Is everyone getting a bit thicker?

Wibbs

bnt wrote: »

Yep. Some folks talk as if the people who design and run such tests are stupid, that they haven't thought about this kind of problem - that they're off in their own world, running these abstract tests that have no connection to the "real world". In the field of psychology, the idea that intelligence is a thing, and that IQ tests provide a reasonably-accurate relative indicator of it, is not controversial at all.

While I take your point B, actually there has been quite the bit of debate about it. IQ tests can measure reasoning(analytical and spatial) ability and are very good at that, but they don't measure memory, short or long term, they don't measure an ability to plan, or drive and attention, or brain plasticity, they're limited in measuring verbal ability and don't measure social, emotional or physical coordination skills, decision making skills, or creativity at all. They're a good test of certain parameters of reasoning, yes, but as a measure of overall human intelligence they're quite limited in scope.

As for connection to the real world? Yes there is a strong correlation between academic success and IQ as one might expect and some quite strong correlation with professional success, but to claim, even expect that quite a narrow field test alone is up to the task of measuring human intelligence is more than a stretch.

I think we can agree that people like Max Planck, Mozart, Plato, Michelangelo and Shakespeare were colossi of human genius, but I would bet the farm they would score quite differently on an IQ test. There are probably people reading this who would close on or even surpass a couple of the names above, but they will likely never be at that level.

AllForIt

I feel I'm getting dummererer as I get less young.

professore

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

With right wing extremism IQs have definitely taken a sharp fall over the last 20 years.
Case in point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjuNuqIev8M

This man is a cabbage. Sadly it seems turning to te extreme right does that to a person.
Just look at Trump, Fox, Brexit, the AfD, the Austrian government and the right wing scene in Eastern Europe.
This has nothing to do with people not being able to take IQ tests.
This is the sharp decline of intelligence in the masses till there's nothing left but thick-browed, knuckle-dragging, drooling skinheads and their leaders who manage to look like a shaved ape stuck in a suit and even manage to utter a few sentences coherently.
I wish Idiocracy was true, the people in it are stupid, but harmless. Sadly people are becoming more hateful and fearful and they are becoming the majority. It was nice when humanity looked like it might turn to a more positive path in the 90's, but instead we are getting fear, hate, ignorance and bile and it looks like it's getting worse.

Whats really thick is inviting over a million immigrants into your country from a medieval culture and expecting no negative political or social consequences.

Yer Da sells Avon

dunno lol

Sardonicat

"Muslamic Lur"

: )

sbsquarepants

Roger_007 wrote: »

Whatever about people becoming thicker, they are definitely becoming less skilled at doing the myriad of jobs and tasks which people need to do in life.
I was just thinking about my grandparents who had many skills which subsequent generations have tended to 'leave to the specialists'.
My grandma made all her own clothes and also made curtains and bedclothes. She made all sorts of goodies and toys for us grandchildren. She was a fantastic knitter. She cooked everything from scratch.
My grandpa could turn his hand to carpentry, plumbing, electrical work or fixing anything that needed fixing. He maintained and serviced his car and any other machine that they owned.
My parents had no such skills and I don't either.

There's definitely a marked increase in specialisation and an increased dependence on technology we don't understand. Notable by the recent arms race in qualifications (as in last couple of decades). A degree now is basically on par with a leaving cert 20 or 25 years ago.
You see fairly basic jobs being advertised demanding degrees + a few years experience - sometimes they don't even specify what discipline!
If a degree in art history is as applicable as a degree in chemistry for the job you're advertising, the job you're advertising does not require a degree of any description!

Wibbs

sbsquarepants wrote: »

There's definitely a marked increase in specialisation and an increased dependence on technology we don't understand.

True. There's also a rise of complexity and "no user serviceable items beneath" too. Plus I would say people have less time these days and many more distractions. If all you have of an evening is the wireless in the corner you tend to have more hobbies and time to pursue and hone them.

