and we start to ear ourselves apart. Our bonds of unity are driven apart by our search for conflict. This is what we define today as outrage culture, cancel culture, race baiting, etc etc. These are just incarnations of our desire to find conflict. We dont have a scary USSR out-competing us in space or trouncing us in Vietnam. So, we are here, at the twilight of our hegemony. The part Idiocracy gets wrong is that the whole world doesnt get stupid. We just fall onto hard times and will struggle while another power accents, to repeat the same fate a few centuries later. This is all, I am sorry to say, very normal. It is how super-hegemonic powers like Rome die.
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All empires devolve into a civil war with challenges to sexual morals, family structure, gender, and creed of one kind or another... I personally suspect it has to do with our conflict driven root of ambition. Life gets comparatively too easy due to too much success, and we start to ear ourselves apart.
"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." -- G. Michael Hopf in his novel 'Those Who Remain'.
Re: Seems simple to explain when you pair it with (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny thing about the dark ages [wikipedia.org] coming around after Rome adopted Christianity [nationalgeographic.com], eh?
Mixing religion and politics has always been a bad idea, rulers need to operate on facts, not on beliefs, and we are going to destroy the last thousand odd years of progress with a few decades of religious authoritarianism taking the reigns
Re: Seems simple to explain when you pair it with (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't single out Christianity. The Middle East was the bleeding edge for technology and science throughout the times we tend to call the Dark Ages (i.e. when Europe descended into religiosity). Just google where our word algorithm comes from.
And then we taught them religious fanaticism during the crusades...
Re: Seems simple to explain when you pair it with (Score:4, Informative)
Don't single out Christianity. The Middle East was the bleeding edge for technology and science throughout the times we tend to call the Dark Ages (i.e. when Europe descended into religiosity). Just google where our word algorithm comes from.
And then we taught them religious fanaticism during the crusades...
Ummm, hello? "We taught them"? Historical fact check: before crusades even started the Muslim have taken over about 2/3 of the known world, and not by preaching convincing sermons, let me tell you. The ancient world was 3 continents: Africa, Asia, Europe. They conquered all of known Africa, all of mediterranean Asia. We were left with just Europe, in crisis, under siege, and missing parts too, like Iberian Peninsula. We had the choice of either uniting and stopping them, or letting them continue picking off European states one by one. But yeah, daring to resist being slaughtered and forcibly converted, what a show of Christian supremacism and fanaticism.
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You don't build empires with fanaticism - you build them with sound military doctrine and advanced technology. The sort of technological advances you get when you're the global center of intellectualism who welcome all faiths among both visitors and citizens.
The crusades on the other hand *were* fanaticism - there was no practical, empire-building advantage for Europeans to claim Jerusalem - then as now it was a bunch of worthless desert.
Instead the goal was explicitly to bring about the end times, to brin
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I can tell you and whoever upvoted you didn't read the links you provided, or bothered to do much research on the dark ages and the collapse of the Roman empire.
Regardless, most historians in general agree that Constantine managed to salvage at least part of the classical Roman Empire to create the Eastern Roman Empire. Prior to that, Rome was already on the decline, with or without Christianity thanks in part to endless wars, political corruption, and over-extended borders. Turns out picking a fight with e
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Mixing religion and politics has always been a bad idea
You need to read more history. The notion that religion even could be separated from politics is less than 500 years old, and actually attempting it is an even more recent phenomenon. The United States was the first country to claim to try it, but arguably still hasn't really done it. The Soviet Union claimed to try it, but really just replaced it with a secular religion (and that incompletely).
Moreover, for all but a tiny slice of very recent human history, religion wasn't just part of politics, it was e
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No, I am referring to that American phenomenon called Fundamentalist Christianity that promotes "belief" over reality and has been subverting America ever since they inserted "under god" into the National Anthem 8 decades ago.
They rode high and mighty with Billy Graham at the helm, and have just started to sour the crowd recently. But a sucker is born every minute and they present a continuing hazard to our country. If you ask me, these lowered IQ scores can be correlated with the expansion of religious cha
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Any critical examination of America's success will show you a positive correlation between belief in Christ and America's rise to power.
