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We're All Getting Dumber, Says Science (fastcompany.com)
dryriver shares a report from Fast Company: Researchers at Norway's Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research now have scientific proof of something we've long suspected -- we're all getting dumber. In their paper, "Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused," which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bernt Bratsberg and Ole Rogeberg report that IQ scores have been steadily dropping since the 1970s.
The study consisted of analyzing 730,000 IQ test results gleaned from young men entering Norway's compulsory military service from 1970 to 2009. They found that scores declined by an average of seven points per generation, a reversal of the so-called "Flynn effect" where IQ was seen to be rising during the first part of the 20th century. The decline may be due to environmental factors, but because the researchers couldn't find consistent trends among families, Bratsberg and Rogeberg discounted factors like parental education, family size, increased immigration, and genetics as significant causes.
The study consisted of analyzing 730,000 IQ test results gleaned from young men entering Norway's compulsory military service from 1970 to 2009. They found that scores declined by an average of seven points per generation, a reversal of the so-called "Flynn effect" where IQ was seen to be rising during the first part of the 20th century. The decline may be due to environmental factors, but because the researchers couldn't find consistent trends among families, Bratsberg and Rogeberg discounted factors like parental education, family size, increased immigration, and genetics as significant causes.
.... sounds exactly like one of those results that would vanish in a puff of annoyingly-irreproducible logic if anyone actually tried to replicate the underlying studies.
You know, like 90% of all other published research in the psychological sciences.
Or young men in Norway entering compulsory military service?
In the early 20th century, human living conditions, including improvements in sanitation, hygiene, and dietary needs being met likely all contributed to a net rise in human cogitative performance, however atmospheric CO2 levels have also been steadily rising in that time.
Then there's this.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
So yeah. Probably CO2 level rise has caught up to the benefits of improved standards of living.
One important thing about this study - it shows that there is not a strong genetic correlation with any of these findings. That means it is very unlikely that this represents any kind of "Idiocracy"-like trend of the 'dumb genes' outnumbering 'smart genes.'
Rather, as mentioned, it is a cultural/environmental set of factors.
If this is replicated outside of Norway, perhaps we've been making ourselves more dumb, either by forcing our less-well-off to live without access to education, or distracting ourselves in such a way that we no longer pass tests as children anymore.
On the skeptical side, while the Flynn effect studies counter for cultural-shift in popular knowledge pretty well - there could still be some measurement effect in there, like fewer students being able to cheat, or fewer administrators getting away with fudging numbers.
Ryan Fenton
IQ tests no such thing, and this study does no such thing.
This study shows a persistent trend in the cogitative capacity of enlistees in the general Norwegian population over several decades using a (mostly) consistent measurement battery of standardized test scores.
It makes no connection to education level.
IQ measures how quickly a person is able to grasp a concept or detect a pattern, and how well they are then able to apply that concept or make use of that pattern to solve a problem. It does little else. Its main detraction is that there are issues in communication, since the tests are tailored for people who are English speakers, and who are literate, which biases the results of illiterate people who are otherwise VERY intelligent. It itself does not actually measure your education level.
So, thats two strikes. Care to go for three?
Having done the army test in 2003, as all Norwegian 18 year-old males had to even if they didn't end up serving, I can tell you it was a three part timed test.
1) Mathematics
2) Linguistics (In Norwegian)
3) Logic/Pattern analysis.
Education comes into play in the first two, and the third one is more about figuring it out as you go.
You are then scored 1-9 in each of them as well as all the other testing such as hearing, vision and colorblindness.
Interesting,
I did read some time ago about a similar study in Finland, i.e. people doing the IQ test when entering the army. Link: https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/studies_show_average_finnish_intelligence_declining_since_1997/7792598
There the "smartest" kids were born around 1977 and after that the results have declined each year. As in Finland army is compulsory for men, most of the men get tested around the same age, so the sample size is pretty significant.
Getting a little bored with the "Science" Says claims, like there's some governing body of authorised scientists that make things official.