Having more disposable income and credit also tends to mean people will replace rather than repair and stuff becomes less repairable anyway as that doesn't suit the economics of the churn of product required for the consumer society. The products are more heavily marketed too. I was having a convo with an uncle of mine a while back and the subject of labels and logos came up. He was saying that back in the 60's if you went and saw say a James Bond flic and you thought his suit was fab, you'd rock on down to one of the local tailors and say you wanted a suit like that and off they'd make one. You had no clue who made James Bond's actual suit, today you would and wearing anything else would be seen as a knock off, a pale copy(even if it were better made).

It's a different environment and people's minds adapt to that and are smarter within that.

jmayo

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

With right wing extremism IQs have definitely taken a sharp fall over the last 20 years.

...
Just look at Trump, Fox, Brexit, the AfD, the Austrian government and the right wing scene in Eastern Europe.
This has nothing to do with people not being able to take IQ tests.
This is the sharp decline of intelligence in the masses till there's nothing left but thick-browed, knuckle-dragging, drooling skinheads and their leaders who manage to look like a shaved ape stuck in a suit and even manage to utter a few sentences coherently.
I wish Idiocracy was true, the people in it are stupid, but harmless. Sadly people are becoming more hateful and fearful and they are becoming the majority. It was nice when humanity looked like it might turn to a more positive path in the 90's, but instead we are getting fear, hate, ignorance and bile and it looks like it's getting worse.

And as professore quite rightly points out the left and the so called enlightened "clued in" classes threw open the gates and thought they could just take a huge tranche of people from an incompatible cultural background and everything would work out.

There is a huge arrogance by some in Europe that they can somehow take someone who has grown up in a very different and frankly backwards culture and magically turn them into the exact opposite.

Even worse a lot of the so called "intelligent" ones chomping at the bit on facebook, twitter, etc bought into the hogwash that these new arrivals were necessary to pay for the natives pensions in years to come.

Yeah the 90s, the decade that gave us Srebrenica where nationalism was hijacked to slaughter others, all the while the so called more advanced and enlightened in the likes of the EU sat with their thumbs up their asses and wouldn't act.
So much for "it will never be allowed happen again".
Then we had Rwanda where the UN and the world abandoned an ethnic group to genocide.
And I am not even going to bother to list all the other conflicts in Africa.

There are idiots on all sides and blindly listening to and buying into the totally unrealistic and often moronic utterances of some celebrities on twitter is as bad as the morons on the right you rail about.

And if you want to know who are the most mentally deficient and causing the rise of the right, it would be the political classes who are abandoning huge chunks of the electorate and then expecting them to meekly do as they are told come election or referendum.
And a big part of that is telling the workers who once carried out functions in society that the globalisation that took their work away, and indeed their kids work, is good for them and that they should simply upskill to be a scientist, financial analysts or engineer to get a job in future.

What were once the working classes of Europe and America have been abandoned politically and labeling them all as thickos and racist bigots aint going to win them back.

Maybe it is now more obvious and most people were always a bit thick.
I think technology now allows people to do tasks that once required a bit of thought and mental effort.
People now use a calculator to do the most mundane of sums, a satnav to guide them to even the most obvious of places, google to find the answer to even the simplest piece of information.
I do think people are losing mental dexterity.

sbsquarepants

Wibbs wrote: »

True. There's also a rise of complexity and "no user serviceable items beneath" too.

Case in point. I have an engine light on in my car, I have no idea why, it just says in the manual to bring it to a dealer to be checked. I can't notice anything wrong with the car, if the light wasn't on I'd have no reason to suspect there was anything wrong. I'm not a car lover so I tend to ignore things until they need doing, but this light has been on for 2 1/2 years now - it's clearly not important. I do get it serviced (by a backstreet mechanic not a main dealer) I asked him what it was and he just said "cars grand, don't mind that!"
The cynic in me suspects that they may just be programmed to turn on every now and then! How would i know any different? A car these days is like a fecking space ship!