Correlation isn't causation, as we all know. But you can't argue that fundamentalism is the cause of American weakness when America is becoming less Christian and less fundamentalist every day.
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Wrong. There is zero proof of that, because there is not one single thing you can point and say "God did that because we were good that day."
While it's nice to assume the context of the situation, don't forget you don't actually know shit. You are right there at the very same pulpit as the UFO, and other conspiracy varied nuts. Without a shred of proof other than some shit some ancient humans wrote down. Ancient humans wrote a LOT of crazy shit down. Time to grow up.
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More Fundamentalist than ever. Although the term is probably a bit outdated; the "fundamentals" (from when it was the post Civil War movement) are relatively mainstream. Although the top fundamental is problematic, Biblical inerrancy, since it often devolves into literalism, and which translation is the "innerant" one is never clear. Although you'll rarely see Fundamentalists learning ancient Hebrew and Aramaic in order to get the most accurate view. The Christian Fundamentalist began as a sociological mo
Re: Seems simple to explain when you pair it with (Score:5, Insightful)
It is about what Christianity provided: stable households with dual parent structures who provided stability and security, discipline, and fostering curiosity and virtue in their children.
Believing in Christ doesn't make it any easier to afford your mortgage and the rest of a family's household expenses on a single income. Kids began getting raised by television when a dual income became a necessity of supporting the financial needs of the average American family.
Re: Seems simple to explain when you pair it with (Score:4, Insightful)
Christianity not only didn't provide any of those things, historically it has significantly reduced some of those things.
Things like curiosity, and virtue are especially reduced in children raised in Christian environments. In general, they behave much worse. Curiosity and rational thinking are things strongly repressed because religion is inherently an irrational delusion. If you start thinking logically, critically, and rationally, your unlikely to continue following any religion.
Christians both historically and recently are more likely to be less virtuous than the median person.
Christians tend to be very bad at disciplining children as well, it often just boils down the the parent being an unstable dictator that gets frustrated and hits the kids. It works about as well as the average country ruled by an unstable violent dictator. Corporal punishment is the least effective or productive means of discipline there is, which is why areas that don't use it have much better behaved children. Corporal punishment is for lazy parents that can't think or control their emotions. It means they don't have to think about how to stop bad behaviour, and they get to attack someone making them angry without feeling bad about it.
The decline in Christianity in the US coincides with the fact that children and adults are better behaved now then ever before in history.
Basically every culture forever has predominately been made up of a man and women pairing together to raise children. There's always been a portion of the society that doesn't have kids for one reason or another.
Re: Seems simple to explain when you pair it with (Score:4)
that American phenomenon called Fundamentalist Christianity
These people voted for Donald Trump, a thrice-divorced, prostitute-bribing, tax-cheating, Russia-coddling, pathological liar.
They don't seem to have any organized agenda other than banning abortion, which is running out of steam and creating a backlash.
If you ask me, these lowered IQ scores can be correlated with the expansion of religious charter schools and home schooling
That should be a very easy thing to check. But until there is evidence, I am very skeptical.
Better questions than religious affiliation are:
1. Is the decline in IQ correlated with rising obesity? Are the people getting fatter also getting dumber?
2. Is the decline in IQ correlated with over-medication?
3. Is the decline in IQ correlated with social media use?
4. Is prenatal nutrition getting worse?
I don't know the answers, but identifying the cause is the first step to fixing the problem. The last thing America needs is more stupid people.
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And those fewer and fewer are getting more and more desperate, while at the same time also being the ones that have the money and the power. Ok, not the believers, but the con artists and dupe them out of their money.
And of course they want to retain that money and power.
So what you have is a country with a population that gets divided more and more between those that have money and power, with both of them residing on keeping their dupes under control with the religious mumbo jumbo, and a growing number of
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Indeed. By the time the barbarians became a serious threat to Rome, most of both the Romans and "barbarians" were Christian.
