I’ve been reading this book called ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell. In the book, there’s a chapter about people with high IQs. The conclusion he came to was that once a person’s IQ reached a certain threshold – 125 points – IQ ceased to be relevant in predicting success. He said that once people are ‘good enough’ we should stop looking at IQ and look at other factors.
Which got me thinking about IQ.
You can be ideological about it, but having taught special ed, and taught at a college, having taught army conscripts, and taught officers – I’ve seen the difference. It doesn’t mean by any stretch that I value one group over the other. There are obviously a thousand other factors which come in to play when dealing with an individual – and for most types of relationship, IQ doesn’t count.
But in a transactional relationship where your value is in their head, when you need to get someone to do something for you, or you need to get someone to understand a concept – it’s a big deal.
If you have an employee, if you’re trying to develop a teaching strategy, you need to take relative levels of intelligence into consideration, and work around as best you can. Differences in intelligence exist. Pretend that they don’t, expect the same of everyone, and you’ll be a crap boss and a bad teacher.
So, anyhow I was reading the Gladwell book and thinking about IQ. Which got me reading about the Flynn effect and a little noticed article from 2004. Long story short, the Flynn effect may have gone into reverse. People are getting dumber.
The Flynn Effect if you don’t know is the worldwide increase in IQ test performance. It seems reasonable to suspect that it’s real. People have never been healthier and have never had as stimulating an environment as they have now. So more people are reaching their intellectual potential. The same thing happens with height, why not IQ? The brain is just an organ after all, it seems insane to imagine that a changing environment wouldn’t effect it.
But as I said, the effect may have gone into reverse (together with the increase in height):
Substantial gains in GA [general ability] were apparent from the mid 1950s (test years) to the end 1960s–early 1970s, followed by a decreasing gain rate and a complete stop from the mid 1990s. The gains seemed to be mainly caused by decreasing prevalence of low scorers. From the early 1970s, the secular gains in GA were almost exclusively driven by gains on the Raven-like test. However, even the means on this particular test stopped to increase after the mid to late 1990s. It is concluded that the Flynn effect may have come to an end in Norway. Height gains were strongly correlated with intelligence gains until the cessation of height gains in the conscript cohorts towards the end of the 1980s.
It’s interesting in its own right, but put it together with skyrocketing rates of autism and it’s a bit worrying.
I suppose though that like autism, this general decline in IQ’s can be thrown on the pile of actual problems like the world-wide fall in sperm counts , the literal feminization of men, etc… that aren’t considered nearly as pressing as water-logged polar bears or the threat of being able to grow apples in Nunavut.
