An average teenager today, if he or she could time-travel back to 1950, would have had an IQ of 118. If the teenager went back to 1910, he or she would have had an IQ of 130, besting 98 percent of his or her contemporaries. Yes, you read that right: if we take the Flynn Effect at face value, a typical person today is smarter than 98 percent of the people in the good old days of 1910. To state it in an even more jarring way, a typical person of 1910, if time-transported forward to the present, would have a mean IQ of 70, which is at the border of mental retardation. With the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test that is sometimes considered the purest measure of general intelligence, the rise is even steeper. An ordinary person of 1910 would have an IQ of 50 today, which is smack in the middle of mentally retarded territory, between “moderate” and “mild” retardation.
That’s only if we take the Flynn effect at face value. No one does, because the implications are nonsense.
Go back in time and the average intelligence will be lower, but that’s only because of a longer tail on the lower end of the distribution (the usual suspects: nutrition, lead poisoning, child abuse, iodine deficiency …). On the smarter end, it’s relatively unchanged because of diminishing returns.
The Flynn effect has many proposed, non mutually-exlusive causes, but an actual secular increase in real brain horsepower is not among the big ones.
Reviews cite lack of hard evidence for the claims made, and as private_messaging said, the effect is slowing in developed countries (though the impact of immigration is difficult to assess).
Not a very good one, though. Most of the ancients that people pay attention to these days are the ones who were well-fed and well-read; it’s strongly suspected much of the Flynn effect is population-wide increases in those two variables (as well as similar things like reduced disease load).
Most of the ancients that people pay attention to these days are … well-fed
You mean well-fed in the sense of “not starving,” but that doesn’t imply “well-fed” in the sense of eating a healthy diet. There’s reason to think that upper-class Romans would have been even more damaged by lead poisoning than the poor, and there’s good evidence that even emperors were deficient in iodine.
I have a historian standing next to me right now who says the lead poisoning story is BS and people who propagate it should be shot/severely eye-rolled at. He says that:
-Romans did drink lead-sweetened wine but -only lower class romans did so because they could not afford better -lead-sweetened wine continued to be drunk up until the 18th century -While some people undoubtedly died, saying it caused the fall of the Roman Empire is a ridiculous just-so story -particularly because the sweetener was used centuries before and after the fall with no increasing usage leading up to the fall -and the eastern Roman empire continued to exist for another thousand years anyway.
Olive oil is only 10% PUFA and I doubt they were getting 10% of calories from olive oil. Benefits of PUFA are at much lower doses, or in the case of Omega-3 making up for huge O3/O6 imbalances.
Yeah. The raise is not a simple shift of the entire curve.
Though, this resonates with another topic: there’s a lot of people today living in conditions vastly inferior to Americans or Europeans of 1910, mostly in Africa, scoring about the same on the IQ tests as western folks from the 1910 supposedly did. I see a plenty of people both accept the Flynn effect (whenever thinking about their superiority to people of the past) and think that said IQ gap is caused by inherently lower abilities (whenever thinking about their superiority to people of other races).
If I remember correctly, researchers suspect that there was significantly decreased lead exposure around that time. I personally prefer to think of it as the Flynn Result rather than the Flynn Effect, because the second seems too much like the Flynn Cause. There are a bunch of reasons why measured IQs could increase, and some of them are there sometimes and not other times, and the measured increase fluctuates accordingly.
And there are far more modern people, of which a greater proportion is producing long-lasting informational stuff like quotes/metaphors/articles/books.
I haven’t run the number, but I expect there is more total “literally value” (whatever that means) produced, say, last year in fanfiction alone, that in all text written pre- industrial revolution. By orders of magnitude.
Depends what you mean by ‘know more math’. In a sense, anybody as fast as you who spent more time studying knows more than you, for how could it be any other way? But that could be because they have more depth in some areas whereas you might have a broader purview. (E.g. you might know more high-level theory about algebraic curves but lose to Newton on a details-oriented question on most cubic curves.)
It takes a lot less time to learn calculus from a textbook than it does to invent it; it would presumably be accurate to say that Einstein knew more physics than Newton. I don’t know if there are any problems in my 3-semester introductory calculus textbook that Newton would have choked on, but he’d definitely have a problem the first time he saw a complex number, let alone something like “e^(a+bi)= a cos(b) + ai sin (b)” that dates to Euler.
Ahhh yeah I forgot discovery was a thing. I guess even going through the process to invent something is its own kind of learning, but that seems tenuous with respect to the original intent of what you said.
Edit: But I think there is a meaningful sense (even if not the only one) in which, say, Euclid or Archimedes probably know more classical geometry than you. And perhaps its meaning comes from their internalisation of a greater depth (even if you could use a theorem prover or theory to quickly derive all their knowledge), which would make those deeper facts accessible to their intuition when solving other problems or developing theory.
For much smaller values of “know”, probably. With google at your disposal, all the math is at your fingertips, but that doesn’t mean you know how to solve a problem which doesn’t come with keywords to search for. Same applies to typical declarative knowledge.
More specifically I mean that Newton couldn’t pass the finals of many of the undergraduate math courses I took, because the math needed to solve the problems wouldn’t have been invented yet.
What I mean is that facing a somewhat difficult problem in applied mathematics which arose naturally in some broader context, most undergraduates are not able to actually pinpoint the relevant methods that they know. (At the same time people like Newton were unusually able to do that). It’s very apparent in e.g. programming contests, that the subset of what people can identify as applicable (without hints) is usually much smaller than the set of what they know.
The “average American teenager” definitely also could not pass those finals.
I rather doubt that there are any math problems at all which an average american teenager could solve and Newton could not, even if they are handpicked to use “recent” math.