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

begbysback

sbsquarepants wrote: »

Case in point. I have an engine light on in my car, I have no idea why, it just says in the manual to bring it to a dealer to be checked. I can't notice anything wrong with the car, if the light wasn't on I'd have no reason to suspect there was anything wrong. I'm not a car lover so I tend to ignore things until they need doing, but this light has been on for 2 1/2 years now - it's clearly not important. I do get it serviced (by a backstreet mechanic not a main dealer) I asked him what it was and he just said "cars grand, don't mind that!"
The cynic in me suspects that they may just be programmed to turn on every now and then! How would i know any different? A car these days is like a fecking space ship!

Nothing wrong with your light mate, sound like it's working perfectly to me

Mutant z

Well i wouldnt say everyone but certainly a particular proportion of the population those generally of the virtue signalling variety.

Grayson

Mutant z wrote: »

Well i wouldnt say everyone but certainly a particular proportion of the population those generally of the virtue signalling variety.

But not the people who use buzz words like "virtue signaling"?



Back on topic, I'm a nerd. A really big nerd. My speciality is logic and it crosses over into psychology quite a bit. It's how and why people think the things they do. It's a study of logic on a formal and intuitive level, the differences and why they exist.

People are making decisions in a different manner now. But part of that has to do with the influx of information that they have. It creates and feeds into biases on a very primitive level. As humans we are prone to making decisions that don't make sense. They make sense to the people making them but when you look at them coldly and critically you can see that they are based on false logic.

It's because we're designed to make instinctual decisions when we encounter risk. These decision making processes made sense when we were looking out for predators but they don't make sense in the modern world.

I think the information we're given can feed into these biases and reinforce bad decisions. And we're given so much that it's just confusing for most people. The news most people get now is based on the algorithms and likes from their social media feed. This gives everything from health advice, to politics to local news. It means that we see an explosion of anti vaxxers, fringe ideas and occasionally mobs (look at what's happened in Irish towns when someone posts that there's a paedophile in the area). And rather than get a nonbiased opinion they get reinforcements based on what they like. It's damn hard for people to change their minds normally, cognitive bias is real, however it's impossible to change your opinion when all you get is the same news.

And you can see it in some spheres when you argue with someone. there are new terms which were unheard of a decade ago which are now in common use. These are buzz words which people see in the news they follow and regurgitate.

Wibbs

sbsquarepants wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

The second part is much of your answer to the first. The less the owner can do, the more the dealer/manufacturer gains. You can get third party doohickeys that will plug into your car, interrogate the "brains" and tell what the code is and you can fix that and reset it. Independent mechanics that I know have such things. From what I gather mind you a lot of newer stuff has to go back to the main dealers as the doohickeys haven't caught up yet.

Permabear wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

True, though it can be an individual thing too. Some can be intellectually bright but useless on practical matters. All fingers and thumbs. And vice versa of course. Different skill sets, attributes and talents required in many ways. That same uncle I referenced in the last post was at the top of his professional field before he retired and he has noted that down the years. You'd have a rough divide between the cerebral and the practical individuals in the mix. He also noted that though he would have expected the cerebral types to be more represented, inventiveness and creativity was roughly divided equally between them. I would say "Renaissance men" who can work both sides were always pretty rare among the population and as you note modern society tends to make them rarer. It entirely depends on the area involved mind you. A subject like I dunno nuclear physics needs almost no "practical" talent, it's all cerebral. Engineering would be one where both would be involved. Medicine too to some degree. Having a few docs in the family it's very obvious that the ones who are surgeons are dab hands at the DIY and around the house in general.

That practical side is yet another thing IQ tests fall short of measuring. They only measure the cerebral. I have also found down the years that those who hold great confidence in IQ tests as a measure tend to be those who scored well in them.

Wibbs

Grayson wrote: »

there are new terms which were unheard of a decade ago which are now in common use. These are buzz words which people see in the news they follow and regurgitate.

and they're so easy to use as a shorthand and as a group signal and affiliation. People have always doen that, it's just the interwebs and media magnifies it. Plus humans have big complex indigestible questions - if and when they do question - but they inevitably seek out small simple digestible answers. Nearly always answers they think they've already answered for themselves.