Canadian Chat → Are Human Beings Getting Cleverer?

An interesting article on BBC.

»www.bbc.com/news/magazin ··· 31556802

quote:

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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.

Focusing on one part of the IQ test, the Raven's Progressive Matrices, they found that on average intelligence has risen the equivalent of 20 IQ points since 1950. IQ tests are designed to ensure that the average result is always 100, so this is a significant jump.

...snip...

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The rest of the article goes on in great detail to try and explain the results.

Myself, I have my doubts about this claim. When kids today don't know the difference between their, they're and there and can't spell or do math if their lives depended on it I question the entire study's validity.

Granted, today's life and general paperwork has become far more complicated and computer literacy is way up among kids these days, but today's computers, electronics and wonder drugs are the products of people who grew up in the 50's, 60's and 70's.

I seriously wonder if we'll see the same kind of progress in the next 40 years that we've seen in the past 40.

If anything, spell checkers and grammar checkers and calculating programs have made people dumber and more dependent on machines the past few decades and ultimately we are devoting all of our technological resources today to putting the human brain out of business.

I think the BBC article is just a wee bit too smug drawing conclusions from this one research paper.

I read the whole BBC article. Quite interesting. In university in the 60s and 70s I was part of an experiment to get more useful results from IQ and aptitude tests. Over a period of weeks I wrote many tests and I discovered that it was possible to practice for these tests and by the end of testing my scores went up significantly in every category. My best category was spatial relations which appears to be similar to the Raven's Matrices, namely the ability to think conceptually by envisioning a problem, eliminating all solutions which could not be true, and deciding on the one that worked. A variation of this is well known to fans of Sherlock Holmes who said that after eliminating all potential possibilities, whatever is left no matter how improbable, is the answer.

-Bob

Then to counter this, you have been in the general populace right? It does not seem so.

Are these IQ tests any good? What exactly do they prove? I've always done very poorly on IQ tests but passed my Captain's Examination in London, without attending classes,(Its tough there) became Captain at 27 years of age on a 200,000 ton tanker, ran a very successful Shipping Surveying Company in Vancouver before selling. To this day I have a low IQ. Something is amiss somewhere.

To add to that I've always tested extremely high on IQ tests, but until probably the last 12 years of my life was seriously underemployed. When it comes to education I'm generally bored (yet I like to learn) and often lose interest. When I returned to school in my 40s I still managed to not apply myself 100% and graduate dean's list. The difference that time was that I pushed myself more than I did in my late teens.

Neither high or low IQ scores come with any guarantee of success or failure. I thought these two quotes about testing sum it up well.

"Simply put, IQ tests are designed to measure your general ability to solve problems and understand concepts. This includes reasoning ability, problem-solving ability, ability to perceive relationships between things and ability to store and retrieve information. IQ tests measure this general intellectual ability in a number of different ways."

"A lot of critics point out that IQ tests don't measure creativity, social skills, wisdom, acquired abilities or a host of other things we consider to be aspects of intelligence. The value of IQ tests is that they measure general cognitive ability, which has been proven to be a fairly accurate indicator of intellectual potential. There is a high positive correlation between IQ and success in school and the work place, but there are many, many cases where IQ and success do not coincide."

»science.howstuffworks.co ··· n455.htm

A common fallacy is the assumption that spelling, math or other specific skills are an indicator of intelligence. It is possible for someone to be stunningly brilliant in one area, yet even so far as disabled in another. Einstein is a good example of this. Furthermore, as much as I loathe it, society today doesn't seem to put the same value on these specific skills - that being language and math - that you mentioned as they did decades ago. The thing one needs to keep in mind is that just because someone is not demonstrating a skill does not mean they lack the intelligence and/or capacity to learn it if necessary. Just because someone may not care about the same specific skill that we do does not mean that they are dumber than us.

Grammar usage is not a good indicator for intelligence. I think you are confusing an increase in laziness with a lack of intelligence which is not necessarily the case

I've mentioned this before. I have an x-wife who works for one of our major banks
and a close friend who has worked in human resources for a very large Canadian
corporation. The stories these two can tell you about the kids hired since the late
1990's are at times stunning. They seem to test well but once hired and in the
workforce they just don't give a sh*t. HUGE amounts of sick days. When disciplined
mommy & daddy usually call the boss and go on tirades. It seems to be quite a
shock to junior that mom & dad have no say with their boss.

Intelligent enough but VERY self-centered!

FaxCap

Not all young people are like that. What you are describing sounds like the type of entitled kids who had their parents pay for everything including their education rather than having to work through life themselves. When they finally get into the workforce that sense of entitlement is carried with them and it produces the product you just described.

You are absolutely right, Gone and the few who do excel and work hard rise through
the ranks VERY quickly! I see 27-30 year old kids (well kids to me!) making $60-$70K/year.

FaxCap

Our most recent hires have been quite the opposite. The main problem we have now is the complete inflexibility of our senior staff who are biding their time. They're retired on the job. The young ones are awesome and very hard working. They do pamper themselves and believe in work life balance but so do I.

Haha, so true. Nothing pisses me off more than the boomers nearing retirement now who bitch about the attitude of young people today, when they were able to buy a house and raise a family on a single income with a decent work/life balance which is something young people today could only ever dream of. And when young people expect to live the same way they did at that age, they're called "lazy"

Some young people are lazy, but for the most part the rest are just resentful.

Cranky old farts. I'm 47 so in between the two groups. My current team is almost all late twenties to early thirties and they're great to work with. My previous team included 4 know it alls in their fifties who spent a lot of time fighting change and challenging any type of management.