I've started replacing that term in my mind with "some random dude claims".
Never happened. True story.
Well ya, if they gave English IQ tests to young Norwegians entering military service, I suspect they wouldn't do as well as they could
"Norwegians are getting dumber"
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
When you mix a hodgepodge of paint colors you get a hue of mud. Miscegenation degrades the Swedish stock, replacing intelligent genes with genes from lesser beings. It's been known since the time of Gregor Mendel.
First thought that comes to mind is the "idiot box". Though come to think of it there were lots of things we did in school that aren't covered today, so I can't rule that out.
sort of like this infographic
https://i.imgur.com/kE8ckkn.pn...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
IQ is pretty much fixed within the first few years of life, so "we" aren't getting dumber. Younger generations are less intelligent than older generations according to this research.
Once again, the US of A is leading the world!
Who made the bold generalization to replace "young men entering Norway's compulsory military service" with "we all"? And would that person have been smarter forty years ago?
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
They fucking voted Donald Trump!
It's the commercialisation of television. Free market competition has no mandate to educate. Education takes a lot of effort - which equates to money in market terms.
And of course that's applies equally to Facebook.
It's obvious, people aren't learning anymore and committing things to memory. They just rely on their electronic devices to answer every question without actually going to the process of acquiring knowledge that stays with them.... so less brain exercise = lower IQ.
Looking at how the comments here at /. have changed, I too see a pattern...
---
IQ is actually defined as the common component of mental performance that is independent of domain and education. There are IQ tests that are independent of education and culture, but such tests are lengthy, costly, and tedious. That's why mass testing uses simpler tests that are calibrated for particular populations and are dependent on education, age, and culture.
Your test is calibrated for Norwegian 18 year olds; a Norwegian 18 year old that has more education than average would score better on the test, but the fact that he has more education than average would also strongly correlate with a higher IQ. If you give the same test to a Norwegian 30 year old, the results would be meaningless.
I started writing a reply, then realised that without more information it's hard to analyse the problem, and the article isn't freely available, unfortunately.
IQ tests don't test a single aspect of intelligence, and it matters what kind of tests have lower scores. Do these have more to fluid or crystallised intelligence? We could then further speculate what caused the particular change. For example, education has moved over the years to better address how girls learn, and it could have negatively affected how boys learn to think.
IQ is actually defined as the common component of mental performance that is independent of domain and education.
No it's claimed to be that not defined to be that. You can't simply define something to achive a near impossible task and pretend it actually does so. Well, I mean you can pretend...
There are IQ tests that are independent of education and culture, but such tests are lengthy, costly, and tedious.
Sounds like they're not IQ tests then. Also [citation needed].
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Well ya, if they gave English IQ tests to young Norwegians entering military service, I suspect they wouldn't do as well as they could
My guess would be that the difference would be extremely low, Norway is consistently ranked in very top for English proficiency, you start with English in first grade and we don't dub English shows except for little kids. With Internet, YouTube etc. kids also get exposed to lots of material that's neither dubbed nor subtitled. The Harry Potter books sold ~1 million in Norwegian, ~200k in English so one in six preferred English and that's for kids. If you take any kind of higher education, expect English textbooks. Even though English doesn't have an official status, with a high number of immigrants and foreign workers pretty much everything exists in an English translation. Now if you go as far back as this study it would be different, but apart from cultural reasons we could easily make English our official language.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm sort of in the ADHD camp. I've read a bit about the subject and somewhat adhere to the theory that a) ADHD isn't as much a disorder rather than a genetic predestination. Roughly 10% of society being Hunter/Gatherer (creative, priest, leader, rebell, etc,), the rest being farmers/settlers. It's a bit of a chicken/egg problem: Do I have low self-esteem because im ADHD or do I have ADHD as a symptom of low self-esteem? Or is both linked to brain performance or is both linked to lack of social proof for aberrant behavior (minimalist stoic)?
