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Loss of Applied IQ Among UK Youth?
Baldrson writes "The UK Times Online reports that: 'After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a professor of education at King's College London confidently declares: "The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years' worth in the past two decades."' 3 years loss at age 11 is an IQ of 100*8/11 or 73 -- a massive loss of 27 points. Although the test measures, not general IQ per se, but general IQ applied to scientific and technical reasoning, it nevertheless appears to blow 'a gaping hole' in what has been called The Flynn Effect: that IQs have been rising in most parts of the world -- particularly the developed countries."
Loss of scientific and technical reasoning eh... so folks are saying "I don't care, I just want it to WORK!"
Man, where have I heard that before?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Well duh.
What with Celebrity Big Brother, the Crazy Frog and chav culture, I'm amazed it's that few!
You must think in Russian.
We're not stupid... We're advanced.
That obselete test just fails to keep up with modern applications of science and math. Like manipulating them to support your point, or redefining them for political reasons.
Also in this section:
Nice to see this particular section of the press doing their bit to keep standards high.
Cheers,
Ian
3 years loss at age 11 is an IQ of 100*8/11 or 73
Um, no. If that were the case, I would have an IQ of 100*35/11, or 318.
Instead, I am posting on Slashdot.
I blame the food, warm beer and inbreeding. Oh, of course: MAD COW DISEASE!!!
Why is IQ judged only on the basis of science & technical application?
Is science the only field worth measuring an IQ on?
Also, "other extreme measures" include farming fish, like salmon, in confined ponds where heavy metals and other chemicals can accumulate because the farmer does not bother to clean the water. Numerous government studies show that farmed salmon had much higher concentrations of toxic metals and chemicals than wild salmon like that in Alaska.
The key question is whether there is a correlation between the increasing contamination of our food and the behavior of the brain. Has anyone noticed the increasing amounts of psychotherapeutic drugs consumed by people in developed countries? What is happening to our brains? Did people in 1850 need to consume Prozac just to cope with their own lives?
The internet is a vast information resource available to a large portion of the civilized world, but I don't think kids today are interested in learning anything. As parents (and people in general, I think) have become more selfish as time goes by, this is the only behavior our children see, leading them to behavior that isn't interested in learning. All they really want is to be entertained. In this regard, the electronic age might be our worst enemy. Instead of using computers and the internet as a tool to expand thier world, they use them as a crutch -- for entertainment when needed, and to do the thinking for them when presented with things like math problems, spelling and grammar. If being smart is no longer 'cool', what's the incentive to learning anything? Money in the form of 'future income' is not enough of an incentive for many kids -- Future income means future work, and many of these kids will settle for a job at a fast food restaurant (despite those jobs being incredibly stressful and low-wage) because they don't want to put forth the effort to learn anything and/or find another job.
The category is too broad and the timeframe too short to making statements to the effect that young people are '30%' less scientific or technical minded than they were thirty years ago. There are far too many variables that can be changing to make a claim such as this. Usually when someone makes a 'study' like this and comes to these conclusions, there is a hidden agenda that is usually political behind it. A general study is made; an unsupportable but sensational conclusion is drawn, specific remedies are proposed. Remedies that tend to favor the people who initiated the 'study' in the first place.
What are the measurements? What are the controls? Who financed this? Who financed them?
And the real question to ask: What difference does it make?
Must be the schools. No one takes responsibility for their own child, just prefer to blame the government, who are trying to make school a LCD environment anyhow.
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
Why would the British be off the Flynn's Effect? It's hardly a problem of TV influence, as it seems to be as bad as every other parts of the world.
Looks to me just like a sensational header to claim for attention.
--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95
This guy really had to study 25,000 kids to determine that people are getting dumber at a worrying rate? All he had to do was turn on MTV for a half hour and watch what they consider entertainment nowadays.
Perhaps the learning of scientific and technical reasoning, by the writer of the article, has fallen to that of an 11 year old in the UK?
I suspect this is largely nutritional.
/ full/111/1/e39
Fear of cholesterol has reduced the intake of phosphatides,
and increased the intake of fatty acids that the body is
not meant to consume in large amounts (vegetable oils) or
at all (hydrogenated oils).
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content
and
Arch Latinoam Nutr. 1998 Dec;48(4):287-92.
Different times. Different lives. Young children today thing different than kids back then. I'm sure today's kids are better in other areas that matter more today than back then. Evolution.
Don't mistake a "drop" in IQ with rising IQs elsewhere.
Recall that places like India and China have, for various reasons, not been the best places to foster intellect in recent times (the last two or three hundred years). The people there are just as intellectually capable as anyone from a Western nation, but did not have many of the advantages that Western society was able to offer due to its better economic position, and so forth.
But times have changed, and education is far more available in places like India and China, in addition to many other developing countries. So it's no wonder that the comparative IQ gap between Western and Eastern cultures is closing, and closing quickly. It's not because people in the Western world are becoming stupider; it's because the people in the East are now able to take advantage of better educational opportunities.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
No, they had other problems that kept them from thinking of those things:
- Starving to death
- Cholera
- Freezing during the winter
- Smallpox
People during those times were depressed too, they just used alcohol (that's what most medicines were then anyway) People who were rich enough that they didn't have to worry about the things listed above had the same 'problems' you allude to the general population having today. It is only that now enough people are well off enough to sit around and worry about such higher level problems.... or perhaps it's just the use of mobile phones?
If other children's IQs worldwide were rising, this would account for an apparent lowering of GB's children's IQs because IQ is an average intellegince quotient.
Western society has become decadent. Everything is provided for you so you dont need to work. I see it all the time here in Britan everyone acts like they are a celebrity and are born with the right of everything being handed to them on a plate. The work ethic is left to us few....
Sometimes I get lost inside my head....
Well thank heavens for that. We're still up on the U.S.
Am I mistaken, but I thought that the IQ was supposed to be an intrinsic quality of a person (barring accidents involving mental incapacitation.) That is, if you have a robust enough test to test a child accurately you will determine what intellectual capacity the adult will have.
Anyone else think, like 99% of the "IQ test results prove that..." it is MOST likely (Occam's razor anyone?) an artifact of the test(s) used (and incompatibilities between scoring sytems). That is, the test is inherently flawed and doesn't correspond to the classical (vague) definition of IQ anyway... Like comparing meters to feet... or meters to imperial gallons...
E = m * c^(Hammer)
There's nothing special about the chav "movement" of today. It's much like the punks of the late 1970s. They wear different clothes, but the attitude is still the same.
Even then, it's something that they'll be forced to grow out of. If any of them wish to obtain and retain jobs, even as custodians or trash collectors at McDonalds, they won't be able to act like chavs or punks. And if they don't conform, then they'll likely turn to crime, and end up dead or in prison.
The basic economics of living, and the criminal justice system after that, acts as the good parents that these kids didn't have.
Nevertheless, those with intellectual talent do almost always manage to succeed, even in the fact of punkism or chavism. There won't be a shortage of British scientists or researchers, for instance.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Speaking as a parent in the UK I have to agree with the general sentiment of the article, though I can't speak about the percentages, not being in possession of the statistics. One only has to listen to the Universities saying "we now have to set basic literacy and numeracy tests for all 18 year olds as part of the entrance process" to know that something is very wrong.
It's the "all shall have prizes" culture where children aren't told "that's wrong, go and do it again" lest we scar them for life and someone brings a law suit.
Contamination is one factor. I bet additives are another huge factor. I bet there are more artificial additives, especially colors and flavors, than there were in the 60's, when things were supposed to be so much worse.
I wouldn't be surprised that the chemicals deliberately added to our food are as bad, or worse, than the chemicals that are contaminating our food from pollution and other factors. And even without things like MSG (under many, many names) and artificial colors, etc, there is the incredible preponderance of sugar (again, under many names), trans fats, and many other ways we are poisoning ourselves (me too, I'm not health food nut even if I try to eat reasonably) because it's cheap, convenient and it tastes good.
Of course, since this is in the UK, maybe it could be from all that kidney pie.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I doubt food is the reason. Malnourishment is no where near the problem it was before the study. You should check out what people ate in the 1850's. Milk was diluted with untreated Thames water along with chalk dust. Candies were dyed with heavy metals. Our food is much better now, especially since we have strictures against cow based feed. BSE is unlikely to show up in eleven year olds anyway.
Drugs could be the reason legal and illegal. What about the effects of immigration? Or the rise of China and India on the effects on expectations on technology employment? There are other social changes as well, like becoming couch potatoes. Don't forget the corrosive effect of the anti science crowd especially in the US. How does the test control for bias between generations?
You're assuming that the UK powers that be want intellignet people. They don't. What they want is unquestioning masses who blindly accept government social programs, centralized monitary policy, and poor government finance.
This is quite worrying. With falling numbers in technical and scientific fields, this does not bode well for the future of industry in the UK. I can see this applying to other developed nations.
Quoth TFA: "Although the test measures, not general IQ per se, but general IQ applied to scientific and technical reasoning"
Hmm. May explain the rise in belief of intelligent design.
And there was me thinking it was almost cool to be a geek. What I got wrong was that it is cool to look geeky, but not actually be a geek.
bang goes my karma... again...
CNN recently reported about a study that found that bat species with larger testes have smaller brains, and vice versa. Maybe these kids just have extremely large gonads, and that's why they're morons.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Assuming that this study isn't a load of crap then it's possible that it coincides with an increase in the availability of childrens TV to passively babysit kids. Cheaper consumer electroncis allowing kids to have their own TVs, the invention of video recorders and satellite channels with only children's programs have all made this easier to do.
Before I was 11 years old I had read the "The How and Why Wonder Book of Atomic Energy" (Wonder Books, Inc., 1961,), and many other similar books. Later in life I graduated with an engineering degree. I think my early exposure to science was crucial, and most of it was not through the educational system. Most was self-initiated, out of curiosity. I even survived testing my own non-nuclear chain reactions and homemade rockets. Then I only had to worry about keeping all of my fingers, not getting reported to Homeland Security. It was an era of space travel and astronaut heroes, when science fiction becoming reality was routine. The society was propelled by hope and wonder, not fear and ignorance. National progress was defined in terms of science and technology, not the advancement of weapon systems or the cornering of the oil market.