The Battle of Adrianople [wikipedia.org] was a decisive, overwhelming victory by the Goths over the Roman legions and the worst Roman defeat in more than three centuries. The Roman emperor himself was killed. It was a historical turning point, and the empire never fully recovered.
Yet the majority of soldiers on both sides were Christians.
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All empires devolve into a civil war with challenges to sexual morals, family structure, gender, and creed of one kind or another. It has happened to the Greeks; the Romans, the ancient Egyptians, the Qing, the Mongols, the Assyrians; and it will happen to us.
Maybe, but "America [will be the first] country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between".
And that's not just my opinion, Oscar Wilde pretty much said as much a long time ago already.
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That works great until you realize that you create a filter bubble with a positive feedback loop where people eventually believe their parallel world enough to go out and shoot up pizza parlors because they think there's a child porn ring in a nonexistent basement.
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And that's gonna accomplish what exactly? The nature of conspiracy nuttery is that no amount of evidence to the contrary can punch a hole into it. If everything fails, the very fact that some government entity "insured" it is already enough for them to pile on the conspiracy. Now the government went and erased all evidence before they were allowed to test their hypothesis (please don't call it theory, every time you call that cooky bullshittery like this a theory a scientist gets heartburn), so next time, t
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What Idiocracy got wrong (even though it never was intended to be taken seriously in the first place, it is a satire) was its depiction of eugenics being the reason for decreasing levels of intellect.
Dysgenics. The opposite of eugenics. We currently have a negative correlation between IQ and fertility, so evolution is reducing IQ.
The problem is that this is a slow process, and not enough to explain the observed drop in IQ scores.
Eugenics has widely been discredited as unscientific.
No, some aspect or interpretation has been wrong. But the basic principle remains. Intelligence has a heritable component similar to height. Smart/tall people are more likely to have smart/tall children. But other factors matter too, notably nutrition and childhood infecti
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I can't disagree that we are heading towards Idiocracy, however the main problem with the internet is not people complaining about dumb things, but it has been taken over for the purposes of selling us stuff and information as opposed to what I hoped it would be as a way of everybody sharing (useful) information.
As for beer being too woke, never heard that, but I am sure someone has said it on the internet. I do have a problem with the paragons of virtue that are corporations /sarcasm telling me what is rig
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...I do have a problem with the paragons of virtue that are corporations /sarcasm telling me what is right and wrong. If you are a recreational drug manufacturer (alcohol) perhaps you are on shaky ground preaching about ethics.
If you are a corporate person repeatedly and purposely breaking laws, ruining lives, and damaging the environment because the penalties are less than the profit, and because no real person does jail time as a result, then definitely you are on shaky ground preaching about ethics. Especially when you subvert democracy by purchasing influence and favourable legislation.
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A beer company hired a trans actor, and the hinterlands are working themselves into a frenzy [youtube.com]
Yeah, you could have lived without that
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Harvey Danger has also been saying this since at least 1997.
Been around the world and found
That only stupid people are breeding
The cretins cloning and feeding
And I don't even own a TV
If the last couple of years hasn't made it blatantly obvious, we're clearly living in the Idiocracy timeline. Humanity created the greatest communication network the world has ever seen and what do people use it for? To complain that their beer is now too "woke".
And take pictures of their cats, and pick online fights with strangers.
Re:Seems simple to explain when you pair it with (Score:5, Funny)
Were number one, were number one!
Re:Seems simple to explain when you pair it with (Score:5, Insightful)
..along with the constant glorification of violence. Why be smart when you can be emotional and get results right now.
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Leadership is important. Most people follow the example. Remember when Reagan was president and everyone took to wearing cowboy boots*?
Well, ... [thebullelephant.com]
*That was a creation of his PR team BTW. Reagan used to ride horses wearing more of a "gentleman's" riding outfit. But the PR people told him that cowboy boots, jeans and a cowboy hat would be a better sell.
Simple - for simpleminded who believe bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)
Cause that's what the study is - bullshit.
The values they got are in standard deviations.
So, mean scores between 2006 and 2018 for 18 to 60-year-olds are something like -0.023, -0.014, -0.007 and -0.019, depending on the kind of test administered, in standard deviations.