Childhood media consumption definitely plays into this, as it trains us to look for emotional states that are fully decoupled from the "mundane" reality around us.
I however have also noticed how much nutrition and psychological factors play into emotional wellbeing and how much that plays into brain performance.
Another thing that happened recently is that I finally had my nose-divider corrected (at the age of 47). I, for the first time in my life, can breathe properly. Or at least way better than before. The difference in my cognitive abilities is palpable. I can concentrate longer and deeper with less strain. I'm pretty sure that my confidence has risen due to that and that feeds back into my ability to concentrate. Sleep-apnosis is know to severely influence cognitive abilities (access to oxygen).
Last but not least, I've noticed how extremely nutrition influences cognitive performance. Processed foods make me less concentrated and more sleepy vis-a-vis organic fresh foods. Again, the difference is palpable.
Bottom line:
There are some theories about rising CO2 levels and whatnot, but I bet dollars to donuts that if IQ really is declining again across the board that childhood media consumption and nutrition are the most significant factors playing into this.
And I have some personal anecdotal evidence to back this up.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
At least the president is a 'stable genius'.
I still contend that computer usage makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber (yet the now-dumber people think they're smarter).
If the US were any efficient in sending corrupt politicans to jail, you probably would need to convert a big city into a jail to handle all of em.
But as it's not, well..
I know my skills have diminished due to electronic devices.
Perhaps we are investing more time in skills (mostly technology related) that did not exist when these test were devised.
While young Norwegians are a non random sample of the world population, your concentration on the figures instead show you have no understanding of statistics.
Immigration is certainly part of this. As Trump said (he was right too), Mexican immigrants coming across the border are not their best. Immigration is a big piece of the dropping IQ.
Most probably what constitutes intelligence is changing due to social and technological changes. Analog clocks are being removed from schools, I've read, because children cannot read them in a digital age. And what about cursive writing? There must be many subtle and obvious changes that are affecting what passes as intelligence. It could just be that the theory and testing of intelligence is lagging the massive changes that have taken place in the last 50 years..
E Proelio Veritas.
A very good point I think. Nature is not an idiot.
E Proelio Veritas.
I have no science ti back this up, but seams this seems reasonable... .. At least in the western world.
.. insert whatever here.
... and I'm sure it's going to get worse.
It seems to me this is just a function of time we live in, and the hedonistic culture we kinda trend towards. Too much comfort basically, it's just a chase to get bigger screen tv, more RAM, better phone with more storage so you can dump more stuff on it, more comfortable couch, black friday sales 50 % off everything, etc.
People that have it hard(er) and are forced to think and improvise to survive (and if they don't, evolution does its thing..) surely wouldn't display same results on these tests.
There were times people did everything by themselves in their lives. Now we have machines that do everything by themselves... or are trying to have them.
I wouldn't be surprised if people couldn't read a map anymore. Fix their plumbing.
That is just the average change. Are we told anything about the standard deviation - is that moving, possibly broader or shrinking.
Is it possible that some of the population are getting dimmer (or whatever IQ tests measure) but that the number of "geniuses" is increasing too.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
1st) as flawed as IQ tests are, they make a strong effort to avoid testing for one's education because the whole purpose is to measure your ability to think.
2nd) a great education can make you smarter but if you don't use it, you lose it.
3rd) The USA public school decline since the late 70s has nothing to do with this study, that has to do with the American public which polled higher for education as a priority so then the Republicans took it up as a major issue when previously it was lower on their list and largely conceded to the opposition. It is the political war between parties that began after that point that has harmed the American education system. Not saying it is all the Republican's fault; it's mostly the public's fault for shifting their priorities but not enough to actually THINK beyond marketing slogans; although, after a certain point too high a priority makes you more irrational!
4th) We all know but won't want to deal with the real reasons for this trend... stupid people have more kids and modern civilization keeps them alive and reproducing at rates never before possible.