It's not surprising that kids get dumber in an era of paranoia, zero tolerance and "intelligent design." Maybe my early memories filter and idealize the past, but that's how I remember it. I have a different impression of what it would like to be an 11-year old now. Instead of colonizing space, you have to worry about ketting tyour latch key past the school's metal detectors, and make sure you don't get sent to Guantanamo for accidently crashing the school web page. Dumbing-down could be a survival mechanism in that context.
What are the benefits to being "a brain"?
What are the benefits to just getting along?
Perhaps in the current social climate, the intelligent thing to do is ignore science, and practice screaming for what you want as loudly as you can? Could it be that *only* those internally driven by compulsions that are, really, non-sane, have the motivation required to master math and science?
Cui bono?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
by the kids around here the have sub zero IQ - they can bearly walk, talk and breath at the
:D
same time.
I blame the parents
Before we ask "is iq inherited" or "how does IQ come about" .. we must figure out "how do you truly measure IQ?"
..eg, memory .. there are different memory skills .. remembering tones .. remembering events .. remembering sequences. Remembering timings. remembering certain classes of tones. Have I made my point?
.. this study measures IQ .. but what skills were truly tested? Does a kid of today need to have the mechanical (or other) understandings that a kid 0 yars ago needed? Maybe they are skilled in other more usful areas (how to use computers, or being more all round?)
.. or more likely .. if IQ genes are identified .. we should be able to come up with puzzles people without those genes can't solve .. or maybe even concepts they cant understand. This is why I highly doubt a race based IQ gene .. there are many people of all races white, chinese, indian, and black people who understand physics, calculus etc. Why is it that members of every race has the innate ability to read .. when literacy was totally non existent in many many cultures. Reading is actually a very difficult skill. But there are also many within those races who don't. It's unlikely that the IQ genes would have greater or lesser prevalence in a particular race (unless they were formed after man "left africa"). Personally I think it has all to do with parental motivation and cultural biases rather than genetics.
.. more important to what? For example, pointing to ancestral acheivements is embarrasing "if your ancestors did all that, how come you personally are a screw up today". I have noticed most "racialists" are lacking many of the supposed IQ genes they claim their race to be gifted with and have no scientific or other acheivements of their own.
Is it raw memory capacity? Is it the ability to recognize patterns? Is it the ability to conjure up a solution to a problem? Is it the ability to come up with awesome lyrics and musical beats? Is it the ability to recognize the existence of a problem?
And then, how do you test it without accounting for environment exposure? Each one of those is immensely hard to test. For example, you might think memory is easy to test. But is that so? Someone who played "Simon" as a kid may be better and remembring sequence of events patterns. Someone who listened watched Sesame street may be better in remembering words. Fact is, each one of those is hard to test. Also, within each category
So, I have to ask
If an "IQ" gene
Either way, it is essential to humanity that we find answers to this.
But first of all, this whole BS of high IQ "master race" crap has to end. Does say being gifted with a superior memory power make you "superior" or "more important"
Sadly I have to post anonymously.
This is all too true in my opinion. I'm probably in the group of 'UK Youth' and I go to a Grammar School, which accepts the top 10% of the area, and I often find myself thinking that if some members of my class are in the top ten percent, this area has no chance. Still, I think this may be a little flawed.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Even people like Lego (who really fostered creativity a few years back) are now focussing on selling theme toys (Harry Potter etc) that the kids build according to instruction and seldom reassemble in any new way.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
No, as opium was widely available for pretty much the same purpose.
Don't blame just something like MTV. The forums at GameFAQs.com are a perfect example of a non-TV related environment that encourages and breeds stupidity.
Take a look at the typical discussion there. The vast majority of the postings there look as though they have been written by morons. There's not even a hint of proper writing skills.
The problem may be that, for whatever reason, the stupidest fools often become the most popular. And in what may be the online version of the old elementary school "imitate the cool kid" routine, many of the more impressionable youth act like morons themselves (even if they are capable of intelligence). Thus the current cesspool of stupidity flourishes there.
I would consider the forums at GameFAQs to be far more harmful to the intelligence of a teen than MTV. One of my grandsons showed me the GameFAQs.com forums while we were looking for information about Myst. At first I thought he was one of the fools there, but thankfully he joked with me about how stupid so many of his peers were. So there is some hope; the truly intelligent youth will notice that their peers are fucktards, and will be keen on not becoming such an individual.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
So we're not comparing us against them, we're comparing us against us over time. And The Flynn Effect discussed rising IQs in developed, not developing, countries.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
> Western society has become decadent. Everything is provided for you so you dont
> need to work. I see it all the time here in Britan everyone acts like they are a
> celebrity and are born with the right of everything being handed to them on a
> plate. The work ethic is left to us few....
Stop watching Batman Begins and get on with your homework...
This is very unsurprising.
There was a time when engineers and trailblazers were popular heroes. But a lot of damage was done in the 1980s and 1990s, when there was a culture of outright greed and everybody's dream was to be a fat-cat manager. Education reflected this, and children were trained to be capable pen-pushers, perhaps also possesing relational and organisational skills. (It was not all bad.) Politicians listened to business leaders, and business leaders naturally emphasised the type of skills they themselves had.
However, the people who did this forgot that management does not create ideas or value. Problem-solving, creative and scientific skills took a back seat; some of this was an understandable reaction to the way education was organized in the 1970s. But they were also considered less important because they were not culturally appreciated and besides, they were not the kind of skills a professional human resources department was looking for.
The result has been a loss of cognitive ability, in part a lack of creativity, but to substantial degree a loss of interpretative ability. The generation that was still educated in Latin and Old Greek may have wasted time on subjects managers now consider unimportant, but they did have a knack for extracting meaning from obscure and incomplete evidence.
I think that any American Slashdotter who has spent time in the general public knows that the falling average IQ is not just a problem in the UK.
I'd be curious to see the rate of IQ change amongst various western countries. Has the common "easy" life stopped working in our favor and started working against us? So many things we had to do before are now done automatically (or not at all,) and so our minds don't have to work nearly as hard to get stuff to happen. Granted, modern life has allowed us to focus more on things lik science and mechanics, but the lack of necessity is keeping many from allowing themselves to be educated.
I also blame America's increasing "stupid" problem partly on the parents that let their kids do whatever they please, with little in the way of punishment. The lack of respect I see everyday from my generation (I'm 20) is just appaling.
I'd definitely agree with this. My little sister is 14, and although she's not bright in the way that my other sister and I were, she's not dumb. However, she and her friends generally seem uninterested in learning, reading (the hobby that I attribute most of my intelligence today to), and just general education. Kids today (and I say this as a 19 year old, so don't mod me -1, Old Timer) are just apathetic about learning, and I can definitely say that as time passes, kids just aren't getting smarter.
Same with a lot of other stuff. I could help out with fixing the car. Well stand by but you could actually see stuff and the adults could actually do things themselves. Todays cars? Black boxes.
I learned a lot about electricity helping out with a model railroad. Pokemon is a nice game but it is played on another black box.
But lets face it, the rot started without especially your generation. YOU are the one raising these 11 year olds and we just don't have the need to get down and dirty anymore.
Odd thing about the sexual revolution? Rather then men learning how to cook as well now nobody learns how to cook. Freaky.
As our tech increases we need less and less knowledge about it. My mom knew how to wire a fuse. I know how to screw in one. My kid knows how to throw a circuit breaker. Wich one of us would be more likely to be able to get a car moving when there is no replacement fuse available?
Maybe parents need to get more involved with their kids. Nah.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Given the mass immigration to the UK from third world countries it is not surprising to see the drop in educational performance.
Another great example is Los Angeles, California. The public schools there have a 54% drop out rate. Guess where most of the students are from -- Mexico. To be frank about it, most of the students parents do not care about education. Cultural background plays a big role. Not to mention people trying to redefine the SAT to give people a pass.
Though, I suspect the immigration of professionals might be a smaller percentage.
What the hell? Isn't there a "paranoid" category for moderating?
Maybe that's another sign of falling literacy rates. No kids, "insightful" and "paranoid" are NOT the same thing....
There does seem to be a 'general intelligence' that covaries among the various intelligences. The twins data suggests it is at least 50% heritable, BUT the connection between DNA and actual performance is very indirect, and there are a lot of phenomena that *appear* to be inherited through the genome but are actually inherited via other mechanisms. "The early development of an embryo is not controlled by its own DNA, but by the architecture of the egg and by maternal effect genes." (Cohen and Stewart, the Collapse of Chaos, Penguin, 2000) There is a suspicion that the Flynn Effect reflects those mechanisms, and this result may be similar. On the other hand, the specialised intelligence being assessed is mathematical and scientific, and there is no evidence that it can develop in the absence of effective schooling. My experience as an American teaching UK students at university suggests that educational policies of the last twenty years in the UK have not been friendly to math and science.
Vs physical age, so yeah, it's linear with age. IQ of lets say 110 and aged 35 your mental age would be approx 38ish.
HTH.
Deleted
Or rather, you got it part right:
"There was a time when engineers and trailblazers were popular heroes. But a lot of damage was done in the 1980s and 1990s"
so far, so good...
"when there was a culture of outright greed and everybody's dream was to be a fat-cat manager. Education reflected this, and children were trained to be capable pen-pushers, perhaps also possesing relational and organisational skills."
Easy there. No, the Freemasons are not out to get you, have some prozac.
Education has nothing to do with it. Popular figures, however, DO. Look at todays idols and icons. They're not trailblazers or inventors or engineers or explorers. They're singers, and movie stars; gangsters, thugs, alcoholics and drug abusers. When we glorify what - in any sane culture would be - the dredges of our society, what sort of impact do you expect it to have?
I had a conversation with a friend recently about popular culture and the current generation that is growing up in the western world. Popular culture dictates that people have three second attention spans. Just look at the length of time before a camera angle is switched in anything audio visual. What kind of effect does this have on youth? What kind of effect has this had on my generation (being in the mid-20's myself)? Can you catch all the pokemons?