In this case, the standard deviation used was 15 IQ points.
They measured a decrease between 0.007 and 0.023 of THAT.
I.e. Their results are showing a decrease of 0.105 to 0.345 IQ points, over a decade.
Just as a reminder, average IQ is 100. Half the people have IQs ABOVE that.
And if you believe that a decrease of 0.345 of one single part of that number, OVER A FUCKING DECADE, is in any way relevant... well I guess you're not the part of the above 100 crowd.
For extra understanding just how much bullshit is in this study...
Starting in 2006, 35 ability items, that would become part of the International Cognitive Ability Resource (ICAR; Condon and Revelle, 2014, Condon and Revelle, 2016; Dworak, Revelle, Doebler, and Condon, 2021; Revelle, Dworak, and Condon, 2020), were administered.
These items were used to form a composite cognitive ability score or domain scores for matrix reasoning (11 items), letter and number series (8 items), and verbal reasoning (16 items).
Starting in 2011 an additional item for letter and number series and 24 three-dimensional rotation items began to be administered, with the original items, to allow for a 60-item composite score. Unlike previous Flynn effect studies, participants were disproportionately female identifying (65.03%) and between the ages of 18 and 90.
Five years into the study, in 2011, they changed how they measure the thing they measure by adding things they measure to the set of things they measure.
Scores jumped in that year [els-cdn.com] across the board. And the effect actually lasted for a year or two, then it dived in 2014. By about the same amount it jumped up in 2011.
Prior to 2011, the trend was basically flat. From 2014 on, scores are actually rising across the board, indicating that the curve is regressing back to that original, flat, mean.
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Re:Seems simple to explain when you pair it with (Score:4, Insightful)
Welp, if you take into account that a significant portion of society is pushed underground because a larger segment of it demands respect from everyone with no intention of reciprocating ... yeah, you have unintentionally made a point. There are a lots of people who could be contributing better economically if they weren't constantly being treated as villains.
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says one of the potholes in the IQ chart
Re: Seems simple to explain when you pair it with (Score:5, Informative)
Intelligent people can handle ambiguity, differences, and the fact that basically nothing biological except for the simplest things comes in discrete units. Almost everything biological is in ranges.
It tends to be less intelligent people that require set and unchanging rules and a limited amount of options.
It's the same reason religions tend to be filled with dumb people, people that don't believe but they grew up with it and don't like change, and people that don't believe but like the power they can get manipulating dumb people.
Lead. Like a performance additive for the brain (Score:3, Funny)
This post brought to you by Lead Miners Of America Inc. proud members of MAGA and sponsors of the NRA.
Not really new (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a flaw in the test/methodology. All these sorts of tests are inherently linked to specific assumed responses, and building the test requires an assumption on the part of the test developers on how intelligence can be expressed. This has always been a flaw with IQ testing and why it really doesn't mean what they want it to mean.
Intelligence could mean a lot of different things depending on context, and intelligence testing is a largely unsolved problem. You can probably just assume that the issue is with the way the test is configured being out-of-step with how people process information and take the test.
The human race capabilities have not consequentially changed for thousands or tens of thousands of years. How someone responds to any particular test is heavily dependent on their experience and environment and only a little on their innate learning ability.
Re:Not really new (Score:4, Insightful)
tfa already says that much: "It doesn't mean their mental ability is lower or higher; it's just a difference in scores that are favoring older or newer samples. It could just be that they're getting worse at taking tests or specifically worse at taking these kinds of tests."
so not a flaw in the methodology but rather no need to rush to conclusions. the authors of the study didn't, why do you? it could be a lot of things. there is a consistent pattern, though, and that surely has an explanation that would be interesting to find.
then again first you dismiss the very possibility of measuring intelligence ("these tests don't mean anything"), but at the same time attribute the errors to a flaw in the process, probably because you don't like these particular results. which prompts 2 questions:
1. so what is it going to be?
2. what does the fact that a post which is basically a misunderstanding of the topic spiced up with a fundamental contradiction is moderated 4-interesting tell us about slashdot's collective intelligence?
we need to test more ...
