American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the 'Reverse Flynn effect'

They say scores in spatial reasoning went up while analogies, vocabulary, and numerical reasoning declined.

Hmmm I wonder if an increase use of videogames paired with a decrease in the amount of time parents can spend communicating with their children might be related.

Note that over the last 30 years it's vastly transitioned from one parent staying home raising children to both parents working.

Not sure where you got your data, but from what I can find, the rate of stay at home parents has mostly stayed unchanged between 1989 and 2018: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/24/stay-at-hom...

Huh that is interesting.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/estimate...

Here is a pretty clear indication that people are just not having children.

Maybe the percentage of stay at home parents has stayed the same but the number of stay at home parents has shrunk because the number of all parents has just shrunk as well.

None of that really helps indicate why IQ in certain metrics related to communication would be in decline. Since the percentages are the same you would think outcomes would be similar then.

So are kids getting dumber or are parents just getting worse?

Or other factors in our environment are contributing to this. An increase in smart devices autocorrecting and doing 'math' for us for example.

'30 years ago' is 1970 to 2000 I bet :)

Hahaha you raise a good point. I'm thinking in the perspective of 90s view on stay-home parents shrinking where as since 2000's that trend has changed:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/08/7-key-findi...

Nearly 50% of households in the 70s had a stay-at-home parent. So a larger number of parents today grew up with working parents than 5 decades ago.

Reminds me of this "The humble pocket calculator should have taken Sociology by storm half a century ago." post criticizing how psychometrics has become bunk as it hasn't kept up with the times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887

If the Norwegians are to be believed then no.

> A study of Norwegian military conscripts' test records found that IQ scores have been falling for generations born after the year 1975, and that the underlying cause of both initial increasing and subsequent falling trends appears to be environmental rather than genetic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

Humans are incredibly adaptive. Is there much reason to have an expansive vocabulary nowadays? We are taught to speak and write as concisely and understandably as possible. We can look up the definition of any word at our fingertips. "[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books." - Einstein.

Maybe these tests are declining because they are measuring skills that are decreasingly relevant? I'm not certain I believe this myself but it's an interesting thought.

Your vocabulary is tied to your expressive power and your ability to form coherent and compelling arguments. I'd argue that without an expansive vocabulary you would struggle to write with precision let alone brevity.

Not that its wrong to question, I just think you'd need to do more work supporting the idea that language skills are less important today for some reason.

> We are taught to speak and write as concisely and understandably as possible.

One day... I believe.

> Your vocabulary is tied to your expressive power and your ability to form coherent and compelling arguments

There is even more to it. Language can influence (prev.: limits) your thinking and ability to categorize. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

(Removed misleading reference)

> We can look up the definition of any word at our fingertips.

So what? Being able to understand expressive language and quickly context shift vocabulary is extremely valuable. If you don't have the vocabulary to identify context, being able to look up the definition of words will only get you so far. Additionally, you can't write words if you don't know that they exist.

All, I am not saying that having a solid vocabulary isn't valuable. Of course it is valuable. What I am saying is that potentially, for most people, having a vastly expansive vocabulary might not be as valuable as it used to be.

There is ongoing debate among academics, even in Norway...

In 2019, a group of researchers from the University of Oslo published a study that found no evidence of a decline in IQ scores over time in Norway, despite claims of such declines in other countries. The researchers argued that the methodology used in previous studies may have contributed to false conclusions about declining IQ scores.

In contrast, a group of researchers from the University of Amsterdam published a study in 2018 that reported a decline in IQ scores in the Netherlands over the past several decades. The researchers suggested that changes in educational systems, such as increased emphasis on testing and memorization, may be contributing to the decline.

Isn't this Sapir-Whorf, which has been disproven? At least the last time I read of it in relation to 1984.

Yup, linguistic determinism is nonsense, thanks for pointing that out. I edited my comment.

That only makes it even more valuable for one to possess it because it sets you apart from everyone else.

A few years ago I did a pretty thorough reading of one of these Norwegian studies and the methodology was... abysmal. I don't remember which direction the reported effect was in, but I do remember that the way they computed it meant that it was the reverse direction of what the true effect should have been. Kind of an impressive mistake.

Made me pretty skeptical of the FE literature.

Plus the focus on teaching for the test and the move away from critical thinking in schools. I had to teach critical thinking myself to my kids and also how to research and cross reference. I have two sets of encyclopedias and a pile of other reference books and showed them how to use them. What they teach in schools now is vastly different from when I went to school. Public education has gone from teaching critical thinking and problem solving to group thinking, homogenizing and memorizing the 'correct' answers, no understanding required.

I've previously wondered if people are learning vocabulary they wouldn't be willing to put in a test.

This site is dense in terms and acronyms that generally will not appear in a dictionary, which does not appear to be unusual. Many interests and professions have a frightening number of terms and acronyms now.

What about this: stay at home parenting comment was as pure attempt on pushing ideology as can be. There were so many changes in the meantime - parenting is more intense, kids read less, kids watch videos more, kids socialize differently, school system is more demanding and kids finish more years of schooling, that taking a single aspect and making conclusions off it is unlikely to end up with reasonable results.

Using a rare word with a marginally different meaning to convey an idea more precisely and concisely depends on the person on the other end of the conversation knowing that word and the marginal difference in meaning it conveys. The moment you can't trust people to distinguish between two synonyms, one of them becomes useless. As we communicate with wider groups whom we have less familiarity with, the amount you can trust nuance to be conveyed decreases. And logically as already rare words become more rarely used, the likelihood that your audience is familiar with them further decreases.

Someone who focuses on clearly explaining thoughts using small numbers of commonly understood words will be much better at forming coherent and compelling arguments than someone who instead invests the same resources in learning a vast but useless vocabulary.