Maybe IQs are declining because the country's demographics have changed. There are a lot more kids from Third World countries in Britain today than there were 20 years ago, and perhaps they're dragging down the averages.
These scientific and technical skills have always been a bit stronger in males than females, but recently there has been a lot of talk about boys beeing 'discriminated' againsts in todays schools due to various reasons (which I guess were not common thirty years back).
Thus it could very well be that this is the true reason for the result, even though it seems to be a bit extreme, and the difference between boys and girls isn't as big with eleven years.
I recently read a book called The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. Its a enviromental disaster story, one of the things that happens in the book is that most children are born with some of abnormality, even if thery aren't then they tend to have lower IQ's then the previous generation. This all leads to america producing less engineers, graduates and technicians.
Its an itneresting read even if it is a bit out of date and a bit right on. As mentioned in the wikipedia article the president in the book is a dead ringer for our current glorious leader, George W Bush.
Argoff (142580) wrote:
If I'm not mistaken, that's the plot of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four!
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
That's unpossible!
Every sign tells us there will be a shortage of scientists in the future.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
"The key question is whether there is a correlation between the increasing contamination of our food and the behavior of the brain."
I think you're looking for the word causation here. Correlation doesn't tell you much.
Sounds like there is a rise in alchoholism and depression in the U.K.
It could be affecting their schools, it doesn't take more than a few kids who are acting out home problems to make life difficult for enthusiast students...
Some other major changes in the environment the last 30 years:
1) travel and world wide population density has increased dramatically-meaning that folks are exposed to various diseases from all parts of the world. Clearly infectious diseases _can_ lower IQ(german measles). Clearly we have increase of certain low IQ populations (i.e. autistic kids). Perhaps the same thing that is causing increased autism may lower the iq of children not so profoundly affected.
2) We've eliminated some poisons like lead in candy-but the number of food additives(and other substances used) has increased _dramatically_-and a lot of these new substances aren't really tested for this kind of problem.
Chavs will steal anything these days including IQ points. Next thing you know they will be after our good manners.
But for those "few" of us who are interested in things technical or creative, we have an unprecedented opportunity. Assuming you can find a moderately stree-free way of earning a reasonable income (not always straightforward given the climate in many modern workplaces), then the time-saving technologies available allow you more hours a week to pursue the stuff that really interests you, and to leverage those hours to be more productive. Finding solutions to technical queries was much harder before the net (Fidonet Echomail was horrendously slow <g>)
Incidentally, most of the rest are perhaps not as decadent as they might look to a depressed geek; they just need a little leadership. It's actually not that hard to do, it just takes subtlety, and overcoming the fear of / antipathy towards the "herd" that thinking people tend — quite reasonably — to develop at an early age.
Why is there a link to a definition of IQ... Do you think we may not know what it means? Will this pointless linking madness never end?
Read Brunner's _The Shockwave Rider_ next. It's the original archetypical cyber/hacker novel.
Well, my post was meant to be a joke (but only sorta..)
To be more accurate, I shoulda restricted my comments to residents of the USA. It seems to me that my fellow countrymen ARE, in fact, getting stupider by the minute.
In what other country of the world, for example, is it necessary to have a warning printed on chainsaws that says: "WARNING: Do not try to stop blade with hands"?
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Monosodium glutamate occurs naturally in tomatoes, dairy products, meats, and mushrooms. Unless you're injecting its refined form into your brain, it's not poisoning you. Excess sugars are possibly poisoning you, or at least causing unhealthy spikes in blood sugar and insulin production, as well as probably contributing enormously to the first-world obesity problem.
Nothing to do with IQ - IQ tests are only meaningful when taken in series, any random IQ test on its own measures only your ability to pass that IQ test.
Moving on to the study - a) I'll believe it when I read it myself, not when the Times have digested and spun it for me.
b) Reverse comparison of this stuff is futile - we do not teach our kids in the same way, or even the same things, as we once did - it follows that questioning them on things we used to teach will show them in a poor light. As the article implies this is the focus of the study, it seems a bit futile.
c) By the time I was eleven, if you handed me a test to take and informed me that it would not directly benefit me, I'd have flubbed it. We now test children almost constantly - by the time I'd made it to 11; I was already getting burnt out with pointless exams.
d) Intelligent discussion of the study is precluded by lack of access to the exact questions asked as well as the methodology.
Thanks to socialist policies in the UK and the United States over the last 30 years, bright people who generally earn more money, but have to work longer hours, are taxed punitively for being productive to finance the baby making machine of the lower classes of people who are generally lazier, less intelligent, and grow up in a culture of barbarism and anti-intellectualism.
Productive people have to work too many hours and too many years to acquire the savings necessary to raise a family, while the underclass just has to sit on their ass and collect money off the public dole and pump out illegitimate children like crazy and actually be rewarded by the government for their irresponsible behaviour.
And what kind of guys do women generally end up mating with if the government is willing to step in and take the role of "big daddy"? Are these women more likely to mate with a man who is responsible yet not the most exciting bloke in the world, or are they more likely to mate with a bad boy criminal thug type who is about as smart as a potato, yet because he is so irrational and unpredictable and controlled, he can give the real-life drama many women crave?
There is also the obvious problem of single-parenthood and children in western countries growing up without a father as well as a large subset of those kids not even knowing who their father is. Children generally learn self-discipline and the ability to focus from their father and without a good father in a child's life, their chances of being anything special are statistically very low when compared to kids who come from stable nuclear families.
Blaming gadgets, gizmos, computers, and MySpace is all well and good, but technology doesn't always have to be a crutch, if indeed a child has two good parents who can teach them the values they need to recognize something in life as being a useful tool or else a crutch that makes you weaker. Men teach boys and girls what being strong is all about, and so it is no wonder today's kids in the fatherless generation of big daddy government are intellectually weak, not to mention weak in other areas of life.
It is interesting how fast society falls apart in many other intelligent mammals from monkeys to elephants when you remove the elder males from the equation, yet our wonderful government leaders in western nations can't see the striking parallels in the damage big daddy government and radical feminism have done to the people of their respected country in the last 30 years.
Simply put, this is both nature and nurture driving down the intellectual quotient of the general population as women can now be less selective in terms of intellectual qualities when mating with a man, since big daddy government will pick up the bill, as well as nurture in the fact that big daddy government has taken the role of fathers in childhood development out of the equation and replace it with man-hating butch dyke lesbians working in social services departments whose only agenda is criminalizing fatherhood, encouraging divorce, and depriving men of having the kind of relationship with their boys and girls that the children so desperately need in todays world.
Perhaps for once, we could establish a benchmark: "How smart are we *supposed* to be?" Slip below that, we know we have trouble. Rise above it, we know we're doing good.
Now, you tell me "People are getting technologically dumber." Well, of course they are! Because more and more people leave more and more power in the hands of fewer and fewer elite, and that is they who both craves power and makes and maintains the gadgets. I've been preaching "The technology that you do not master, will eventually master you." for 30 years, now. Hasn't turned one head, yet. At least *my* butt's covered!
And it is "dysgenesis".
I suggest that any interested parties look it up, as its onset has been predicted for a very long time.
They just need IQ tests with fewer questions. But you don't need an IQ test to tell you today's youth are "loosing" IQ points.
No. "3 years loss at age 11" means today's kids reach the same IQ at age 11 that their parents reached at 8.
This would translate to 73 if IQ rised linearly with age, but it probably doesn't.
AC
PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Links
For the sake of convenience I am putting links to all the "PC & Defects in Reality Testing" posts:
Introduction
Part I
Part II
Part III: "Words Matter"
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part I: The Development of Reality Testing
[I apologize for the length of this post. This is a very complicated topic and the processes I describe are highly relevant to the ways in which PC damages rationality. The rest of the series can still be appreciated without reading this entire post, however.]
In order to fully understand how the ideology of political correctness traumatically interferes with the ability to adequately assess and describe reality, it is necessary to have some understanding of how it is that we learn to interpret the information pouring into our senses and create an understandable and predictable picture of reality.
When an infant is born, he has already been subject to some impingement from the external environment, though the violence of sensation has been mitigated by the mother's body and the womb cushioning him from the world. The intrauterine state of being of the unborn child becomes a template for the ubiquitous fantasy of living blissfully in union with an all powerful, all gratifying mother. At birth, the infant is violently expelled from the womb and assaulted by the world. However, his neonatal nervous system is incapable of comprehending the flood of sensory input. Infants can spend up to 20 hours a day in REM sleep, a state often thought of as being devoted to mental housecleaning, ie the brain is making connections (neural networks), discarding memory traces that do not fit with pre-existing data, and incorporating new inputs that have special (affective) relevance. During the earliest days to months, when the child is overwhelmed by sensations (internal and external) he turns to the mother, who picks him up and nurtures him, recreating a version of the protected, gratifying womb, at her breast.
Later on, during the process of separation-individuation, the child comes to recognize his separateness from the primitive, all encompassing, all gratifying mother. [I have described the process in some more detail here; scroll about half way down for my discussion of the work of Margaret Mahler.]
Once a child has achieved enough independence to recognize the existence of an external, frustrating reality, he must come to terms with the loss of his position as the (fantasied) center of the mother's universe.
He learns that he is not even the most important person in his mother's life. She prefers his father who protects and cares for the family and mediates the entire family's interaction with the environment, ie reality. It is the relationship with the father, with whom the child identifies, that forms the basis of the relationship with reality. The father is the child's rival for the affections of the mother as well as an object of love and nurturing for the child. (There are different schools of thought about what determines the eventual renunciation of the mother as the primary object of affection; this will be important in understanding the genesis of Political Correctness and I will expand on it in a future post.)
How can this developmental process, from experiencing the self/world as a blissfully, undifferentiated mass to the ability to recognize and manipulate external reality, be derailed? Since a large part of our
Where, even though they are supposed to be phased out, to this day often have fair amounts of mercury in them...and the amount of shots required for children has increased dramatically over the decades.
m
We have a control group to compare today's heavily vaccinated children against, too:
http://www.mercola.com/2005/may/4/amish_autism.ht
It would be interesting to run the same tests on 11-year old Amish kids and see how they compare.
