Why are IQs dropping?

Or to ask the question a different way - who controls our public schools and universities and how is that 16 years' worth of brainwashing working out?

Set the bar low enough and you'll trip over it. Expectations are lower, schools encourage mediocrity, everyone makes the dean's list. The world is still a competitive place and if you're expecting everyone to love you because you show up and breathe, and you've had sunshine and rainbows blown up your butt, you'll be in for a real shock, hence anxiety, depression, record substance use and suicides.

This has nothing to do with education, as IQ is not a measure of what one has learned, but is innate. The reason is that stupider people are having more children than smart people.

Gee, what demographic change has come to the USA? Lots of Ashkenazi Jews, Northern Europeans, and Hong Kong residents? Or someone else?

More Dims = more Dumbs = more Gullibles = more Dims.

Is the "intelligence" measured innate, native to the individual, or is it knowledge-based built by education and training? And where in the "Western World" is this most prevalent? There are many, many questions and very few answers in this piece. I don't think IQs, if measuring intelligence, are dropping. I know that people today are more "stupid" than ever in my lifetime. The growing complexity of our "Western World" would seem to draw out the stupid more so than the living environment did of a few decades ago.

Teachers aren't teaching. They're too busy indoctrination their charges to hate their parents, doubt their gender, and blindly follow the God-State.

I dunno, maybe they started including democrats in the test samples.

Jordan Peterson has a great take on the effects of lower IQ citizens on a country. According to Peterson there are thirty million people in the U.S. whose IQ's are so low, that these people couldn't perform any job in the civilian sector without constant supervision. These people would also be refused entry into the military, because there are no jobs in the military they could perform without the same constant supervision. Peterson goes on to say that no amount of training would reverse this. He states that he's tried with a number of people in his own practice as had others over the years with the same results. Only with constant supervision can these people perform a task over and over again correctly. The minute they are left alone to perform a task, they make mistakes. Jordan Peterson believes that anyone with an IQ under 80 fits this model. If IQ's are dropping, this does not bode well for the country. Democrats however will find millions of willing voters to push an election in their favor.

My grandson joined the Coast Guard 9 years ago and at that time one needed to have an IQ of 100. Now they have lowered the bar to 86. This branch of the military has high standards. God knows what they recruit in the other branches.

IQ tests must be racist… let do away with them. We are doomed.

Because people don't read any more. I am really saddened that none of the generation of young people anywhere in my extended family actually enjoy just reading. I began reading the newspaper and magazines at age five, and read voraciously my whole life, at one time subscribing to and fully reading 32 magazines for decades. Many of them were scientific or mechanically oriented. Many of those magazines have been taken over by extreme leftists and turned from science or other informational pursuits to extremist propaganda tools. The left has converted huge swaths of the "information space" into propaganda outlets, preventing facts and knowledge from being presented fairly.

If you have studied IQ results worldwide, then you know which people have the highest IQs, the middle level, and the lowest...regardless of politics, economics, or levels of education. The elephant in the room is stating publically what test examiners know privately.

Someone once unkindly described Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) as having a mind that was naturally barren but highly cultivated. I have no idea what that statement meant, "barren" being a relative term. However, discipline and hard work can turn even modest intellectual gifts into something more imposing. Proper education should involve pushing students intellectually out of their comfort zones and into some real work which they would not have done otherwise except for the teacher who challenged them intellectually. Most of us had a handful of teachers who made us into something better than we knew we were. We didn't necessarily appreciate what they did for us at that time, but we learned to love those instructors for the eventual results in our lives. There was once a time when real accomplishment was valued highly enough to make the maximum efforts to succeed. Nowadays there are entire sections of major American cities in which no students--not one--can read or write at grade level, or perform simple arithmetic. In 1969 I was with three busloads of Nashville area Boy Scouts going to the National Jamboree at Farragut State Park, Idaho. On one early leg of the trip I sat next to a an 18-year-old high school graduate (of Nashville's Maplewood High) who was stone illiterate! He couldn't read at first grade level, and he had a diploma. Don't you know that public education is much worse today than in 1969? It's hard to be optimistic when so much ignorance and stupidity envelops our daily lives, even occupies the top rungs of government. Our enemies are evil, but they aren't stupid like Joe and Co.

People with higher IQs have higher connective capacity (a term I just made up now) and will learn by osmosis, absorbing knowledge around them and forming new connections, whether being taught or not. With everyone, the more you learn the more you can learn. Some people add bits and pieces, others add exponentially. This can usually be caught in the tests. It is innate. It could be that the more intelligent people are avoiding studies, or that they are sampling a larger percent of less intelligent people.

#’s 12 1nd 15 have encapsulated it. Very few children (I have six grandchildren now) read for pleasure or knowledge. They rely for information and entertainment on packaged stimulation which doesn’t lead to this “connective capacity”. School systems, public education seem close to worthless, for the most part.

Reply 12, nobody reads. Nobody debates, researches or discovers. IQ is a function of survivability, and if everyone has no challenges, the IQ is not trained. Video games follow a storyline. Learn the story, you beat the game. Many video games follow a set pattern - a theme or script. Learn one you learn them all. None of this trains or exercises IQ. IQ is problem solving. Give someone a standardized IQ test, you need to give them a different test if they take it again or the results are skewed. Such tests DO depend on education level, to some degree. Math and language skills are most critical. If you are good in these, you will score higher.

Pretty simple really. Garbage in, garbage out.

"Why are IQs dropping?" - oh, dear, another conundrum

The Gen-Z generation is no doubt, hands down, no competition, the stupidest generation in the history of the world. If someone can be convinced that men can get pregnant and have a baby, they are just plain stupid.

What IQ tests are good at is predicting how a person will perform on IQ tests (either the same one or another.) They have low correlation (~0.4 ?) with actual performance in class. Anyone like the author of this piece, who seems to believe "STEM" courses do not demand logical reasoning, should take a few math and physics courses. At universities with low admission standards (like large state schools) the graduation rate for students who start in engineering is ~30% and most take more than 4 years to graduate. At schools with high standards, like MIT, the graduation rate is only ~60%.

Keep in mind the consequences of any discussion of IQ. Look at what the mob did to William Shockley. Having said that, also keep in mind that genetics makes the cup but education fills it. No matter how much you pour in a small cup it simply overflows at some point. It does not help that we are a society that seems to breed ADHD via the net.

The school don't teach the three R's