> IQ scores in most of the Western world began reversing sometime from the 90s to early 00s. [1] That link is for the US but similar stuff has also been observed in most of every Western/OECD nation.
I wonder to what extent demographic shifts account for the observed reversal? It would be interesting to tease out what happens where composition remains constant, i.e. Poland. Though I doubt this explains the entire effect.
> By contrast they're still rapidly increasing in the 'Global South'.
seems like the Flynn effect doing its thing just as it did in western countries in the 20th century.
Just because smart people tend to have fewer children (because, for instance, they delay it due to schooling and career demands) doesn't mean genes for intelligence are necessarily being selected against.
There's several reasons why this might not be the case, including that our premise is simple heritability and not genetic determinism, which is a different concept. I get where you're coming from now though.
People beat around the bush but the heritability of IQ is extremely high, modern studies put it around 80%. So if one group has an IQ of 140 and another of 100, it'd imply about 32 of those 40 points are generally able to be explained by genetic factors. For some contrast that tends to be around, or a bit above, the estimated heritability for height.
And so you'd see that easily in a single generation. It'd be akin to if tall people (or short people) began removing themselves from the gene pool in significant quantities. You'd immediately (well at least once people reached their adult height) see a significant increase or decrease in average heights.
This isn't true; 80s and 90s-vintage twin studies put it around 80%, but those numbers have been slashed; even hereditarians don't stand by them anymore. Molecular genetics results (contested by hereditarians, in fairness) situate it closer to 15-30%. David Bessis has a good piece about this.
And that's before you get to the slippery definition of what "heritability" means. It does allow you to use the words "explained by genetic factors", but in a very specific way, one in which the number of hands you have isn't similarly explainable, but how much TV you watch is.
That's quite a meaningless statement. Molecular genetics is in its infancy and so you're appealing to absence lack of evidence, which exists for most of everything, as evidence of absence - quite nihilistic! A quick search similarly suggests rates as low as 10% for the heritability of (non-European) height based on molecular genetics, undoubtedly for the same reasons.
And we've already had this conversation and in spite of your obsession with bias confirming 'blogs written by very smart people' - the heritability of TV watching is zero. Actually lol looking this up, it turns out there has indeed been a study done on this [1], as part of a study on the heritability of sedentary behaviors in general. And yeah, it's zero.
You are right that the number of hands you have is not heritable, but is only because heritability is defined as the percent of variation in a trait, between populations, that can be explained by genetic factors. When basically everybody has two hands, there is no variation, so there is no heritability to measure. It'd be like discussing the heritability of hair color if everybody had black hair. It's not some sort of clever insight or retort, though I'm certain your blogs framed it as the wittiest thing ever.
This comment doesn't actually say anything. I get that you're unhappy with the comment that I wrote? But that's all I get from it.
The one specific claim you make here, that height has heritabilities measured at around 10%, is false. In fact, the comparisons between the steadfastly high heritabilities of simple physical phenotypical traits like height and complex behavioral characteristics is a big part of the current scientific conversation about behavioral genetics.
But you’re seeing huge effects in three years, not a generation.
The report notes “The change in mean scores that can be explained merely by the changing composition of the student body, however, never exceeds a few points.”
So for Portugal for example about 10% of the drop might be attributable to immigration. But the other 90% to something else.
The West is still mostly in the denial phase, so nothing is really being done, yet. As such, the effect is ongoing. The Flynn Effect (and its reversal) are measured in impact per decade. And numbers that seem small at first aren't necessarily so. For instance a 3 point decline per decade doesn't initially seem like much until you consider that IQ generally has an artificial mean of 100 with a standard deviation of 15. So 3 points per decade is 20% of a standard deviation per decade! That's enormous.
In the past an IQ of 85 was considered mentally retarded. This was changed in 70s to make normal intelligence 'more inclusive.' That's another way of stating that 85 is still the best threshold for mental retardation. So a reverse Flynn Effect of 3 points/decade means you're talking about going from perfectly average to mentally retarded in 5 decades.
And for many things, the effect will not be linear. If we take a test there's likely to be an exponential pattern where somebody of a certain IQ will get an answer correct e.g. 99% of the time, somebody a bit below 80%, somebody a bit below that 40%, and then somebody a bit below that will basically never get it correct beyond the point of statistical noise. Pair that with likely increased variance when looking at individual and relatively small societies, and it's fairly easy to imagine sharp swings being completely viable.
Not almost everybody alive, but certainly a very large percent. And you also have to keep in mind what this means in different eras. In the not so distant past the overwhelming majority of work was agrarian, any formal education was relatively rare, and issues like malnutrition were quite common. That latter aspect alone has been assessed at affecting IQ by ~15 points, enough to already send an average person into the domain of mental retardation. Go back somewhat further and drinking 'small beer', as it was called, was a frequent recommendation for young children since it was guaranteed to be relatively sterile, and had more nutrients than water. Cheers to developing brains!