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
IQs have fallen at the same time as the education system has disintegrated into an "EVERYone gets a prize" certificate-fest. How odd...
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
--- Attributed to Socrates
I don't know if this lack of reasoning translates into less intelligent people (I'm sure Children have the same capacity for intelligence whether more intelligent or less) but it does mean they are less well versed in answering that particular type of question. Lest we not forget an IQ test really is a terrible test of intelligence.
But something changed. Somehow games got to be desirable to the kids who already were getting sex. While games are still considered geeky the people who play games are not longer true to the code of being a geek.
Or put another way, the "cool" kids are on the web as well and taking over. Just look at the number of blogs. You don't think a real geek would be seen dead on myspace and such do you?
It used to be so that someone who was into computers was a geek and usually had a reasonbly intelligence. Now computers are just a toy. Just as it is no longer the case that someone who owns a car is a gearhead someone who owns a computer no longer has to be a geek.
Thanks to MS computing has now become as easy as owning a car. Is it bad? /me checks for the latest webcam captures.
No.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
BBC UK mentions the little interests in science.
From my Web site: "BBC News reports teenagers value the role of science in society, but feel scientists are "brainy people not like them." This was according to The Science Learning Centre's research in London that asked 11,000 pupils for their views on science and scientists.
Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as "normal young and attractive men and women". The research examined why numbers of science exam entries are declining. They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did "very important work" and 70% thought they worked "creatively and imaginatively". Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did "boring and repetitive work". Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were "really brainy people". Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: "Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family", and "because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female".
The number taking A-level physics dropped by 34% between 1991 and 2004, with 28,698 taking the subject in that year. The decline in numbers taking chemistry over the same period was 16%, with 44,440 students sitting the subject in 1991, and 37,254 in 2004. The number of students taking maths also dropped by 22%...
Seen on Shacknews."
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
And now there is evidence that they are getting dumber!
LOLOLOL!~
A nice dose of 220 through your hand will teach you more about electricity then any classroom lecture.
As for wiring a fuse with say a screwdriver. Sometimes you just got to do stuff that is unsafe. If we only did was what safe we would still be up a tree somewhere in africa. (or for the religious people, inside the garden of eden)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Nope, Laudenum.
James P. Barrett
I think things like outsourcing and global capitalism are responsible for the "decline", think about it, if you're a kid growing up today you have to think about whether or not going into debt is going to pay off for the field you get into and by the time you graduate and how stable that job market will be for the future, not only that but you have to worry about companies outsourcing your whitecollar job to some high skill+ low wage country and then you're stuck with a crapload of debt if you can't find a job. I don't envy kids living today in first world countries because places like india and china simply outcompete them on $ per worker.
Why would I want to go to university or study hard to be a science/math nerd if the company is going to move or eventually outsouce and higher low wage workers or farm them in on visa's?
People during those times were depressed too, they just used alcohol (that's what most medicines were then anyway)
Heh! And the "alcohol" was better in those days, too. Beer was regulary >15% by volume (cf 4-5% today) and other drinks contained opiates, in the form of morphine.
Large parts of Victorian Britain were designed under the influence of alcohol and opium mixtures.
Stick Men
Might be the propensity of Brits to take a lot of drugs?
Well, considering the list of countries by IQ, it seems that Britts should just offshore fertility to China.
There are 3 types of people in this world: those that can count and those that cannot.
I meant Laudanum and it is opium, not morphine (morphine is a constituent or something).
Stick Men
The fate of the goyim is a harsh one. But it is nothing more than the price of self-deception, paid in full.
Regarding Public education, the bourgeois have gutted the system so the children are taught to be perfect bourgeois fodder: mindless drones who will work for the bourgeois without asking any questions, and purchase the stuff bourgeois sell them through invasive advertisements.
The bourgeois, meanwhile, send their own offspring to private schools so they can be properly taught how to dominate and exploit other people.
As usual, it's the majority of the population that gets shafted there.
Singers, movies stars and gangsters may influence youth culture; they always have. And your complaint about society glorifying such people might have been spoken by Cato the Elder. Indeed, it probably was.
But kids did not set their own educational standards. Balding bureaucrats in three-piece suits (probably wearing horn-rimmed glasses, and looking down with contempt on modern singers) did it for them.
And their standards reflected what serious people of their time considered to be important skills; and that, basically, the ability to read a balance sheet. Such was the culture of the 1980s.
I guess my IQ is too low to understand what everbody means when they speak about IQ.
I've noticed something else in the last year that worries me. I own a horse, and I recently had to move him to a barn that mostly teaches 6 to 14 year olds to ride. Often, the parents have non-riding kids in tow, and they hang around the barn. Many (not all) of the non-riding kids have no clue how to deal with an environment that isn't entirely kid-safe. Some basic survival skills seem to be missing. They don't notice, let alone get out of the way of, horse traffic. They're unaware of what's happening behind them. They have no sense that they need to have some caution when near these huge animals and their big, steel-shod hooves.
I've seen a horse, faced with an 8-year old child in his path, stop, reach down with his nose, and nudge the child out of the way, as a horse would do with a foal. The horses have more sense than some of the kids.
These are school-age kids from rather well-off families. They're not retarded or autistic. But they have no sense of what's hazardous.
I think that the problem isn't that kids are getting dumber, but rather the I.Q. test is becoming outdated. The methods and practices of todays teachers are much different than they were even 20 years ago. Todays kids are learning to think in a different manner than they have in the past. Many people mistake the I.Q. test as the definitive measurement of intelligence, but what most psychologists define intelligence as is how well someone scores on the I.Q. test. The only thing the test can tell you is how good you are at taking the test, so any collective rise and fall of average I.Q. scores in a region or across the globe cannot be attributed to the worlds intelligence falling.
Once you embrace The Bible (of the Farming of Man), you know you will end up with farm animals, one way or another. The Brits (and all the other blind followers of the J-C handbook) are getting exactly what the deserve: a descent into the dark fate of a dumb farm animal. On the other side of the world they call it "karma".
So what if the process has been helped along by the chosen ones. We all knew where it was going anyway. And it wasn't a good place.
There are more educated people in this world today then there were fifty years ago. Yet I'd be willing to bet that yesterday's luminaries were on average more intelligent than those of today. It's what one of my professors calls "The Calculator Effect." Any idiot can perform Integration on a TI-89, but that doesn't mean they understand Calculus or could do it without the aid of that wonderful machine. Thus, the presence o f advanced technology hobbles the process of learning the fundamentals of Calculus as it is mostly easier and faster to punch in the equation and hit the enter key. What was that axiom about sufficiently advanced science being indistinguishable from magic? Sadly I think that's the reason people are getting dumber in the civilized world. For many of us, everyday devices have become a sort of magic and we have no real understanding of how they work. Who needs science when you have "magical" devices that do it for you?
I'm going to put that on a bumpersticker.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
Perhaps kids these days are getting dumber, or perhaps the icing is just being spread more thinly. It is important to remember that this wasn't an IQ test per say, they were testing 'scientific' concepts such as volume and density. Perhaps the simple fact of the matter is kids 30 years ago were taught these concepts prior to taking the test, kids these days aren't. A change in curriculum, in my humble opinion, is a far cry from foaming at the mouth and running around hysterically screaming "The KIDS! They are getting DUMBER!" There is more to learn today, than there was 30 years ago, just there was more to learn 30 years ago than there was when general relativity was merely a twinkle in a patent clerks eye, I don't think anybody could argue this fact. Given that there is more to learn (General relativity is a bad argument to make for 12 year olds, but the vibe of the point remains valid, we are teach more and more varied things, from history to IT and everything in between) - then obviously it will take longer, thus claims that the kids are getting dumber are bunk. If you want to measure intelligence, do a real IQ test. I'll leave with a quote: "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers". Attributed to SOCRATES by Plato (469-399 BC)
It has been for some time, actually, in the first world. Perhaps what this new data is showing is that there was a methodological flaw in the development of new tests that was causing the baseline to drift.
The Flynn effect appears likely to have been caused by a combination of reduced malnutrition and reduced extreme poverty and abuse. This are now quite minor in rich countries, which means there isn't much room for the Flynn effect to operate.
On the other hand, "disgenesis" - dumb people having more children faster - is a real effect and is likely dragging us the other way. However, it could not explain such a large drop. The estimates I have seen are closer to 1 IQ point lost per generation.
I think the Flynn Effect should really apply more to developing countries as opposed to developed ones. There is a greater imperative for higher intelligence in a country that tries to advance then those that are already under a popular consensus that they are already at the peak of development. I believe that this leads to decadence and a drop off in general IQ due to too much dependence on technology which reduces the need for mental agility. Why bother thinking too much when somebody else, or a machine, can do it for you?
A test shows IQ drop in youth! Oh my frigging God, do you know what THE HELL THAT MEANS?!
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Well, uh, IQ is proportional to age, isn't it?
No, it's not. If it were, consider that 85 is considered to be the bounary between "normal" and "mentally retarded." An 8 year old isn't equivalent to a retarded 11 year old. An 11 year old with an IQ of 73 have some serious developmental and behavioral problems.
Support SETI@home
Western society has become decadent.
Jawohl! What they need is a good war, that'll make real men of them!
Really,the people who rant on about decadence are in general even more frightening than the young dumbasses that incur their wrath.
I see it all the time here in Britan everyone acts like they are a celebrity
That's what happens when you put a camera on every streetcorner.
I am a chemist, and quite familiar with risks of all sorts of chemicals. I think you are falling for the classic fallacy of "natural = good/safe". This is patently false. Most synthetic flavorings and additives are much purer and safer than the "natural" alternatives, which often are contaminated with things we know to be toxic, along with others that we still haven't tested yet.
There are over 4000 chemicals in an apple, 99% of of which have never been tested for toxicity.
I, for one, said goodbye to our smart Brittish overlords already a long time ago. Maybe your application to join U.S. as an official state finally meets criteria. Just start teaching intelligent design and stop calling soccer football, and we are fine.
If you see the quality of the applied tests you will discover were are the problems.
"The punks were politically-motivated and rebelling against the Establishment, and even the establishment in popular culture."
Oh yeah I remember it well, the establishment quaking in its boots when Johnny Rotten swore on the TV. The queen was gonna call out the army you know!