5th) Technology also greatly hinders development in children and continued mental activity in adults. Television puts your brain into a lower state than sleeping, for example. The consumer society of constant escapism has you going for dopamine fixes non-stop which not only distracts from brain use but also diminishes any intellectual highs one gets from figuring things out. Hell, even video games today are mostly just feel-good reward systems without any difficulty; perfected to the point of these addictive pointless mobile games. oh ,and don't read a BOOK and THINK -- checkout my cat videos on facebook!
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
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...just Norwegians are getting dumber.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
You seriously think that the Syrian refugees that came to Norway just a few years ago would be drafted in mandatory military service? Really? And you are the one talking about people getting dumber...
This study has just confirmed my own findings that both my teachers in my college and my students now are dumber than me.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
No i don't think that's a WE.... NORWAY IS GETTING DUMBER. that's the real title.
And since they let in all the muslims that rape their women and destroy their country....
Yes.. yes they are getting dumber.
not my problem.
Social justice.
It basically encourages lack of actual critical thought. Rots your brain.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I gotta take a selfie.
There are always exceptions to military service for health, disability, conscientious objections to killing people etc. So it is possible that this study just shows that brighter individuals are using those exceptions to avoid military service.
Indeed if you look at what wikipedia has to say it seems that while 60,000 are available for conscription every year only 8-10,000 are actually conscripted. The article also suggests that they select "unmotivated" fit people and you can get out of it with a "good reason".
I'd argue that these selection biases mean that you are less likely to conscript smart people since they are more likely to be able to figure out what they need to do to avoid conscription.
And the Universe responded by making bigger and better idiots.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Bratsberg and Rogeberg discounted factors like parental education, family size, increased immigration, and genetics as significant causes.
TFS forgot "tried to" ... confounding factors are, well, confounding sometimes ...
I seem to recall Norway transitioning from Bokmal to Nynorsk ... not sure the exact timeframe or how complete it was? Maybe that could have some effect?
2) Linguistics (In Norwegian)
In Nynorsk or bokmal?
People need more electrolytes. It's what IQ craves.
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
I'd say timed test of math performance very much depends on "training" if not education. Growing up I was forced to do a lot of math manually over and over and over again. I very quickly understood *how* to do it, but it was tedious and over time I got quicker by memorizing big 'short cuts' so I could do the same problems faster, not because I understood it any better but because I had memorized shortcuts and understood how to break up the problem to use those shortcuts. Already I'm far slower at doing arithmetic in my head than people older than me because most of the time I had offloaded the tedium to a calculator. Now the vast majority of people have a calculator with them at all times, it would be natural for simple arithmetic to take longer, but that doesn't say the math is any less understood.
It is very difficult to imagine some objective measure of mental capacity that *didn't* get influenced by training. At the very least the suggestion that this *specific* test has shortcomings seems to be the point in this thread.
Besides, even as the tests have been consistent year to year, the broader context of what life demands of our brains have not. A person well equipped with respect to the mental demands of the world 40 years ago would not necessarily be well equipped for the world today, and vice-versa. We may have high ambitions of how we conceptualize intelligence in an abstract way, but in practice we can't really measure without *some* educational/life experience bias.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You're talking bollocks. IQ tests are the most thoroughly researched and proven psychometric tests known to psychology. No other psychometric test has come even half way to its level of predictive correlation with actual outcomes.
AC the tests show if a person can take in information and use it.
Without having someone smart around to help that low IQ person with the most simple of tasks.
Any task. A new task, the same task done yesterday, a task that just got introduced.
Thats the very lowest IQ a modern mil will accept from an entire population of people.
Why? A mil wants everyone who can be used to go to war.
But not the people who cannot work without needing another person to help them.
Thats why IQ is used to sort an entire population every generation. The testing finds everyone who can be used in a modern mil.
As many people as possible.
Why is the testing showing bad results? The national IQ has moved in the wrong direction. Something has changed. A larger number of people with a low IQ of testing age are now taking the tests every other generation could pass.
