In the modern world, is there any evolutionary selection <i>for</i> intelligence? I can think of at least a few which are <i>against</i><p>Anecdotally, my wife is applying for surgical medical residencies, a field which generally attracts intelligent, ambitious individuals. The whole system seems downright hostile to having children. It obviously wasn't designed with women in mind, and the entire system has been intentionally ossified to prevent it from responding to the desires of residents, for the benefit of attending physicians. I imagine there are a large number of similar industries. This has definitely impacted our plans for children, and it wouldn't be an issue if she were considering a less competitive specialty. In fact, it seems that the very selectivity which ensures that the program is filled with intelligent people is used as justification for intense hours and lack of maternal support.<p>In my opinion this is the sort of externality that would benefit from government intervention in some way. However, I don't think financial support would be very good at targeting such cases. I think the reason that tech companies have done a better job of providing child care support is that the field doesn't have the same sorts of institutional barriers to responding to employee demands that medicine does - specifically demand by employees in their prime child-rearing ages.
The title of this post and the opacity of the abstract is how you start a tire fire on HN.<p>My recommendation would be to post some quoted passages from the text to add some momentum to a productive discussion.<p>I think one of the interesting passages is<p>> From 1990 to 2012: the “working class” share of jobs has steadily de- clined from 31.4% to 20.5%; the “creative class” share has been pretty stable, rising from 29.3 to 32.0; the “service class” has risen sharply from 39.3 to 48.5. He calls the latter “low-skill jobs”, seeing increases in occupations like nursing assistants, personal care aids (whether at home or in nursing homes), retail sales, and food prep workers (McDonalds). Note that the ratio between low skill and creative has risen in favor of the former: 1.35 to one in 1990; and 1.57 to one in 2012.<p>I'd really be interested in changes in the resulting economies for where those working class jobs ended up.<p>Reading a paper is hard, having a discussion about a paper is even harder. And especially when it has aspects of class and intelligence. Everyone is an expert in their own opinions on those two subjects.
Fairly startling stuff, in my opinion.<p>> <i>Over several generations, there is no doubt that dysgenic selection lowered the quality of genes for intelligence and increased migration had an adverse effect.</i><p>> <i>Looming over all is their message that the pool of those who reach the top level of cognitive performance is being decimated: fewer and fewer people attain the formal level at which they can think in terms of abstractions and develop their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning.</i><p>So, as often as we hear the joke, is Idiocracy actually happening?
Administering IQ tests to adults is fraught with difficulties, especially when comparing across generations<p>For example, the WAIS-IV measures "working memory", in part, via orally administered arithmetic word problems. An imminently reasonable thing to associate with intelligence in the pre-pocket-calculator economy!<p>But today? Kids spend a lot less time drilling arithmetic now than N decades ago. Those drills are more often administered on computer screens than orally in front of a classroom. And almost no one does a non-trivial amount of mental arithmetic in their work life. So this is mostly a useless skill. And, because it's a useless skill, we devote a lot less time to mastery. Even once mastered, the skill atrophies because <i>it's just not very useful</i>.<p>Question: if scores on these oral arithmetic word problems only barely decline despite <i>significantly</i> less practice -- both in the classroom and in everyday life -- what should we conclude?<p>Stated differently: if someone with 10K hours of tetris grind drops 2% more blocks than a total newbie, who's likely to be more adept at other forms of spatial reasoning?<p>The more general critique is that "intelligence research" has ossified around Cargo Cult psychometrics. At one point, "orally administered arithmetic word problems" were a <i>fantastic</i> proxy for economically useful mental faculties. That is no longer true. As the set of useful capacities change, so too should psychometric evaluations. Both because treatment effects are going to make cross-generational comparisons worse than useless, and also because the thing being measured has become irrelevant.<p>The humble pocket calculator should have taken Sociology by storm half a century ago. But the field hasn't kept up, and the problem is about to get exponentially worse as generative AI tools and other types of advanced automation start to augment every aspect of mental labor.<p>What it means to be "good at solving hard problems and getting things done" when assisted by GPT-614830 might look entirely different from what it means to be "good at solving hard problems and getting things done" today.