But if you go into the past and just look at well educated, well nourished individuals, regularly exercising their brain - then their cognitive ability was likely comparable, if not higher, than that of a typical modern era individual. But that sample made up a very small chunk of all people whereas today I'm comparing them to the norm.
This. If there is one thing I've learned it is certainly not that you can generalize from yourself to others, especially for medication and its side-effects and withdrawal effects. I get so sick from taking novalgin that its a medical emergency (Agranulocytosis). Apparently, this occurs in like 1 case in a million. Conversely, I've heard of horrible side-effects or withdrawals from other medications where I experienced absolutely none of them.
To be fair I didn't understand the author's statements as looking down on people who dislike poems that don't rhyme. Regardless, I think, and hopefully we could both agree, that we shouldn't look down on people for any reason. Humans have inherit value and worth that does not depend on laws, leaders or their views on any topic.
I will say, I am always impressed, if some time has gone by and I pick up some Chaucer, Keats, Byron, Shakespeare again. Interestingly, now that I am reflecting on it, one of the most impressive and dense, at least to me, is Milton, who writes in blank verse in Paradise Lost, which itself provides a counterpoint to the notion that non-rhyming poems are less impressive.
I think I still agree with you though that ceteris paribus, Paradise Lost with rhyme would be even more impressive, though I do wonder if it would have the same impact.
I agree. And I would remove the basically. I give it five years before essentially just a few very senior people are managing the whole cycle. Downward pressure on wages is just gonna keep ratcheting up.
I'd be interested to know what everyone's favorite opening lines of all time are. (bonus - to see how much of it you can quote without looking :)
For me, its:
Whann that aprill with hir shoures soote,
The drought of march hath perced to the roote,
And zepherus eek with his sweete breath,
inspired hath in every holt and heth,
the tendre cropes, and the sonne hath in the ram,
hir halve cours ironne,
Than preketh hem natur in hir courages,
and longon folk to gon on pilgrimages.
Somehow that has always stuck with me, I'm sure I'm missing parts, but from the first time I ever heard these lines the just imprinted themselves like a song to me.
"The war tried to kill us in the spring" from The Yellow Birds always stuck with me, for its complete decoupling of the war from the men who had come thousands of miles to fight it.
** ETA the full opening:
“The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
Though for me it’s the second line that nails it: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
I was taught to use the term "action sentence" for an opening line that actually does something to a reader, and to aspire to that. I think it's a Gordon Lish-coined term, but it might not be.
Hard to pick an absolute favourite, but one would be:
"There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls."
From Cortazar's short story Axolotl.
I don't know for certain why I find it so evocative, but it certainly draws me in, and makes me want to know more.
Quoting without looking attempt:
"I went to see them in the aquarium in the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now, I am an axolotl."
"Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French."
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins
Being English, from the south, where learning French to only a poor standard is a common pastime, you can just picture it instantly.
Curiously, it seems difficult to find John Donne's Meditations XVII with the original language. The spelling has been modernized everywhere I can find it online.
(I suppose this technically isn't the opening line, but it's the first line used when most people quote the passage.)
No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine
I'm no expert, and don't know if it applies in this case, but for a cancer I had (lymphoma) I was told that aggressive can often be easier to treat or "cure" (as defined by survival rates, etc.) since it also can often be hit more brutally by the treatments.
Anyway, since many in my family have died from this horrible cancer, its fantastic news to hear of any improvements there.
Sorry, it does not apply ... this drug inhibits (for the first time) the KRAS mutation (previously considered "undruggable") that is the primary cause of 90% of pancreatic cancers and 50% of colon cancers.
Lymphoma is a bit of an outlier. In the case of lymphoma, more aggressive types indeed respond better to treatment, and given that we are now fairly good at treating lymphoma, that translates to good outcomes.
This. Its also great for finding out all the ways you are wrong or discovering the views, data, perspectives you are missing. I use it for this as well.
Category theory is all about relationships and structural patterns. so its useful when you want to interoperability and composition between systems i.e. invariants under transformations, etc.
Without reading too much into what this framework does, I'd say category theory could be useful for some ML problems (i.e. layer composition, gradient propagation, etc.) - but I'd think it would be more useful as an analytical tool than as actual lib/code structures.
I wonder to what extent demographic shifts account for the observed reversal? It would be interesting to tease out what happens where composition remains constant, i.e. Poland. Though I doubt this explains the entire effect.
> By contrast they're still rapidly increasing in the 'Global South'.
seems like the Flynn effect doing its thing just as it did in western countries in the 20th century.
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