Re:Not really new (Score:4, Insightful)
Fair enough (and I tend to agree in specific instances of IQ test), but...
How do you explain the consistent drop? If methodology is flawed, I'd expect a more broad fluctuation over time.
Not to mention mediocrity seems the new standard-bearer. Look at political debates from the 70s compared to now, and it is glaringly obvious.
Re:Not really new (Score:4, Funny)
How do you explain the consistent drop? If methodology is flawed, I'd expect a more broad fluctuation over time.
Narrator: He can't.
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Fair enough (and I tend to agree in specific instances of IQ test), but...
How do you explain the consistent drop? If methodology is flawed, I'd expect a more broad fluctuation over time.
If the testing methodology didn't change between 2006 and 2018, that alone might explain the drop. I know that sounds backwards, but hear me out.
The way people absorb and process information has changed dramatically even over the last decade. I think it's fair to say that in the last 10 or 15 years we have developed a markedly different culture. And one of the perennial failings of IQ tests is that they are very culture-specific, and will give falsely low readings for subjects from other cultures.
Maybe 10-y
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Re:Not really new (Score:4, Informative)
IQ scores are the most objective and accurate measurement in all of psychology. I
Fuck that. Differences between different IQ tests can vary by staggering amounts ( http://www.iapsych.com/iapap10... [iapsych.com] ). On one test you could score 100 and on another you could score 125. For another person this may be the other way around for the same tests.
So even if you say that they are 'the most accurate' (a relative term) that means nothing because they are not very accurate in an absolute sense.
If you take any of it seriously and don't take IQ seriously that's a clear sign of mental issues.
Ad Hominems are also a clear sign of mental issues.
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IQ tests literally adjust the score based on your age and your sex. There's no way that's an accurate measurement of intelligence if it changes based on non-intelligence characteristics.
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The bottom half is a riff on the old trope “humans aren’t evolving any more”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anything that affects human reproduction by more than a percent will cause evolution, but that kind of small effect takes a cool thousand years to manifest. But some of the events in the past several hundre
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I didn't say we weren't evolving, I said human capability - from the context, human reasoning capability - hasn't changed consequentially. Your counter examples don't suggest any reasonable relationship to human intelligence, even the various egregious cases of genocide or ethnic cleansing are unlikely to have any effect.
Re:Not really new (Score:4, Interesting)
Minecraft 1, Public Schools 0 (Score:5, Interesting)
The systemic racism we're looking for is the dominant monopoly on public education dominated by a monopoly employees' union.
But kudos to Notch for teaching kids how to do 3d modeling. I know one former player who took quickly to WorldEdit and now does CAD/CAM work like it's second nature.
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Actually, spatial reasoning isn't something that can be taught or improved on.
It's the most accurate measure of intelligence, and is not limited by barriers of language or prior knowledge/education.
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Actually, spatial reasoning isn't something that can be taught or improved on.
Many studies almost say the opposite, that it's incredibly easy to improve.
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I think this may actually be a poster child for what the article is about. Verbal reasoning skills are dropping right along side the ability to have civil discourse.
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"You're the one that claimed studies disagreed with my stance"
I'm pretty sure that you made a claim and are unwilling to back it up. Doesn't matter that someone made a counter claim that conflicted with your claim.
From my point of view you both can be dismissed as background noise if either of your positions can't be supported.
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It appears "spatial reasoning can be trained wins"
https://nclab.com/courses/spat... [nclab.com]
https://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/3... [umass.edu]
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Re:Minecraft 1, Public Schools 0 (Score:5, Interesting)
The systemic racism we're looking for is the dominant monopoly on public education dominated by a monopoly employees' union.
What? Teachers make shit wages and have to put up with nonsense from parents to legislators who want felony charges if the wrong material is taught. Can't imagine why they would want a group to protect them.
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Our entire education system was built upon it. Teachers taught what the communities that paid them wanted them to teach. Now teachers teach what they feel is best and want everyone to just trust their judgement. But that is not really how government spending works. People want to have a say in the education of their spawn, and the worst thing that could have happened was the pandemic where they sent the children home.