Come on, Punk was just as much a contrived culture as the last one, and Malcom Mclaren and his camp rinsed it out rather nicely thankyou very much. For one or two glorious songs the clash had a modecum of political integrity, but most of punk was us sticking safety pins in our faces and graffiting a wall, the same uterly impotent comically outraged youth as portrayed by Rik (Mayall) in the Young ones is more the truth of British punk.
Sorry to be a revisionist, but you get to see the patterns after looking back for a while.
I think a bigger effect is from the outlawing of leaded gasoline. If you test the soil next to major highways that were around prior to 1970 there are still elevated lead levels. Also leaded solder was outlawed in plumbing which contributed to higher lead levels.
I didn't read that in the referenced article. I read that in a study of 27K children, 11yo children are "less intelligent" than they were 30 years ago. Someone mentions that the children today are doing about as well as 8year olds then. And then there's some journalistic hand waving about how this represents a serious problem that change within our educational system to resolve.
OK. Now for some real background. The study the researchers are repeating is part of a group of studies done by Jean Piaget back in the late 1960s through the 70s. Piaget was a developmental psychologist was was interested in discerning developmental stages in childhood that could be predicted and potentially nurtured with special education. He broke development down into four stages:
1) Sensimotor Stage: birth -> 2yo (a child who developed object persistence, or the recognition that a physical object persists even when out of the visual field and across time, would pass to the next stage)
2) Pre-Operational Stage: 2yo -> 7-8 (a child who developed conservation skills, recognizing that certain abstract things which appear different are actually the same, would pass to the next stage
3) Concrete Operational Stage: ~8-11yo (a child who developed abstract reasoning, such as manipulation of abstract variables in math or algorithmic reasoning, would pass to the final stage
4) Formal Operational Stage: cognitive adulthood.
This study -- cited in the article -- tests when children move from Pre-Operational to Concrete-Operational stage. They do so with a conservation skills test. In one test the researcher takes a tall and thin beaker and fills it up to a certain amount in front of the child. Then the researcher hands the child a light block and a heavy block and asks the child where they think each will displace the water in the beaker. If the child realizes that both displace the water equally, the child understands conservation of water displacement.
They then move to another test where the child is faced with a tall set of blocks stacked upon one another, and a short and wide set of the same blocks stacked upon one another. The researcher asks the child to use the short and wide blocks to build the same tower as the tall and thin one. If the child realizes that since both contain the same number of blocks it is actually possible for him/her to complete the task, the child understands volume conservation.
In yet another test, the researcher takes one cup of water and pours it into several smaller cups and then asks the child where the water line will be if they pour all the water from the smaller cups back into the larger cup. Ya'll get the idea.
Now, these researchers are testing children today using the same methods as Piaget back in the 70s. What they found is that the mean for transitioning out of Pre-Operational Stage is today later than it was back in the 1970s. They don't know why. Is it due to changes in our educational system? If it due to environmental changes? Hell, how about: does Paiget's development model hold any factual water? *cough!* Are these results meaningful, and what do they mean?
I don't know.
But one thing I do know is that these results say NOTHING about relative IQ differences from then and today because neither study measured IQ!!!! It is a gross misunderstanding of this work to compare the actual results of relative changes in children developing specific conservation skills over time, and then claiming that these results can extrapolate general intelligence changes in children over time. They are not the same!
To sum up, baldrson misses this "IMPORTANT LAB RULE": know what you are measuring and confounds it with a second "IMPORTANT LAB RULE": take accurate measurements. So, now that we have that all cleared up, how 'bout heading over to the pub for a Guinness?
I don't think that was a serious comment. Moderators, please mod +6 Funny!
School is "Vat fing wot you know nuffin' about!". I think it's universal. I am pretty sure the kids here in Australia are just as stupid, and the way the public education system is getting ransacked here it's only going to get worse. But I think that's the agenda.
Are you familiar with C. P. Snow's "The Two Cultures"? It describes the kind of nonsense that makes people who are not self-identified dorks reluctant to understand anything the least bit technical or scientific. Willful ignorance bothers me to no end.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Beers might have been a little stronger than they are today but they weren't >15%. It simply isnt' possible to brew much greater than 15% and still have something that is drinkable. Even with the specially bred yeasts that we have now designed specifically to produce alchohol we are topping out aroung 20 to 25%. This is one of the main limiting factors in swithcing from an oil based society to an ethanol based society. The reason wine is around 12% to 16% alcohol is because that is the limit that the yeast will brew to it dies then and sinks to the bottom. The high alcohol stops the wine going off. Beer doesn't brew they high because it isn't provided with as much sugar. It's the hops in the beer that help stop it going off. I suppose it would be possible to brew a very strong beer with wine yeast as long as you used only a minimal amount of hops but it wouldn't be very nice beer. The specialist high alcohol yeast produce too many by products that taste foul to be used in brewing.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
My question is, where the hell are the parents of these kids? So many parents are in denial about what their children actually do- if there are even two parents. It sickens me to see lives go to waste like this.
We briefly touched on IQ (and its calculation) in my psychology studies. From what we were told, your Intelligence Quotient was basically a representation of where you sat on the bell distribution curve for your:
- age
- gender
- cultural background
- etc
Basically, the closer they could come to matching your specific circumstances to those similar to you, the more accurate your IQ measurement was. There was much discussion about how both questions and distribution had to be changed to remove cultural bias inherent in the testing. So if you were straight down the line as being average, you'd have a score (IQ) of 100. If you were below average, you might be 70. If you are above average you might be 130.
So can someone explain to me how the IQ can be dropping when it is meant to be the measure of the average? The percentage of people in the demographic obtaining a score of 100 should remain constant. I understand that the number of correct answers might diminish or increase over time, but the percentile of people scoring 100 and the distribution of the rest should remain the same otherwise the scoring is flawed.
Glenn
The Smrt way to trade CFDs on the ASX
First we find out there is a rise in the number of brits who believe in "inteligent design" or "creationism" or whatever they call it now. Then we find this drop in intelligence of the eleven year olds. I suspect the populations of both Briton and the USA are too dumb to maintain Democracy in the long run!
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
It would be good to get a graph of this "huge spurt" from ages 8 to 12 so we could see about how erroneous the Terman definition of IQ is likely to be during these years.
Seastead this.
As a Brit who finished school in the late 80s I can recall my mother going to a parents/teachers evening. My A level maths teacher told my mum that she couldn't do the exams herself. This was as a decent state school in the UK (Wetherby High School) in its day. I'm pretty sure it's all a reflection of teachers teaching rather than teacher's teaching. AFIAK, you don't need a degree in the subject anymore in order to teach it... you just need to know how to teach it. Seems a little strange to me.
Some 20 years ago, as soon as I got back from school there was a science show on one channel, an environmental kids show on the other, and news on the third commercial channel.
I got back from work early on Friday and what did I see? Girl TV (wtf?) and some show about kid warriors fighting each other. Oh and lets not forget a bratz cartoon.
I used to love plonking down on the couch after school and watching anything from experiments on various gas or metal types, to the ecosystem of the great barrier reef. Sure we had our transformers and He-man etc etc, but it wasnt ALL transformers and He-man!
I'm sorry, you only wrote "bourgeois" 6 times in this message. To qualify for the Marxist Vocabulary Award, you must use the word at least 10 times in a single post (including the subject line). You are encouraged, however, to submit another entry at any time before the final cutoff date of February 1, 2006.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
This UK youth is not an elitist asshole.
/. here who posted earlier, I attend a grammar school. These are specifically designed to harbour the most intelligent and train them to their potential. If what is available in my year is the cream of our province, then we have serious issues, especially since my school is highly selective.
/. crowd, they were in the "geeky" social group. I'm a geek, that's where I like to be. Where we DO talk about maths, we DO talk about computers, we DO talk about more than "Lost" and, "OHMIGAWD DID YOU SEE WHAT SHE WAS WEARIN'?!" . None of us are dysfunctional geeks, we have lives, but our lifestyles are different enough to realise what we lack and have that the others don't have. What the others, who don't care how things work and have fun in free periods bundling each other on the floor work.
Like a fellow
I cannot imagine how other provinces ("Counties" here in the UK) manage. Grammar schooling was abolished in every other county, and there is a serious movement to abolish them here. Why? Through some twisted use political correctness and an attitude of, "All are equal in ability, thus, it is unfair to split staffing between schools, where the grammar school may take the better staff due to a more prestigious position." Luckily the Labour party has recently begun motions to keep and enhance selective schooling in the country, which I think is a good thing.
However, back to my experience. Technical and applied sciences are sorely, sorely lacking. I had a girl in my economics class a few weeks ago requiring explanation and a little time for the mathematical cogs to grind to work out the total sum of 50 - 40 = 10.
I am not joking.
I believe I know the problem, and it purely is our society, and the crap we are force-fed, and most of use ingest. Who to blame for this, I'm not sure. Maybe corporations aiming to control our habits from birth, maybe lazy parenting, maybe government attitude, likely a combination of these things and more. I am however certain of the society in my school.
I attend a sixth form at the top grammar school in my area, and I find it fairly boring, but I love to learn. Most likely like a lot of the
+ Major point: None of us watch TV. We do grow a liking to a certain series here or there and we watch (Much which is popular here, too. Futurama, Firefly, BS:G and so forth), but none of use sit in front of that square box and just sit there mindlessly because we don't have anything else to do.
+ We learn where we can in school. Let me explain this. I have slowly and methodically found out school grades are in no way whatsoever a representation of intelligence in any way. They are simply a test of memory, this is how ninety-five percent of the school treat it, and that is how it is taught. You never have to think at any point, you are told some bare facts, and you need to memorise them. This is why some truly idiotic people can get good marks. I think a further factor why science and maths is worst hit is that is requires minimal amounts of though, we have to memorise equations, sure, but then we have to APPLY them. Oh that scares them. They didn't memorise that one. We as a group want to truly learn. I aced triple physics with an A* at GCSE with barely any revision, it being the toughest physics test open to me at the time, simply because I've always been interested in physics, and how the world works.
