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

When IQ tests were invented folks didn't know about tests, at least in the US. They were rural immigrants who could maybe read. So when asked logic questions, they would answer pragmatically and be 'wrong'. That had some impact on perceived early low results.

As folks became better-read and educated they began to understand that IQ test questions were a sort of puzzle, not a real honest question. The answer was expected to solve the puzzle, not be right in any way.

E.g. There are no Elephants in Germany. Munich is in Germany. How many elephants are there in Munich? A) 0 B) 1 C)2

Folks back then might answer B or C, because they figure hey there's probably a zoo in Munich, bet they have an elephant or two there. And be marked wrong.

That theory could be plausible, except Flynn used results from Raven's Progressive Matrices, which is just pattern recognition. There are no questions about elephants or text-based questions that could introduce cultural bias. It's simply picking the shape that matches the pattern presented in a grid.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices

I've often heard from humanities academics that STEM majors do not confer critical thinking skills.

I really wonder what do the people in humanities consider “critical thinking”. Mathematics and formal proofs are the epitome of logical thought IMHO - while arguments in the humanities often don’t have the same level of rigor; nor are their p-tests as stringent as in the physical sciences. So what exactly is it that’s they think is missing from STEM?

Edit: Don’t just downvote. Explain. That’s what we are here for.

Rigor in modern non-STEM academics is extremely abstract at best, and clouded with clique-derived "registers" of language that only the in-group shares. This language spills out into some drivel like the following I found the other afternoon:

    This article utilises feminist technoscience studies' notions of bodily 'materialisation' and 'ontological choreographies', offering a cyborg feminist account...

And it goes on.

Modern academia outside of most STEM programs leads to things like this. I've seen a few English 101 professors that valiantly try to get their freshman past a 5th grade reading and writing level (to some success) and to actually think critically. But once you enter the hallowed halls of academia and begin to learn the language and methods of reasoning, which are lacking. I can call out one such methodology (it has a name that I've long forgotten) that allows one to make claims and assertions about the contents of a text without considering the authorial intent at all. It is essentially a codified method of casting aspersions. So-and-so becomes a gay lover, such-and-such is an allegory for communism, and so on.

I'll go ahead and blame 'process philosophy', the rejection of the absolute, the rejection of the spiritual, the obsession with a mechanistic existence, and the blind faith that -- somehow -- humanity is getting better all the time.

Where our reasoning faculties are now has been centuries in the making, even the founding fathers of the United States argued about rationalism and its rejection of the divine.

But the rationalists prevailed, and after them Marx, Lenin, Freud, and others.

And now we're here.

> Rigor in modern non-STEM academics is extremely abstract at best, and clouded with clique-derived "registers" of language that only the in-group shares. This language spills out into some drivel like the following I found the other afternoon:

There's still a significant chunk of philosophy which isn't like that at all. Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush). But philosophy in the analytic/Anglo-American tradition has maintained much of its immunity against that disease.

Similarly, there's still plenty of work published in fields such as history, economics, sociology, political science, etc, which (mostly or entirely) sticks to good old-fashioned factual arguments. For example, sociology of religion – try reading the late Rodney Stark's work on applying rational choice theory to the study of religions, or Eric Kaufmann's contributions to religious demography – you won't find any "cyborg feminism" in either of them.

I'd be very interested in the "analytic/Anglo-American tradition" crowd. Can you recommend any books? I'd even take a college primer on the subject.

I will definitely take a look at Stark's and Kaufmann's work.

The analytic/continental split happened around the 19th century. Both traditions read more or less the same thinkers in Western philosophy (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, the Enlightenment Rationalists, the Enlightenment Empiricists, the Enlightenment Idealists, Kant) up until then. Once you hit the 19th century, stick with the readings that deal with the problems set out by Frege, Russell, and Moore, who are trying to get as close to science and formalizing problems in a clear, mathematical way as possible. As a result, the philosophical agenda uses conceptual engineering as a general approach. Generally speaking, any topic that fits into a "Philosophy of X" (e.g. Philosophy of mind, language, ethics, action, etc) is part of the analytic tradition.

The continental thinkers (starting with Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger) are asking questions like "What is one's place in the world?" or "How do forces of history affect the deepest parts of people?" or "How does our Western scientific worldview limit other kinds of knowledge?" On the surface, this is going to seem a lot more 'subjective' and is partly why it gets obscure very, very fast. Personally, I think it's still worth reading, but that's because I find those issues interesting to begin with.