Re:Minecraft 1, Public Schools 0 (Score:4, Interesting)
"What? Teachers make shit wages and have to put up with nonsense from parents to legislators who want felony charges if the wrong material is taught. Can't imagine why they would want a group to protect them."
Cute narrative. I have one, too:
LAUSD has about 500k students (k-12) as of 2023. It also employees over 75k staff (mix of teachers, administrators, etc).
20 years ago the only difference was the number of students was over 750k.
As the student population has decreased, so did their testing (which reflects the quality of education).
We have schools which are empty (or nearly so) while we lost 1/3rd of the population. We're not reducing our costs in anyway to reflect the reduced number of students. We should be downsizing both property and employee costs to reflect the massive decline in student population. Or at least see a bump in education quality (spending more per student).
When you include all ballot approved bonds and spending, we spend more per student that most public schools in the nation and provide some of the most generous benefits to LAUSD staff. And we're doing this with far greater staff-to-student rations than 20 years ago -- and we're STILL producing weaker and weaker high school graduates.
https://www.latimes.com/califo... [latimes.com]
In math, 73% of 11th-graders earned A’s, Bs, and Cs. Tests scores showed only 19% met grade-level standards.
For eighth-graders, 79% earned A’s, Bs and Cs in math. Test scores showed 23% met grade-level standards.
In English, 85% of sixth-graders earned A’s, Bs and Cs, while 40% met grade-level standards.
For seventh-graders, 82% earned A’s, Bs and Cs in English. Test scores showed 43% met standards.
Apparently the solution to failing our K-12 children is to just cover it up with "good grades".
In our best category, we're pushing out less than half our students who perform at their grade level every year. And math is embarrassing -- not even 20% performing at grade level.
Maybe, just maybe, the "nonsense" from parents is justified.
Re:Minecraft 1, Public Schools 0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Cute narrative. I have one, too:
LAUSD has about 500k students (k-12) as of 2023. It also employees over 75k staff (mix of teachers, administrators, etc).
20 years ago the only difference was the number of students was over 750k.
Nope. You can't just lump teachers in with all the other staff and expect the metric to be a good measure of educational outcomes. Having more administrators and security staff and network techs and lunch staff and other people who aren't involved in the actual teaching might be necessary to keep the school running (or they might not be), but they aren't teaching your kids.
So is the mix the same as it was 20 years ago, or, as one might suspect from the lower test scores, does LAUSD have far fewer teachers and far more support staff now?
I couldn't find data as far back as 20 years ago, but in the 2007 to 2008 school year, LAUSD had 45,473 [wikipedia.org] teachers and 694,288 students, or 15.27 students per teacher, and a total of 83,967 employees, or 8.27 students per staff member. LAUSD now has 24,769 [wikipedia.org] teachers for 565,479 students, or 22.83 students per teacher, and a total of 74,000 employees, or 7.64 students per staff member.
So even though the student-to-employee ratio is similar — even slightly better now — the student-to-teacher ratio got worse by about 50%. There are way, way more non-teaching staff in LAUSD per student, and only two-thirds as many actual teaching staff per student as there were just fifteen years earlier.
Teacher-to-student ratio is the primary metric that matters. If education quality in LAUSD is deteriorating, the increased number of students per teacher is likely the main reason why. LAUSD has simply become too big to function efficiently, and as a result, more and more money is being diverted away from education towards non-teacher staffing, resulting in worsening student-to-teacher ratios. Until that problem is fixed — probably by breaking up LAUSD into a few dozen districts and letting each district trim the heck out of its support staff — the system's educational performance is unlikely to improve.
Re:Minecraft 1, Public Schools 0 (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe, just maybe, the "nonsense" from parents is justified.
I'm reminded of the comic about all the managers sitting around watching the one person work and saying "why aren't we performing better after all our efficiency drives".
No the "nonsense" from parents isn't justified. The parents protect under performing children and blame everyone but themselves.