+ Peer pressure of hatred of science and learning. Being a geek, I do of course have geek attire, such as the exceptionally cool, "Shroedinger's Cat is dead" T-shirt from ThinkGeek.com. Ninety-eight percent just don't care, ask, and as I'm always willing to teach, start off with the phrase, "It's about physics..." knowing it'll scare them off. They don't care. They don't want to stay and listen. Their social position may fall! However, people have complimented me on this T-shirt, in private. Girls especially, I'm assuming because they have a greater "pack" society. We don't do t
esp re lego
I have heard many geek types in their 70s wonder in the same vain about how todays kids are going to take stuff apart so they can bet interested in being engineers and scientists
I guess the answer is linux - it is not really a commercial product, but serves mainly to train the next gen of scientists and engineers and tinkerers, adn does it in the same way- showing how you can take something apart an dput it back to gether again
"technology makes it possible for anyone to become just about anything (career-wise) at least."
FIRST DIBS on gigolo to supermodels!
there is a long history in sci fi of how people can be stupid when the computers get smart enough
seriously, why do we need to know math ? for 99% of the population, you really don't need to know more then how to check your calculator (im being serious here - this is NOT a troll).
KNowing math is like knowing how to guage the age of a horse by its tooth length - usefull for some vanishingly small % of the population.
Of course, one can argue that we all know that things like resoluiton by partial fractions and trig are completely useless for most people,a nd we just do it as a filter for the ed system, to keep the wankers out of professions where you have to have some intelligence, like surgeon, airline pilot or the guy who lays out the software spec.
Eventually, with an open mind, you start to see how far our preoccupation with jobs, with keeping our larvae safe, and with supressing sex are taking us down the ant road. The collective can do unthinking marvels while the individuals are kept too busy to act independently. Even our more intelligent researchers are every day burdened with more and more demands for grant application paperwork before they have a chance to apply their intelligence to worthy problems.
I should try to avoid polluting one of the most insightful discussions ever on Slashdot with soapbox rhetoric on broader issues, no matter how tempting. In the West there is an historic scarcity of children which may have long term environmental benefits but is certainly making it hard to allow those kids we do have to enjoy the traditional challenges of their growing years.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Perhaps the grandparent was thinking of 15 proof, ie 7.5%?
This study has been replicated numerous times over the decades. It's one of the big 'uns. But whatever - we're on the same page. :)
The group of people who's IQ points have fallen the most are the readers of this stupid article.
This article compares a IQ applied to certain subjects to General IQ scores and then goes on to say that they have fallen "3 years worth." Three years of what worth? Three years education, three years of "Flynn Effect" improvement, three years stupid articles like this one?
Tripe, the lot.
I think that has a lot more to do with the legal system and lawsuits. While the stuipidity of people in the US can't be questioned, this really isn't an indicator.
If global warming / global cooling / asteroid event / etc. changes the Earth's climate and the only human survivors are some obscure primative tribe who has never heard of /. and doesn't care about RIM vs NTP... does it matter?
Humanity will survive.
If it doesn't...
Shrug
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The very fact that this article says IQs are "on average" lower now than they were or people here talking about mean IQs tells me it's not a qualified treatment of the issue.
IQ is an ordinal, not a cardinal number. To discuss it in terms of mean, variance, skew or anything else is statistaclly meaningless.
A truer tale of education in Britain in the last 20 years I have never heard.
Teletubbies.
I agree with you. I also think particular exam grades should be set so as to keep their value absolute too. Such as top 5% in a test get an A, next 5% get the B and so on.
But hearing this pathetic argument against grammar schools of late convinces me Britain is going to keep at this useless path until China and India boot us so hard in the balls we wake up!
IOW what a load of horse crap you've posted. It has nothing to do with the OP and you're too stupid to realize it. Whoever modded you up to 5 is an ignoramus.
loss of applied iq? well i was under the impression that iq was some kind of inherant thing: surely something that is genetically determined cannot change from one generation to the next? that would negate the whole notion of iq would it not?
never mind the fact that iq lacks any kind of validitly in terms of what it's meant to be testing -thats not the point when you're looking for a crude way to justify your race hatred, or belief that social darwinism is the way to go.
excuse me if i dont read the fine article but I'm getting a bit sick of the way that iq bs shows up quite so regularly on slashdot; its no more science than astrology and deserves to be sidelined.
It's odd that every comment here is about circuits and electricity. The article refers kids couldn't figure out that pouring water from a a tall thin jug into a fat small jug gives you the same amount of water!!!
What the living heck does that have to do with ICs? You can play with electricity not understanding the simply or complicated explaination underlying physics all day long. This is about the basics of interacting with this world on a mechanical level.
OK, but like many of you, I taught myself programming as a kid and studies EE later... but hell, I also played outside and got a sense for gravity, forces, and geometry. That's what this is REALLY about!
I don't know what chavs are, and there's no entirely kind way to put this:
oh, you geezer you. this line is hilarious:
"The punks were politically-motivated and rebelling against the Establishment, and even the establishment in popular culture."
Actually, most of them were drug/booze filled horny teenagers with nothing better to do. just like every other "movement" of that kind in the last, oh, I think I can safely say 'couple of centuries'. I can't provide any really old examples, but I'm pretty sure they existed. Heard of emos? (maybe a north american thing). they think they're an important movement too. so do many goths. Even hipsters often do. secretly, though, they're just a bunch of kids who have similiar taste in music. maybe they have similiar taste in politics too, but rocking out tends not to changed the world much.
the vietnam era hippies (beatles etc.) were a politically-motivated group, rebelling against the establishment. that's why they actually accomplished something. Even so, most hippies were in it for the free love and the cannabis.
Loss of scientific and technical reasoning eh... so folks are saying "I don't care, I just want it to WORK!"
Not quite, I think here it's more like, "I don't care or wanna work, I just wanna pimp sum hos and cap some 5-0."
I hate to burst your buble. but Clinton reformed the US welfare system, not Bush.
It's as simple as 2 + 2...
*takes out calculator*
[2] [+] [2] [=]
There's the reason!
I'd suggest anyone concerned or curious about the effect our food and our food choices are having on our lives read Not on the label by Felicty Lawrence.
Glenn
The Smrt way to trade CFDs on the ASX
IQ tests can be taught just like any other skill. The claims that they measure innate intelligence have never been substantiated. I was drilled in them when I was 10, my IQ rose from over 120 to over 140. By the end I was getting every question on the paper correct
Until the 1970s the UK had a two tier state education system. 5% of the kids went to grammar schools the rest went to 'secondary modern's' - sink schools in other words. To get into the grammar school and get a decent education (albeit not quite as good as the private education) you had to pass the eleven plus.
During the eleven plus era large numbers of kids were drilled in taking IQ tests. This continued for a while after the grammar schools had been phased out, partly due to inertia but also because there was tight competition for places at private schools which still have selection today.
so this is not a demonstration that kids are getting stupider, merely that the local effect of one bias in a ridiculous test is greater than the general bias.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Thanks for that - I had forgotten about my old 'Mykit 200' (it had 200 projects in one) with springs, and the other type was called a 'Denshi Board' with all those clear cubes. What fun things they were!
Previously, I thought "western decadence" described the hi-profile movie stars, etc with their dozen cars, mansions, etc....
Now I realize that even "common" society is extremely decadent:
Sadly, most of these are not soley the activities of the ultra-rich nor even of the upper-middle class... I'm not saying there aren't some "decadent" activities going on in India nor do they have all the answers...
I used to always think that the rich doctors, lawyers, etc (in the US) lived the unattainable "wealthy lifestyle"... I realize now that even the minimum-wage workers at Mc Donalds enjoy many luxuries that even the "upper-class" groups in most of the world (in terms of pop.) do not have.
Unfortunately, what I'm trying to show is that even the masses are living highly decadent lives (and they probably don't know it). And I think most of the items I listed would be considred normal (as opposed to other excesses which might be less obvious)
Yes, even by decadent western standards, I consider "pop culture" to be extremely (even more) decadent... They should have been fed to the lions (figuratively), but somehow society seems to embrace them in a strange way.
Are you under the impression that IQ has anything to do with "work"?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
IQ tests are archaic "intelligence measurement" tests dated from times where we didn't know better but to label people with arbitrary numbers based on results from a test that only evaluates a tiny portion of what we can define "intelligence" to be. Please tell me our society has evolved to something better than to believe this shit.
It is only that now enough people are well off enough to sit around and worry about such higher level problems.
Worry they do: my A&P professor says that Prozac is taken more than aspirin. Of course, primary care professionals are handing that stuff out like candy, so it's not surprising...
I KNEW IT!!! All of those "please think of the children arguments" were true, piracy is inversely related to child study habits. Fortunately we have the RIAA to help us get our children into gear. But for all of the Europeans, won't someone please think of the European children?
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
"dumb" and "ignorant" the mathematical relationship will still hold. That correlation is quite strong by any stretch. People with low IQ's are having more children at younger ages, and (rightfully) we have removed "selectionary pressures" that would eliminate these children.
Fortunately, genetic engineering will save us from this problem before I gets too big. Actually, what worries me more is the bifurcation we are experiencing. Until 30 years ago or so, there was little relationship between the IQs of a mother and father (basically, most people weren't that mobile and had a limited pool of age-appropriate mates in the neighborhood). This has changed. Smart people are marrying smart people, and dumb people are marrying dumb people. Again, I think that genetic engineering will solve this problem before we wind up with a bimodal IQ distribution, but it is a concern.
The decrease in Childrens' intelligence is due to an elite cabal of flying radioactive monkeys, working in conjunction with a conglomeration of Al Gore, Enron, Jews, Terrorists, Oil Companies, Professional Sports, and Neo Conservatives. They are putting flouridated water, trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated oils into our children's food. They are filling our classrooms with brainwashing standards and sex education in order to force our children into lockstep with their industrial, capitalistic, machine. Also, children are more likely to live under power lines and watch television-- both of which cause autism and brain damage. Also, the information age has given them ADD and is making them all into screaming lunatic perverts. They can't focus because their entire life is a barrage of media. All they know how to do is consume. They are out of shape, socially malajusted, and entirely dependent on harmful technology. And what's really sad here is "flying radioactive monkeys" is the only thing in this paragraph that let's you know I'm kidding.