I rather doubt that there are any math problems at all which an average american teenager could solve and Newton could not, even if they are handpicked to use “recent” math.
Possible counterexample:
x^2 + 1 = 0
Newton didn’t believe in the square root of minus one.
-S. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature
Another reason to distrust the ancients...
That’s only if we take the Flynn effect at face value. No one does, because the implications are nonsense.
Go back in time and the average intelligence will be lower, but that’s only because of a longer tail on the lower end of the distribution (the usual suspects: nutrition, lead poisoning, child abuse, iodine deficiency …). On the smarter end, it’s relatively unchanged because of diminishing returns.
The Flynn effect has many proposed, non mutually-exlusive causes, but an actual secular increase in real brain horsepower is not among the big ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Bad_Is_Good_for_You
Unfortunately, the progression seem to have ended or even reversed .
Reviews cite lack of hard evidence for the claims made, and as private_messaging said, the effect is slowing in developed countries (though the impact of immigration is difficult to assess).
Not a very good one, though. Most of the ancients that people pay attention to these days are the ones who were well-fed and well-read; it’s strongly suspected much of the Flynn effect is population-wide increases in those two variables (as well as similar things like reduced disease load).
You mean well-fed in the sense of “not starving,” but that doesn’t imply “well-fed” in the sense of eating a healthy diet. There’s reason to think that upper-class Romans would have been even more damaged by lead poisoning than the poor, and there’s good evidence that even emperors were deficient in iodine.
I have a historian standing next to me right now who says the lead poisoning story is BS and people who propagate it should be shot/severely eye-rolled at. He says that:
-Romans did drink lead-sweetened wine but
-only lower class romans did so because they could not afford better
-lead-sweetened wine continued to be drunk up until the 18th century
-While some people undoubtedly died, saying it caused the fall of the Roman Empire is a ridiculous just-so story
-particularly because the sweetener was used centuries before and after the fall with no increasing usage leading up to the fall
-and the eastern Roman empire continued to exist for another thousand years anyway.
But they weren’t consuming huge amounts of unstable polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils, either.
They were, and who said they’re bad anyway?
Olive oil is only 10% PUFA and I doubt they were getting 10% of calories from olive oil. Benefits of PUFA are at much lower doses, or in the case of Omega-3 making up for huge O3/O6 imbalances.
Yeah. The raise is not a simple shift of the entire curve.
Though, this resonates with another topic: there’s a lot of people today living in conditions vastly inferior to Americans or Europeans of 1910, mostly in Africa, scoring about the same on the IQ tests as western folks from the 1910 supposedly did. I see a plenty of people both accept the Flynn effect (whenever thinking about their superiority to people of the past) and think that said IQ gap is caused by inherently lower abilities (whenever thinking about their superiority to people of other races).
If true then why has it been acting on white Americans post 1960?
If I remember correctly, researchers suspect that there was significantly decreased lead exposure around that time. I personally prefer to think of it as the Flynn Result rather than the Flynn Effect, because the second seems too much like the Flynn Cause. There are a bunch of reasons why measured IQs could increase, and some of them are there sometimes and not other times, and the measured increase fluctuates accordingly.
And I know more math than Newton, too! (Maybe not Euler, but definitely Newton.)
And there are far more modern people, of which a greater proportion is producing long-lasting informational stuff like quotes/metaphors/articles/books.
I haven’t run the number, but I expect there is more total “literally value” (whatever that means) produced, say, last year in fanfiction alone, that in all text written pre- industrial revolution. By orders of magnitude.
Relevant (see also followup)
Depends what you mean by ‘know more math’. In a sense, anybody as fast as you who spent more time studying knows more than you, for how could it be any other way? But that could be because they have more depth in some areas whereas you might have a broader purview. (E.g. you might know more high-level theory about algebraic curves but lose to Newton on a details-oriented question on most cubic curves.)
It takes a lot less time to learn calculus from a textbook than it does to invent it; it would presumably be accurate to say that Einstein knew more physics than Newton. I don’t know if there are any problems in my 3-semester introductory calculus textbook that Newton would have choked on, but he’d definitely have a problem the first time he saw a complex number, let alone something like “e^(a+bi)= a cos(b) + ai sin (b)” that dates to Euler.
Ahhh yeah I forgot discovery was a thing. I guess even going through the process to invent something is its own kind of learning, but that seems tenuous with respect to the original intent of what you said.
Edit: But I think there is a meaningful sense (even if not the only one) in which, say, Euclid or Archimedes probably know more classical geometry than you. And perhaps its meaning comes from their internalisation of a greater depth (even if you could use a theorem prover or theory to quickly derive all their knowledge), which would make those deeper facts accessible to their intuition when solving other problems or developing theory.
For much smaller values of “know”, probably. With google at your disposal, all the math is at your fingertips, but that doesn’t mean you know how to solve a problem which doesn’t come with keywords to search for. Same applies to typical declarative knowledge.
More specifically I mean that Newton couldn’t pass the finals of many of the undergraduate math courses I took, because the math needed to solve the problems wouldn’t have been invented yet.
What I mean is that facing a somewhat difficult problem in applied mathematics which arose naturally in some broader context, most undergraduates are not able to actually pinpoint the relevant methods that they know. (At the same time people like Newton were unusually able to do that). It’s very apparent in e.g. programming contests, that the subset of what people can identify as applicable (without hints) is usually much smaller than the set of what they know.
Indeed. Being able to pass a math test and being able to use the math in a real-world context are two different things.
The “average American teenager” definitely also could not pass those finals.
I rather doubt that there are any math problems at all which an average american teenager could solve and Newton could not, even if they are handpicked to use “recent” math.
Possible counterexample:
x^2 + 1 = 0
Newton didn’t believe in the square root of minus one.