The "nonsense" from legislators also isn't justified. We used to have experts teaching kids, now we have congressmen dictating how kids are taught, -not only no longer by experts but also the dredges of society.
Teacher used to a noble profession, it is now a bottom tier choice done by people who often fail to find an alternate career (at least in America).
The "nonsense" is precisely what is causing the problem in the first place. Thank Christ I live in a country where my wife gets to decide what and how to teach without government intervention, where she was required to have a masters degree in the subject matter, for a school that tells parents they either need to control their kids or they will be booted out. Incidentally our education system well and truly outranks that of the USA on every list except for the "Best Countries Report" compiled by ... US News. I guess they probably have US taught students working there so probably couldn't add up the results correctly.
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White conservatives are so fragile that they rewrote the history books to remove any mention of Rosa Parks being black. The entire point of why she was arrested! Not giving up her seat for a white person. https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
They changed it back after it made national news but talk about being a snowflake.
Dworak is a moron. (Score:4, Insightful)
Video games ranging from the 3d Marios to Quake to Minecraft account for increased 3d rotation scores, and the utter farce that is the US public education system guided by the Dept. of Ed. and NEA explains the drop in all the rest.
Re:Dworak is a moron. (Score:4, Informative)
A similar thing was seen with Lego improving 3D visualization capabilities. It even worked when girls were encouraged to play with the bricks and their scores rose to match those of the boys.
For a long time it had been claimed that males simply had different brains that were better at 3D stuff, probably due to historically being the hunters, and that was why women couldn't park a car properly. Turns out it's simply down to boys having more experience in that area.
IQ test is a myth (Score:2, Interesting)
About twenty years ago a group of researchers gave a geometry test to western educated people and aboriginal people. On concepts the scores were simi
Re:IQ test is a myth (Score:5, Insightful)
People are getting smarter, with worse education. (Score:2)
I think the fact that the spatial reasoning scores went higher, and spatial reasoning being one of the few if not only purely cognitive test that doesn't involve prior knowledge or understanding of language, indicates that people are getting more intelligent, but with poorer education.
We have access to a wealth of information, far more than any time in history. People are using their brains now more than ever. The issue is our education system has been getting systematically worse and worse. People aren't b
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indicates that people are getting more intelligent, but with poorer education.
What it really indicates is that a lot more people are dumping massive amounts of time into 3d video games...
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It appears that it can be taught.
Society does things wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Actually, this is a bad study. Spatial reasoning is the only proper way to measure intelligence because it doesn't require prior knowledge.
This study just shows that our education system is getting worse, despite our intelligence getting higher (which is probably because in today's modern world, people constantly need to be learning to keep up).
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While spacial reasoning might not require prior knowledge practice can help. Also prior knowledge is important in intelligence, important in creating new things.
Also I have a problem with your statement that spacial reasoning doesn't require prior knowledge from here https://www.sesp.northwestern.... [northwestern.edu] if it doesn't require prior knowledge then why are they trying to teach it? I can believe that spacial reasoning is something we develop just as living in the world.
Some proof would be good, and your example of
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I didn't mention aboriginal people so I think you might be responding to the wrong person. It was this https://news.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org] I just assumed it was you since
You are right, it was the only thing in this thread that showed referenced any evidence of spacial reasoning being irrelevant of education
As far as prior knowledge is concerned: a big part of testing for spatial reasoning is the person not having prior knowledge and being able to, purely through imagination, turn a 2d pattern into a 3d one.
The prior knowledge is acquired through life, we live in a 3d world that know what that world looks like, it is prior knowledge it may just not be taught in school.
I personally think IQ tests are dumb, the idea that you can rank intelligence in some linear order seems absurd, different skills are important in different situations who can say what weighting each one has in
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Every new thing 'we' create we dumb it down so the simplest of individuals can operate it without thinking. This is extremely detrimental to society as a whole.
... or you've deluded yourself into thinking that understanding what all the blinky lights on a router mean is a sign that U R SUPAR SMAR as opposed to just finding it interesting.
Haven't they been discredited? (Score:2)
Hasn't IQ testing been discredited anyway?