Something has changed with the nations education and level of IQ over the past decade. Something new got introduced to the population to make its unable to do basic tasks past generations could.
A mil is not a sheltered workshop and does not have the troops to spare to help people with a low IQ with every task.
A normal nation with a normal population that can be educated should not change unless a large number of new people with a much lower IQ got introduced.
Thats why the mil tests for IQ. To ensure they only get people who can get a command and have the skill to do what they are told without needing extra people around to ensure the task is done.
A mil can avoid this by ensuring a nations education system is great and accepting the best from that generation.
Become a mil that only accepts professional people.
Attempt to test people for "IQ" (eg hidden as a fun new word recognition test) and only accept people above say the lowest third of results. A modern normal mil does not want that lowest IQ part of their intake to grow. Ever.
A nation who was a growing low IQ intake has many problems. No skills to use communications gear. A procurement budget wasted as low IQ troops have a go at a new task and fail and fail. Then fail some more.
Once supplies are open they have to be used, so low IQ troops use a lot trying to master the most simple mil tasks. Systems that cost nations will small mil budgets millions of $ to work with. Low IQ troops remove all competence in any part of the mil.
Want a smart useful army that has to use a draft? Dont fill your nation with low IQ people.
If your nation is full of a generation of low IQ people? Test them to make sure they don't get offered modern mil service.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Near impossible task? How about a century old statistical technique. Every reasonable IQ test contains g-loadings, and the only thing you can meaningfully compare between IQ tests is the g-factor.
I believe the elites want a dumber population that easier to control and sell. Glenn Seaborg famous said, "If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war." But it not a foreign government, the oligarchs within. RESIST - PERSIST. Education yourself!
"It riles them to believe
That you perceive
The web they weave
And keep on thinking free."
- Graeme Edge
Exactly.
"You know, like 90% of all other published research in the psychological sciences." Or maybe 98% of that research is somewhat or mostly wacky?
Maybe the actual issue: The smart people in Norway are avoiding military service?
Another subject about Norway:
Norway is rehabilitative, not destructive, to those who commit crimes. Michael Moore's film, Where to Invade Next explored the system in Norway, and prompted articles like this one: Why Norway's prison system is so successful. Quote from that article: "... when criminals in Norway leave prison, they stay out. It has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world at 20%. The US has one of the highest: 76.6% of prisoners are re-arrested within five years."
Being destructive to those who commit crimes is another crime, a crime committed by the government.
The only thing we know for sure is that the idiotic editors of FastCompany are stupid and getting stupider.
Aside from the fact that "dumb" refers to speech ability and has nothing to do with IQ...
this test refers to conscripts in one country's military, it says nothing about the general population. And there is no reason to assume that group reflects society as a whole.
it is an aggregate test that takes about the average intelligence of its very specific group, nothing about "we're all getting" anything. The group can be getting stupider on average while the smartest are getting smarter
IQ doesn't even work the way these idiots seem to think it does. It's supposed to be a comparative ranking with current society. There is no way to compare tests taken 30 years ago with tests taken today. If someone in 1970 scored 100 and someone in 2018 scores 110 today, there is no comparison you can legitimately draw between the two.
And since IQ is a normal distribution against current society, by definition of IQ, IQ of the population is constant.
I suggest that you review the definition of the word "Compulsory."
I suggest that you review the definition of the word "Unbiased." ... the tests are applied to *ALL MALE CITIZENS*. Since this is literally a sample size of "All male citizens of service age in Norway from the start year, to the terminus year", you are talking a very large and unbiased (by ethnicity, race, cultural upbringing, religious practice, affluence level, ... etc.) sample. The only demographic excluded is likely to be female gender, which I explicitly lamplit. Unless you want to make a compelling argument that women are intellectually inferior to men (*gigglesnort*) in the face of a wide number of well reviewed studies to the contrary of that assertion, there is no grounds to claim systemic bias of the sample.
It's systematically biased by sex. ...), healthcare system, and I could go on.
