Young losing their IQ advantage over old ( the Times )

There’s a lot of very boring middle-aged men who seem to spend their fairly pitiful lives complaining online about all the exact same things: “wokeness”, immigration, women, political correctness, modern music, public service broadcasting, family entertainment shows etc. Young folks are the latest thing to bash. Best ignored. It’s what boiling their piss in the first place.

When the Times deliberately misrepresent the study to pander to it's geriatric demographic we have entered a twilight zone where getting the rise out of some easily offended people seems more important than informing them. The Times was once the pick of the Tory press - now is fighting in the gutter for a dying pool of readership.

But that's not what the research is actually saying. Its actually saying as a society we are on agrigate getting more intelligent. You certainly would get that from the headline.

"Believe the Science" , depends what you are measuring and what numbers are hidden in the averages. I'd still posit that if a lot of important biological/social variables have turned negative for young people , then by whatever rounded variable one describes as IQ is not likely to be going the other way.

The only conclusion about young people that can be drawn from this research is that young people have stopped getting more intelligent as they had been for decades.

There is probably a ceiling to how intelligent a persons DNA allows so a plateau at a high level is not surprising.

honestly I work with data and do I think all this data has improved the way we do things. hard to justify in a lot of cases.

• Approximately 328.77 million terabytes of data are created each day
• Around 120 zettabytes of data will be generated this year
• 181 zettabytes of data will be generated in 2025

Why should people have to learn skills which are better achieved by machines. It sounds really important to do mental arithmetic but ultimately a calculator does a better job with more accuracy faster. Very few scientists actually do any mental arithmetic because they use tools to do arithmetic for them. What is important is to be able to accurately guestimate a result as a way of verifying the probability of a calculators result been accurate - that remains a critical skill.

The very definition of been a sapient ape is the ability to use tools and each tool we acquire allows us to do more technically advanced things with less resources.

There is always going to be nostalgia for the way we did things on our youth but it's really a bad way of looking at the world.

What is a great take home from this study is that the wealth of information readily available to elderly people is helping to keep them more mentally agile than ever before - as a direct result of information technology.

File sizes have gotten bigger for the most content, higher image quality and more streaming data. More people communicate more and through data but the files being larger means the data size has gotten exponentially bigger.