If a news anchorman just went on TV and started going "BLEEARGH, BLEAARGH!!" while a menacing barrage of pictures fired off in the background, a lot of people would be very concerned and see the report as a shocking expose on the evils of the modern age.
of years. They kill tens of thousands of Americans each year. Pesticides are estimated to kill about 20. Which is more dangerous?
Or think about this one. Remember a while back when Viktor Yushchenko, the president of Ukraine, got poisoned? That same chemical has been found in a number of rivers near chemical plants. Each time, everyone throws a hissy fit. But let's put this in perspective: The dose that Yushchenko endured was something like the equivalent of eating ALL THE TOXINS IN THE SLUDGE in one of those rivers - and it still didn't kill him. Those whiners who are complaining abou parts-per-billion contamination of dioxin in the river sludge are almost assuredly more likely to die driving to the meeting to complain. People always panic because we can "detect" a poison. The problem is that our detectors now are so senstive that we can detect absurdly trivial amounts - even single molecules in some cases. If our bodies were really that susceptable to these trace toxins, we would have been weeded out of the gene pool long, long ago.
Except... uh, punk wasn't "about" taking drugs OR having lots of sex. Every punk I knew was fairly intelligent and well learned and none I knew were into sex or drugs. Sex and drugs were the currency of the old pop machine and punk was a rebellion against all that.
They are too protective of kids any more and do not foster indipendant thinking like they should. And yes some people do not give their kids good technical toys like legos robtics and chemistry sets which BTW are a shawdow of what they were 20 years ago they took all the cool compounds out of them. The Uk takes this protectionism the farthest though also they need more good hands on science in schools even in the US there is a lack of this. As a kid I rember playing with legos technics and heathkit electronics kits , those electronics labs from radio shack and making games on my old trs80 coco. Heck they gone so far they now age check the purchase of epoxy at some stores. I used epoxy for lots of stuff as a kid you can't bond metal to plastic in a robot or model airplane project with elmer's glue or even super glue doesn't work well. The nanny state mind set has to go.
Has the world not made significant strides towards mysticism, away from science with growth of all sorts of religious movements? Is the world wide erosion of human rights (and sanity) partially due to this growth in mysticism - afterall, it usually is? This article may indicate that the world is ready for accelerating this growth. Are we heading for a modern dark ages? IS the old feudalism replaced with a modern company controlled version?
Intelligence is heritable and the intelligent are having fewer children than the dull.
Intelligence is aborting/abstaining/contracepting itself out of existence and leaving the world to the idiots.
The same stupidity that causes people to be unable or unwilling to get more education is the same stupidity that causes them to have babies that by no means they should be having. I have never seen any evidence that, independant of IQ, there is a substantial effect of education vs birthrates. There might be a small difference in that people with education delay child-bearing until they finish school, but I have never seen evidence of differental total births. It doesn't matter anyway. The simple facts are that people with low IQ are having more babies sooner, and that IQ is substantially hereditary. This mathematically implies that average IQ will go down over the course of time, unless some other force counteracts this trend.
I have no idea what "better fed" has to do with this. If anything, you are backwards again. People that are so poor that they don't even have food tend to stop having babies. Give them more food, and they are likely to start having more!
In any case, I agree that the situation of today's youth is very saddening. It is not their fault that the idolatrous values that contemporary western society imposes upon them will inevitably lead them to misery and confusion.
Slightly more than half of the adult US population can now correctly answer the question "How long does it take for the Earth to complete a circuit of the Sun?", as long as it's presented in multiple-choice format:t tp://www.rifters.com/real/articles/stats_on_americ an_scientific_idiocy.pdf
http://pdf2html.pootwerdie.com/pdf2html.php?url=h
The questions are at the bottom, along with the answers.
Seriously, print this out and test your friends, family, classmates and or coworkers. If they fail, shoot them and remove them from the gene pool now. It may seem harsh, but it's for the children. And Lord knows nothing is more important than them. Hop to it!
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
Clearly the government needs to require all breeding families register and pass a test before they're allowed to breed.
Alternatively, they could just add contraceptives in to the water supply.
Problem solved.
The Ginger Dog
My personal suspicion is that this is due to the government fixation over league tables and regular exams. The end result being that children/students are very good at taking exams and answering the (leading) questions with the right keywords - but unable to think for themselves, or probably answer a question they've never seen before.
When I undertook my GCSEs (age 16) exams over ten years ago it was clear that this was already the case, and I suspect it has become worse since then.
DG
The Ginger Dog
The problem with IQ tests is that they do not apply to anything practical. The people I know who can do them easily are highly organised, mentally alert, emotionally dysfunctional, and socially handicapped. I am 75, failed at school, was sacked from more jobs than I can remember, never had a single qualification,and ran a successful company for years. One thing wrong with todays schools though is that they don't teach how to hold a pencil, so kids can't write legibly, and do word processing with two fingers. I would rather be a kid today than in the 1930's where you sat at a desk and learnt your times tables in silence, and got one session of football a week. I use computers for music, drawing, writing, editing, and playing games. I had never seen a computer before I was 40. Thank God (read Google, Microsoft, etc) for giving me the means to do a thousand things at once and not have to remember much how to do it.
Terman's original definition of "Intelligence Quotient" is exactly as I computed it. The reason for the more nuanced definition based on normalized studies is not that Terman's definition was "invalid" but that the normalized measures are more accurate across a larger range of ages. Terman specifically used childhood developmental scores in his quotient, so my application was as good as Terman's and although the "huge spurt" in rate change reported by the critique of my math is a valid point I seriously doubt that the "huge spurt" is a "huge" problem for the conclusion which is that there has been a terrible drop in applied g-loaded skills.
Seastead this.
Atleast over here there is a much stronger drive to get kids to UNDERSTAND things like physics and math, instead of the way my parents learned it by heart. Physics at the age of 11 is quite elementarty. Is it possible that the kids in the 70:s were told that blocks of equal shape make equal amounts of water-level-rise, without truly understanding why?
Modern schooling may leave the kids apearing less educated at a younger age, but the logical reasoning and tools tought to learn and understand at the kid's own pace SHOULD well make up for this at a later stage.
I, along with most of my friends, am in my early thirties. When I look at my friends from undergrad and grad school (mostly scientists, engineers, teachers, doctors, lawyers - ie, successful by normal standards), there are only a few have children. I can think of five children out of all of that peer group of fifty people or so, none more than two years old.
On the other hand, when I look back to my dirt-poor rural high school, I can think of several people who already have three or four children, some already in their teens! Almost everyone that I have any knowledge of has children.
At least in my personal experience, reality seems much worse than the published data I have seen. Perhaps this phenomena is getting worse, as the studies I saw had ten year old data.
Right on. It is somewhat depressing the warning labels that are around. Law suits or no law suits. If as a parent you can't figure out that the plastic bag that your tv/vcr came in shouldn't be left around for your todller's amusement, then something is wrong.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
of Britain's all to close relationship with America
Learning by looking closely at something (often by taking the thing apart) as been a part of human learning for thousands of years, and is the reason the West advanced ahead of the East hundreds of years ago. - By looking closely at things and resoning how that object works, understanding the processes involved then imagining an improved version. This is progress,
However, as current big companies want to kill competition in the market and gain market share, DRM (Digital Restrictions Managaement) ( http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html/ ) makes it extremely hard to learn by this natural reverse-engineering process, and by circumventing the encryption in the DRM combined with laws have been heavily lobbied and passed, such as the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) in the USA, then the natural process has been for ever damaged.
How can the West expect to stay on top with new laws like this which severely hinder human ingenuity? For our short term greed, our long term lead will lose out.
Its a pity!
Were you talking to me? Sorry it was the way you were looking into the mirror as you said it... confused me.
Sometimes I get lost inside my head....
Farmed salmon live in huge square "fish cages" made of netting, that are in sheltered tidal lochs. The only time they live in tanks is in the hatchery.
> Were you talking to me? Sorry it was the way you were looking into the mirror as you said
> it... confused me.
You're erroneously presupposing I was looking into the mirror as I said it. Perhaps you've not seen Batman Begins:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0372784/quotes
> Henri Ducard: Only a cynical man would call what these people have "lives," Wayne. Crime.
> Despair. This is not how man was supposed to live. The League of Shadows has been a check
> against human corruption for thousands of years... We sacked Rome. Loaded trade ships with
> plague rats. Burned London to the ground. Every time a civilization reaches the pinnacle of
> its decadence... We Return to restore the balance.
Actually, all through the middle ages until the general introduction of clean water.
:) ). So instead of a drink of water, you would drink some ale or beer, which was generally quite weak compared to what we drink now. I don't have the reference here but I believe that it was 1-2%. Interesting, if useless, information.
It was because the fermentation process removed most of the dangerous toxins and diseases found in the water that the general populace used (while replacing them with alcohol
On the general debate, everything that I wanted to say has been covered, but briefly:
There is a general societal trend to mask intelligence and technical ability. For instance, in Ireland, people with low test scores and who have no interest in school are usually proud of it (as opposed to me, supposing I'm intelligent, where if I got a low test score all I felt was relief, because I'd passed another exam!). I cannot understand people being wilfully ignorant. I cannot understand people trying to suppress information. It makes no sense.
This decade has depressed me (luckily I'm generally an optimist) because everywhere I look I see ignorance beating common sense. Scientific research is stalling in many important fields because of political pressure bein applied (usually through funding). Some companies and individuals seem to delight in hitting any advances or promising leads with any and every type of roadblock that they can come up with. The patent laws are the most obvious example, but there are others.
And it all comes back to what the article is about, and some of the comments made. Children are encouraged to do what they like. There is no discipline, no limits. It's the nature of a child to test limits. If no limits are set, the child develops with no instinctual knowledge of what is right and wrong in society. And that, as seen when one looks at "chav" culture, is a major problem. Children chucking rocks at cars, safe in the knowledge that they'll get away with it. This is so prevalent that many local authorities now put a CAGE over any walkways crossing the road! That is dealing with the symptom, not the problem. The problem is not confined there. Middle-class and richer children have slightly more exotic ideas of fun, but are not being curtailed.