It's systematically biased by country of citizenship - which means by race, ethnicity, CHANGES in ethnicity due to immigration, residence, educational system, language, media exposure, diet, political events, disease exposure, environmental stresses (weather, pollution,
Generalizing from data collected on all draft-age Norwegian males to the state of the entire human race is one of the the kinds of misstep that cause "real scientists" to look down their noses at research work done in the "soft sciences". Did the authors actually make this "all of us" claim, or is it hype hung on their results by the media (or their institution's media relations group)?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That is a lie consistently spread by the IQ measurement community, mostly because they want to sell you something. When you look at actual reality, you find that the IQ is rarely the limiter of what people understand and what not. Much more important is how they chose to use their IQ (usually they do not) and what starting point they chose for chains of reasoning (usually some irrational one they never challenge, randomly copied from the media from peers). With this prevalent mistakes, IQ becomes a minor factor.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Unless there is something VERY special about Norway, a wide-spread trend that cannot be attributed to education, gender, religion, or other environmental factor has pretty good predictive qualities, since the sample size is large, and unbiased (Only males tested most likely, but the service is compulsory, not voluntary.
Service in Norway is NOT compulsory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
About 60,000 Norwegians are available for conscription every year, but only 8,000 to 10,000 are conscripted.[2] In earlier times, up until at least the early 2000s, all men aged 19â"44 were subject to mandatory service, with good reasons required to avoid becoming drafted.
Besides that decline in conscription, actual numbers of conscripts are around 14% of eligible Norwegian males, cause "the number of applicants each year exceeds the needs of the Armed Forces".
Further, researchers aren't showing a decline of IQ in Norway, nor anywhere else.
They are working with a presumption of a decline in IQ and trying to hammer their "observation" peg into that presumed roundish hole.
Using administrative register data with information on family relationships and cognitive ability for three decades of Norwegian male birth cohorts, we show that the increase, turning point, and decline of the Flynn effect can be recovered from within-family variation in intelligence scores.
This establishes that the large changes in average cohort intelligence reflect environmental factors and not changing composition of parents, which in turn rules out several prominent hypotheses for retrograde Flynn effects.
I.e. They claim that they can explain presumed IQ decline by extrapolating measured in-family IQ decline.
Problem is - they don't actually have the data to show that. And they are blind to their own biases regarding all the preconceptions they are juggling.
From study's appendix it's pretty obvious that the IQ sample was both changing in structure AND reducing in sample size over the years.
Number of recruits born between 1964 and 1972 varied between 30440 and 32148.
1973-1980 we see a drop from 29159 down to 23900.
1981-1989 rises slowly from 23317 up to 26484.
But far more important is the fact that they are NOT ACTUALLY FINDING THE IQ DECLINE AMONG THE NORWEGIAN CONSCRIPTS.
All that they ARE accurately finding is that the number of IQ tests among conscripts has declined by 10 percentage points, over a decade.
From TFS:
Conscription test coverage declined substantially for cohorts born after 1980, with coverage rates falling from 93% in 1980 to 83% in 1991 (Fig. 3A).
So not only is the number of conscripts declining, number of conscripts taking IQ tests has declined even more.
Which they then take to consideration - and pull the following nonsense out of the thin air.
Focusing on families with sons in the first two parities and plotting the share of unscored younger siblings by the observed IQ score of the older brother, lower scoring firstborns were more likely to have unscored younger brothers (Fig. 3B).
The problem is exacerbated toward the end of our data window: Among the 198-1991 birth cohorts, fully 30% of those whose older sibling scored in the bottom IQ bracket have missing IQ scores.
As sibling scores are correlated, this implies that low-ability males are less likely to be scored, and that the selection was stronger for the cohorts born in the late 1980s than for those from the 1960s and 1970s.
I.e. Not only are they ASSUMING correlation between IQs of sibli
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You have to admit, humans faced much stronger selective pressure in the past.
