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There is a new report in the journal "Intelligence" that proposes that people have grown dumber since the Victorian age. They came to this conclusion by studying the time that it takes to react to stimuli, rather than by looking at IQ tests which has been the standard measure until this study. Thoughts?
Since I've had a few IQ tests due to brain surgery, I can say with some confidence that the ones that I've come across are junk. I mean that they're junk in the sense that they "measure" things like perceptual ability while they claim to measure processing ability. They rely on things like eye-hand coordination while they claim to be evaluating your ability to follow direction. The tests themselves rely on your ability to understand the instructions (which sounds like intelligence, but can be skewed by things like dominant culture, language, and education). The memory tests relying on language are particularly faulty. There are even faults and false-negatives that can arise if you're colour blind.
Mind you, I'm not sure how well a test measuring speed of reaction defines intelligence. *shrug* At least, if it's simple test, you'd hope that there are fewer faults in test design.
There's always going to be dumb people and smart people.
With this study, I would argue that we're smarter now, considering the fact that there are probably far less illiterate people out there now.
Furthermore, I don't know if I'd trust the Daily Caller to present a scientific report without some kind of slant...
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Furthermore, I don't know if I'd trust the Daily Caller to present a scientific report without some kind of slant...
I did try and link to the original report, but you have to pay for the article. That seemed like too much of a burden to put on people.
edit: As for the illiteracy issue, I would say that is more a factor of education then it is of intelligence. There is no question that people are more educated today then they were in the Victorian period. The question though is whether that education actually translates into higher intelligence or not. Basically it comes down to a street smart vs.book smart question.
I did try and link to the original report, but you have to pay for the article. That seemed like too much of a burden to put on people.
Furthermore, I don't know if I'd trust the Daily Caller to present a scientific report without some kind of slant...
Is it available in any scholarly journals?
You know what makes top tennis players (for example) so good? They take longer before they react to the stimulus of the ball. Now, after they react, they've got all their well-trained speed and strength and whatnot, and that goes faster than your average joe—but because they delay fractions of a second longer before acting, they've got more information to act on, and thus are less likely to do the wrong thing.
This sort of study where the stimulus was hitting a tennis ball in someone's direction would conclude that the best tennis players are more stupid, rather than more disciplined, than inferior players.
But, of course, g deniers have to come up with something as an alternative to g. If they admitted that g is intelligence, there would be all sorts of resulting conclusions that would be ideologically uncomfortable.
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Is it available in any scholarly journals?I did try and link to the original report, but you have to pay for the article. That seemed like too much of a burden to put on people.
Furthermore, I don't know if I'd trust the Daily Caller to present a scientific report without some kind of slant...
Yes, you can find the journal where it was originally published here. You can also find a link directly to the article in the linked article.
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There is a new report in the journal "Intelligence" that proposes that people have grown dumber since the Victorian age. They came to this conclusion by studying the time that it takes to react to stimuli, rather than by looking at IQ tests which has been the standard measure until this study. Thoughts?
What does reaction speed have to do with intelligence?
There are a multitude of facets of 'intelligence". Reaction time is one of the smaller ones. Spatial reasoning, abstract thinking, and verbal skills are several I place greater importance on, personally.
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There are a multitude of facets of 'intelligence". Reaction time is one of the smaller ones. Spatial reasoning, abstract thinking, and verbal skills are several I place greater importance on, personally.
yep. Exactly.
Besides, one research is hardly ever conclusive. Besides, they are only comparing their measurment to one research performed long ago, which was by itself uncocnlusive.
The article itself makes me think that the author is dumber than most Victorians. I wouldn't say that necessarily extends to the rest of the population, though.
My wife's freaking cat reacts to stimuli faster than she does. Does that mean it's smarter than she is? (Answer: No, her cat is dumber than mud.)
So...completely redefining the trait being measured changes the outcome? You'd have to be less intelligent that the average Victorian for that to be surprising.
I'm going to release a study* in which BMI is used to measure intelligence. Hey look, I'm a genius! :P
* apology to studies everywhere.