To the point of this rant. If we intend to have a better future, there is no point in thinking wishfully now. All children should have their academic needs looked after. Teachers who are ineffectual should be replaced. Cirriculums should be reviewed more often than they are, and parents should be severly punished for what their children do. It comes back to responsibility. Parents are responsible for their children, by EU charter (or constitution in America). This is not stated explicitly, I believe. Rather it is implied because a child cannot face major punishment for any actions they commit. While the details of this would need to be worked out, the rights of the victim should supercede the rights of any proven crimial (for lack of a better word). I personally believe that this would encourage parents to BE more responsible and to look into accusations against their children more seriously (If you've had to deal with a parent who insists that _their_ child could _never_ have done this you'd know what I mean).
To finish with a quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general who planned and commanded Operation Overlord, founded NATO, and indeed, was the first SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander, Europe), and was also a two term US President with one of the best domestic and foreign records of ANY US President, who was domestically and globally popular and very successful as a person as well as a career;
"I have never left my childhood in Abeliene behind me. The virtues of hard work, optimisim and dedication taught to me by my parents have led me to where I am today."
Rational thought is the only true freedom
Prozac was introduced in 1988. Any people consuming Prozac in 1850 must have had access to a time machine. The rest of your comment is equally nonsensical. You mention a lot of recent developments and assume causation. Siting "some" scientists does not impress. Most scientists would contend that siting "some" scientists is, at best wrong, and at worst a total lie. Give us references, not idle speculation.
E - Excelent - Tried every question and got most of them mostly right.
G - Good - Tried most of the questions and got them mostly right.
S - Satisfactory - Tried some of the questions, didn't get everything wrong.
U - Unsatisfactory - Didn't bother to hand in, or got absolutely everything wrong
Yeah. This is at one of the better Universities around in the UK (though not one of the best). If schools are as bad (and they are) is it any wonder?
James P. Barrett
The Times used to be a high quality paper; it's now just a side brand of the Daily Mail. All of the Murdoch press have these semi-salacious articles to appeal to women (carefully calibrated for the audience so as to be racy but not actually shocking).
"By stressing the basics -- reading and writing -- and testing like crazy you reduce the level of cognitive stimulation. Children have the facts but they are not thinking very well," says Adey. "And they are not getting hands-on physical experience of the way materials behave."
Remember this research next time the topic of building Commander Data comes up. The chucklehead crew of the Dark Star demonstrated that even teaching Computer phenomenology was disasterously inadequate. The integration of first-hand real world experience is essential to intelligence as we think of it.
I observed a similar thing on the Underground. There was a little (~14 year-old) chav all by himself. All of a sudden, he started "bustin' out a rhyme."
It was largely concerned with the various sexual acts likely to be performed by the girls in various towns and suburbs in the Greater London area.
It finished off with something like, "Check out ma maladie, check out ma maladie."
Poor soul. He probably should have seen a doctor.
Even though it's politically incorrect, I think it might be worth considering that the changes in the demographic that has taken place in the UK, and most other European countries for the last 30 years, due to immigration from less developed countries might be a factor in this.
= 298650
Last year a study of the scores for the Danish army's IQ test showed that the percentage of immigrants and descendants that failed the test was 28%, while the same number for Danes was 7%.
I have only been able to find this Danish article about it: http://www.ekstrabladet.dk/VisArtikel.iasp?PageID
Anyone who knows of a Babelfish style translator that handles Danish?
I bet there are more artificial additives, especially colors and flavors, than there were in the 60's, when things were supposed to be so much worse.
It's my understanding that before there were food laws and inspections pickles, for example, might contain lead as a coloring agent so Victorian times might have been worse IQ-wise if food were the problem.
The more refined, I think, purchased pure and sweet Bayer (TM) Heroin -- for the aches that ail you. Poster was reproduced in my abnormal psych book. And there was _real_ Coca-Cola -- sugar, caffeine _and_ coca. Top that, Red Bull.
Working with many products of the British state comprehensive education system at uni, I was frequently reminded of that scene in Brave New World:
..." "Well now, which is the longest river in Africa?" The eyes are blank. "I don't know."
"The - Nile - is - the - longest - river - in - Africa - and - the - second - in - length - of - all - the - rivers - of - the - globe
There were all these students who could get great marks on problem sheets and exams, but once you asked them something that actually required thought, they were stumped.
When I was in school, a long time ago (like Miow) I was taught basic Maths, Reading, Writing (hated that, glad I learnt to type) ... and some basic problem solving skills. No such thing as a calculator on my desk, let alone a PC :-). ... this machine makes calculations easy, as long as you know what you are calculating. ... and yes, that might mean "1+1=2, 1+2=3, 1+3=4 ..."
I've since bought many a pocket calculator. I've bought the occasional PC too. I've had to learn to use both, because nobody was going to teach me.
I learnt to use the calculator by applying the mathematics I learnt in school. What a surprise!
I've learnt to use PCs so well, I now help work colleagues and friends with PC problems. I've even learnt to use Linux (SuSE Pro 9.3 on this PC).
The most surprising thing for me, was a workmate who was doing an Accountancy course, but didn't know how to do a basic proportian sum. If 6 apples cost $4.80, how much for 10? This was some years ago, and as far as I know, schooling has got no better. I use the word schooling deliberately, since I think calling it education is an acceptance of how complicated and confusing it's got. Let's go back to some basic schooling for everyone
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
Oh, the 19th-century and early 20th were nightmares compared to today, no doubt. You could sell anything for any reason and the only thing people had to go on was if someone keeled over after using the product.
The FDA and other government regulatory bodies are overall a Very Good Thing. The problem is that like any bureaucracy, they succumbs to political and financial pressures. Plus the manufacturers themselves aren't always the most vigilant when it comes to finding problems with products that are (or could be) making them boatloads of cash.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
There are lots of reasons for the decline. I would not be surprised to learn that the decline in the US is greater than the decline in the UK. I would cite as reasons. Types of play: video games vs. constructive toys such as sets for chemistry, electronics, construction. Closest we have today are games like "Sims." Government funding for science: during the 60's and 70's the National Science Foundation had a considerable amount to spend on high school education. I could easily go on a long discussion of things I don't like about how businesses are managed and the de-emphasis of engineering. On the other hand, we have smart scientists and engineers who are doing remarkable things. The problem is that they somehow represent an elite group and the pool of potential talent may be getting smaller. If you examine the national origin makeup of engineering schools, it appears the % of the population of Asian students is growing. The % of US students is declining. The % of black US students is practically non-existent. Is the pool of US students actually diminishing?
"If all the American people want is security, let them live in prisons." Eisenhower
Most computers don't even come with a programing language these days. Back in the good old days Every kid with an Apple, Atari, Commodore, or CoCo dreamed of writing a cool video game, or BBS. Turtle Graphics? Where have you been? I have not seen anything about Logo in years. Really a shame. It still exists but schools now teach kids now to use Word and PowerPoint not how to program.
Now you are considered a "geek" if you have a fan that lights up and a window in your case. If you really want kids to be smarter then get them more Legos, blocks, erector sets, Model rockets, and flying model airplanes. Do not get them DVDs, iPods, and Cell phones.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Go take a trip to an electronics store, get yourself a programmable PIC and a test board, and a book on PIC assembly. Then get to hacking.
It may be hard to take apart modern prebuilt stuff, but it's never been easier to build your own.
Right on. Why not blame decreasing IQ's on global warming, loss of the rain forest, decreasing number of piratesm (of the arrr! variety), increased computer usage (blasphemy), the rise of the cell phone, or the hundreds of other things that have changed in the last xx years?
As medicines get better and people put more value on human life, more people live. Previously, only those capable of coping with life would live. Now you get every loser who can fill out a form collecting money from the government, people helping those who can't/won't fill out a form, and medicines helping others. Over time, people get stupider and weaker.
:/
Now watch as I get modded down for insulting those who can't take care of themselves.
Grammar Nazi
Well, here's my homework:
Go to www.homedepot.com and enter "747028900263" in the search window. (This is a UPC code).
It brings up a "Resources Conservation" showerhead that puts out 2.5 gallons per minute. Multiply that by 15 minutes and you are looking at 37.5 gallons, nearly 8X the bucket I described. Others have the same rating. And I believe these are "low flow" heads... The ones in older construction used up to 10 GPM... See this link for more info. These are the kind that make your skin raw by the time one leaves...
And this is to say nothing of how much electric power is required for heating... 40 gallons is about 200 kg worth of water... Consider that it takes 4.184 J to heat 1g of water 1 degree Celsius, and I estimate that approximately 5 Kw-h of energy is used PER SHOWERING (assuming an outdoor temp of 60 deg F and water temp 100 deg F). Which means two people showering once daily will use about 300 KW-H per month... (My total usage on my apartment's electric bill is about 500-800 KW-h and I run the heater/AC often).
The previous paragraph lends some wait to conclude that most of the energy is wasted (due to excess water usage). And considering how often people shower, number of people doing this, etc, etc, quite a large amount of energy & water is truely wasted just due to a lifestyle!!!!!
And I did not mention that in other countries, people tend to not shower as often in the winter (for obvious reasons).
So it is the current that tends to kill.
So, now that we have that all cleared up, how 'bout heading over to the pub for a Guinness?
Your comment was too long to read, but I'll get the first rounds!
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Your (his?) claim that "There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease" is refuted here and here, the latter of which links is an anti-vaccine site.
this link gives references to more scientific studies. And this link also responds to your claims.
And, it's blazingly obvious that smallpox, pertussis, and polio have responded to vaccine regimes. In areas that lacked polio vaccine, polio cases continued. When those areas began to receive the vaccine through WHO (including Europe), the cases reduced or stopped altogether. Case closed.
Vaccination also fits well with the established mechanism of disease resistance. Those who have received vaccination show an increased level of antibodies to the disease vaccinated against; the antibodies are the proteins used by white cells to identify and then destroy the invading pathogens.
I recommend getting your information from medical journals and sites instead of scare websites.
And if you have a child, PLEASE get your vaccination information from repuatable sources.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.