The people I know who have the most kids are too dumb to use birth control reliably.
The smart people I know (genius level) have 1 or 0 children.
It could be a fluke of data... or yea.. dumb people might be becoming a larger portion of the population.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The data and abstract doesn't show what is claimed in the headline. It shows a slowdown of the Flynn effect but the people in the studies are still smarter than 1970s cohorts.
What's more is that the data clearly declares bias: only Norwegian males born from two Norwegian parents are included. Moreover the scoring systems were changed in the 1980s and in the early 2000s and they indicate the data is thus less accurate.
So basically: people entering the Norwegian military are not getting progressively smarter as we thought. Or: people that aren't smart enough to avoid military service are getting dumber.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Stupid high level officers are deadly to the army that employs them.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
But the reason we are here in this topic, is because Norway used to have mandatory conscription screening, which did produce a lot of statistics about its population.
In the age group of 18, there is roughly 70.000 each year. Since conscription is unisex these days, even if its a 2/3 male/female split. So 17.000 of those gets called in for all the tests: Physical, aptitude, perception, mental ability. So the sad part is that we don't test the other 53.000. And another thing is that statistics will skew as the total amount of boys tested will go down. But since this is a national endeavor, the statistical skew will affect the more populated areas a lot more than any rural region, and Norway has a lot of rural regions.
So past that, Norway wants about 9000 conscripts, conscripting what it can.
And there is a lot surrounding this. Screen has been gradually reduced, alongside smaller number of conscripts.
In 2012, Civil Service was removed. This used to apply to people with the aptitude, but with clashing moral reasons to serve the army.
In the early 2000s, a change was made to stop doing the interview screening process with the local police, and instead went for a online form.
Somewhere in the 1990s, the amount of conscript was reduced, but not the extensive screening process. This is what happens when Soviet Russia collapses into something lesser.
1977, women where allowed to enter all parts of the army, assuming they passed physical screening.
This is also a topic where its hard to google for information, since very few newspaper articles will publish the line of historical events.
Literacy and numeracy is something any school in the EU should have had the ability to educate people with for many years of schooling.
That is what an IQ test is for. Can a person read. Can a person do math. Can a person work with a task in a set amount of time.
The ability to read and do school level math in a set time should not be new to an entire population of citizens that just had years of good schooling.
Why does an entire generation not have the ability to use their own nations language and do the math they just got educated with in school?
A nation with large amounts of people who are illiterate and innumerate? Who cant do a task without support and expert supervision?
The education system should have tested for such people every year over many years.
All the mil expects is that the people who sit a test can read their own nations language. Do some everyday math.
So what is it with this modern generation that cant read, cant do math, cant be educated, cant learn new tasks, cant communicate in their own nations language.
After years of education? Where would such a large population with no skills be found?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Pretty sure his point was "my anecdotes are better than your data because I don't trust your data".
Exactly! I have boosted my intelligence by not reading.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Near impossible task? How about a century old statistical technique.
Hoe about it? It's not a measure of mental performance that's independent of either domain or education. It's one incomplete attempt to summarise a multi-axis distrbution with a single number.
So yes, boiling down intelligence to a single number is basicaly bullshit.
Every reasonable IQ test contains g-loadings,
IQ tests are particular bullshit because they test a very small and specific set of thigs.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This isn't news. Carl Sagan was gravely concerned about this.
We'll make great pets
Some schools are even doing away with homework. Can you fucking IMAGINE??? Lazy kids, stupid parents.
It might appear that way to people who don't have much of either.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We have become TOO reliant upon technology to shift the "busy work" of our thinking.
Calculators. Devices to remind us of appointments. Google maps to navigate.
If the points dropped across the board by around 7 points wouldnâ(TM)t the scores people receive be around the same? Since itâ(TM)s just based on an average?
Science says we are all getting dumber? Well, all I can say to that is Pffffffffffffffffffffffffftttttttttt
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
i agree most are, but NOT ALL (ahem...)