And if you can show that BMI correlates to intelligence, then it might be worth using it as a proxy for intelligence, since it's so much easier to measure. Without that, it's worthless of course.
I'd like to point out that I'm didn't say that BMI is a proxy for intelligence, or that it correclates. It is a direct measure. Fat = smart. What can I say? My reflexes suck.
if there is work linking reaction time to stimula to intelligence, which the abstract claimes, then there may be something to it.
Obviously, this probably doesn't correlate across species, so the cat's reaction time is irrelevant.
1. Correlation =/= causation.
2. General correlation between variables =/= statistics regarding one variable automatically transferring to the other.3. I fail to see how species would be at all relevant, assuming it has (a) some intelligence (not much, but some!) and (b) reaction time. The neurochemical processes in a cat's brain and a human's brain work pretty much similarly.
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Then your analogy makes even less sense, though it stays amusing.
Because that's what the study is claiming. They're not "completely redefining the trait being measured", they're using something known to correlate with the trait.
Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence (g) and are considered elementary measures of cognition.And they're doing so, I assume, because we have reaction studies from the Victorian period, but not worthwhile intelligence ones.
I deliberately picked a terrible analogy -- in fact, that was kinda the point. But my amazing BMIQ(tm) has allowed me to infer that you might be taking this more seriously than I am...
Smarter cats may react faster.
I have a total of one (1) observation (my cat is both faster and smarter than Mrs Gersen's cat), so it must be true! (Seriously, though, glossing over an unfounded claim in an abstract isn't too convincing.)
EDIT: Out here in the wilds of science-land, when someone makes an easily-mockable claim we expect three things:
(1) Data; (2) methodology; and (3) an explanation of WHY it is the way it is.
Assuming (1) and (2) check out, the omission of the 3rd criterion is enough to provisionally reject the hypothesis until one is offered and tested.
In this case it's worse, because we're left with TWO claims (1. people are dumber now, and 2. reaction time is a valid measure of intelligence), and we have no explanation for why either one should be, far less both.
OK, we've got this, from the article:
"They back up their claim by suggesting they know the reason for the decline in intelligence—smarter people having fewer children, while the less smart, have more."
Which would, to a large degree, be offset by the well-established regression to the mean (given the comparatively few intervening generations -- we're not fruit flies)? Also, the heritability of IQ itself is something we have a poor handle on: summary.
P.S. Paywalls suck; reading the paper would be 10x better than reading a summary of a summary of an abstract.
My life would have been easier if you were correct: "I am making claim Y, but have no reason why that should be, and some reasons why it shouldn't" has gotten me exactly nowhere with respect to getting other scientists to buy into Y. The best you get is "interesting, if it works out that way, but it needs a lot of work (and a mechanism) before it needs to be taken seriously." That seems to be more or less where we're at, with regards to the topic at hand.
That said, I should point out that Intelligence appears to be a legitimate peer-reviewed psychology journal, and not an online paper-mill, which means, presumably, that further research is in the works (enough to make publishing the current findings worthwhile).
To me, intelligence tests—including the ones used in the study—have almost all a built in flaw: testing processing speed. How fast you can work through a problem or answer a question is a type of intelligence. But it is used through every single aspect of almost every single test. Every IQ test I ever took was timed. The tests used in this study deal with reaction time. There is an inherent problem with this.
Take two people taking the same test at the same time. Both come from the same socio-economic background and ethnicity (these are not factors in intelligence, but they affect test scores by changing the way you approach problems or communicate information. Many an IQ score has been thrown off by not taking these into account). One finishes every section of the test in the time allotted. She gets one out of every four questions wrong. Assuming that this average holds across all sections of the test, we can assume an IQ of roughly 150.
The second person is unable to finish most sections of the test in the time allotted. But every question she answers, she answers correctly. Still, at the end of the test she has only answered two-thirds of the questions. Again—assuming that average holds across the entire test—we can give her IQ at roughly 130-135. This is because most IQ tests regard an unanswered question as a wrong answer.