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yes, that is what people that usually have lower IQ scores say
they may not be perfect, but for most people, talking with a 80 IQ and a 140 IQ, you will see a difference (even less educated high IQ ones, like the highest IQ women)
Schools no longer teach standardized tests (Score:4, Informative)
Daily practice on sample SAT problems in Algebra II helped boost my score for admission into top schools. Today, states like California believe the SAT is racist and it can't even be evaluated in admissions decisions at my alma mater.
I see the results of this deemphasis on millennial applicants to the open headcount on my team. Most don't even read the job description and over 95% fail to complete simple arithmetic during the interview process.
The most educated of my friends are not reproducing or have single children, while deeply uneducated states are prohibiting birth control and encouraging large families. I don't see this trend reversing anytime soon. The only silver lining is that those who are still motivated to educate themselves can be assured of a career when algorithms replace menial workers.
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Well we are in a world where the job description has little to do about the job you will have and what skills you actually need. If you are getting people threw recruiters, than chances they never got the job description, but just sent a copy of their resume to as many companies as possible.
Why do you put someone who is already stressed into an arithmetic test. Do you also ban calculators? While I have a minor in Mathematics, I also have dyslexia, which often makes arithmetics a bit more difficult to
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SAT type tests should by like hunting, where one side doesn't even know it is playing. Alas that isn't really possible though.
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My high school honors algebra II teacher coached her students every morning and we all got accepted into college regardless of race and income. I scored top 2% in verbal despite moving to the states just 8 years ago because I read everything within reach. I was raised in a brown skinned, minimum wage, first generation immigrant family and can confidently say poverty and racism is just an excuse from people who do not want to put in the effort to fix their situation.
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What makes the SAT so special that our education system is ruined without it?
I see the results of this deemphasis on millennial applicants to the open headcount on my team. Most don't even read the job description and over 95% fail to complete simple arithmetic during the interview process.
This IQ drop is a 2 point drop https://thehill.com/policy/tec... [thehill.com]. Your experience there is either incredibly bad luck or the ol' "When I was young we were all amazing but now kids suck" shtick as it can not be explained by a 2 point drop in IQ.
DEI (Score:3)
Norway too ... (Score:5, Informative)
Reverse Flynn effect was observed and studied in Norway.
They did it on conscription age males, and traced back families too ...
Here is the paper at PNAS [pnas.org].
They conclusively say that it is neither genetics nor immigration ...
They narrow it down to "environmental", but nothing more specific than that.
Take your pick: Lead in gasoline (but that was stopped in the 1990s)?
PFAS?
PM2.5?
I run into some real smart kids (Score:5, Interesting)
Invent AGI before we're too far gone (Score:2)
AGI is the solution to all of civilization's problems, might be a solution which does not include humans ... but oh well, small price to pay.
MAGA rots your brain (Score:2, Troll)
Odd that it decreased as phone use increased? (Score:2)
Flynn Effect Is Bullshit (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Flynn Effect Is Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Have a link: https://www.quora.com/Does-IQ-... [quora.com]
Re:Flynn Effect Is Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
that is exactly one of the comments about global warming ... it is snowing here, so there is no global warming, right?!
that is why IQ are dropping, people believe in failed logics and end teaching wrong ways to think to others
idiocracy; another prediction comes true (Score:2)
The Fox News Effect (Score:3)
Easy explanation (Score:3)
It's funny how the decrease in American IQ scores corresponds proportionally to the rise in Republican reproductive rates.
Lead the way (Score:3)
Pretty sure IQs started dropping right after they stopped pumping lead into the air on a massive scale. People keep getting smarter, then they removed lead from gasoline, then IQs started falling. We need to start adding lead to our gasoline again, and just think how much smoother your car engine will sound!
Diet. (Score:3)
US diets improved, and intelligence went up. Less lead paint everywhere, intelligence went up.
So, what crap is in your diet, given this, and US life expectancy dropping, and the percentage of people becoming obese going up....
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Here have a link: https://www.washingtonexaminer... [washingtonexaminer.com]