Douglas Adams made jokes in his fiction about boiling complex systems down to a number. Stephen Jay Gould pointed out how unscientific the idea of IQ is - it's akin to astrological charts.<p>Boiling brains down to one number and ranking them, and saying it comes from genes, nutty. When scientists have no idea why a nematode with 302 neurons turns left or right. You can tell it's religious or political or whatever by how people defend it - no one gets that agitated by how many light years away some star is.
Related,<p>Flynn effect and its reversal are both
environmentally caused: <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf</a>
The interesting part for me was the suggestion that over time, the lower demands of school, family and workplaces can lead to lower IQ although the time frame seems pretty short to be genetically significant.<p>My own experience (in the UK) is that younger people perhaps seem less bothered about grammar, history, philosophy (the classics?) perhaps because they have learned that all information is on the internet and have subconciously assumed therefore that they do not need to learn the application of such knowledge. When I was young I remember my schoolmates lamenting that learning maths was pointless because "calculators", maybe that is coming home to roost now.
I'd love to see the distribution of IQs over time, instead of just the average.<p>For example, a distribution that becomes increasingly bimodal tells a very different story than a distribution shifting to the left.
This ignores the fact that while intelligence, however measured, has a large hereditable component, that inheritance is environmental, not genetic.<p>The Flynn effect, which showed widespread gains in IQ scores without any alteration in population genetics is the clearest indication that very significant variations in IQ can occur as a consequence of environmental effects.
Using IQ as a concept to enshrine intelligence is a terrible mistake IMHO because it encourages this toxic RPG-enshrined idea that intelligence is a number that goes up. That makes it only slightly better than it being just a bool. We don't even begin to know how to measure intelligence or what is in or out of scope when we use the term "intelligence". So to use such a study as a short hand to suggest a country is getting "stupider" or "smarter" just feels like shamanic rune throwing.<p>We could suggest that IQ is a measure of intelligence but I would argue that IQ only matters if you're applying to university which also gives it this correlative value of "wealthy" and "parents that care" if you're cherry picking economic outcomes which makes it hard to pick apart as a vacuumed characteristic. It also is a very narrow measure given that the breadth of human endeavour requires a lot more types of intelligence than just shit-hot pattern matching.
All IQ research should be taken with a grain of salt: <a href="https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...</a>
I think it's worth asking if intelligence tests are even keeping up with a fast changing social environment. For example, young people are extremely adept at communicating with memes or a few seconds of video. Are these new skills even measured?
Not necessarily related but I would like to bring up this and hope it's something to consider:<p>Do what you're told, go home, come back next day. Repeat.<p>That is not 100% correct but good enough to summarize modern life.<p>Why learning abstract stuff in school if your career is stuck in call center jobs or you're the warehouse guy?<p>You don't really need math at home. There is few demand for intelligent problem solvers. There is a very high demand for "just do what you're told".<p>I see that everyday in my corporate setup. It is sad but I see it.
IQ is supposed to be a measure of inherent intelligence. This study has studies going a mere 40 years back, an utterly insignificant evolutionary time. What they are measuring seems to be mostly changes in pseudoscience IQ tests.
There was a theory floating about on Twitter about apparent European noble practices regarding child birth.<p>Basically, nobles that failed out of society for whatever reason (drunkards, second borns, etc.) would intermix with the lower classes. This would propagate out "superior" genes that may have aided increases in intelligence over time.<p>This is quite controversial but it is thought provoking.
I don't know about this article. I read a sentence that suggested that immigration might be linked to dysgenic effects on IQ. I refuse therefore to give attention to this document for the simple reason that it might be used by racist people to justify bad things... I am an immigrant. I refuse to consider views that might, even indirectly, question my presence on this country.