So we have the results: the person who took the time to carefully answer the questions and get them correct is considered less intelligent than the one who rushed through and got one out every four answers wrong. This nonsensical result impairs our understanding of intelligence. Who decided that that was the time required? What if we increased the time allotted? How do you measure imagination, inspiration, and moments of epiphany under a timer? Until these issues can be adequately addressed, IQ tests are pointless exercises in measuring how well you can think like a committee thinks you should think.
Reaction time =/= question answering speed, though.
Reaction time =/= question answering speed, though.
True, but does the simple ability to react equate to intelligence? There are many animals in existence that have lightning fast reflexes. Are they by definition smarter than us?
See above. The Jeff maintains that it's somehow species-specific, but I remain unconvinced, insofar without a mechanism we have no way of drawing that line. Does it work for chimps and humans, but not cats? Housecats and mountain lions, but not dogs? At what point of divergence does this hypothetical species delinator kick in?
I've known people dumber than their pets.
Anecdotal, I know. But there it is.
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I'll throw out an alternate theory to explain slower reaction times: a sedentary life-style. People tend to sit and not move around as much as they used to. This may contribute to slower reflexive actions.
Nor is there a claim that reaction time is intelligence, just that there is a correlation between simple reaction time tests and measures of intelligence in humans. Theoretically based on faster brain processing times.
I don't know if any one has studied it, but the correlation may exist in other species as well. But the larger difference between our intelligence and that of other species is brain size and structure.
I see where you are coming from here, but has anyone proposed a theory explaining why there is a correlation between the two? That seems to be an important missing bit of data.
EDIT: OK, just saw the "Theoretically based on faster brain processing times" bit. But that seems to return to my original point: processing speed as the prime measure of intelligence.
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I'll throw out an alternate theory to explain slower reaction times
Or another: subconscious suppression of the constant multistimulus bombardment we surround ourselves with, by way of multitasking and being constantly "plugged in."
Like, maybe your brain intentionally slows you down a bit so you can function at all.
I know I am less intelligent than i use to be.
I don't know if I'm less intelligent, but I can say that my processing speed is way down.
Or another: subconscious suppression of the constant multistimulus bombardment we surround ourselves with, by way of multitasking and being constantly "plugged in."
Like, maybe your brain intentionally slows you down a bit so you can function at all.
Good one! I like it.
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There is a new report in the journal "Intelligence" that proposes that people have grown dumber since the Victorian age. They came to this conclusion by studying the time that it takes to react to stimuli, rather than by looking at IQ tests which has been the standard measure until this study. Thoughts?
I question the accuracy of:
1.) Intelligence testing in general, which has a long history of issues with test bias and methodology problems.
2.) The ability to accurately measure "reaction times" from the Victorian age to modern day and how applicable "reaction times" are to actual smarts.
3.) The accuracy of the measurements on the Victorian end of things. There may have been a lot of enthusiasm for science back in the day, but it tended more toward "SCIENCE!" than "science".
4.) Pretty much any science news story that I see on a political news site like The Daily Caller, but not many (or any) science news sites.
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FYI I've submitted BMIQ to the patent office. ;-)
This just occurred to me as well -- we've seen that chimps can register, memorize, and repeat a series of numbers flashed across a field nearly infallibly, and at a speed that no human can come close to replicating. One hypothesis was that their present-oriented "working space" (encompassing reaction speed and short-term memory) took up a lot of brain processing power that in us goes towards long-term operations (planning and consequence-based thinking). In other words, they're better than us in the one area because they're not as good in the other -- the two things may be working at odds.
One would expect, then, that humans with faster reaction times would score better on tests of short-term pattern recognition... but worse on tests of cause-and-effect and long-term planning thinking. And, yet, to call the former "intelligence" while disqualifying the latter seems more than a little bit silly. (If "mentally rotate this object" counts as intelligence, and "use logic and foresight to determine how to efficiently implement the following cascading outcomes, given the following input parameters" counts as non-intelligence, then overall I'd rather be "unintelligent" by that rating system.)
Exactly how did they get the measurement from the victorian age to compare it to, and where can I get my company a staff necromancer?