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

Imagine that, 150 years ago or whenever, some clever soul had decided to make a written test to measure niceness, and called the test score Niceness Quotient. And the first version sucked, but some other folks iterated on it and over time the test was improved until it correlated pretty well to the sorts of things you would think that niceness would correlate to. 150 years of progress later, we'd have a whole field of Niceometry and researchers trying to isolate sub-areas like charity, friendliness, etc, and trying to suss out an underlying factor of general amiability, and the whole thing would be so well embedded in to the culture that almost no one remembers that "nice" is just a regular word with no objective or scientific definition, and that we measure it with a written test not because that's a good way to measure niceness but because we can't find a better way.

This is a terrible analogy, IQ tests measure something real and objective called the g factor : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

Also, intelligence tests are but a tiny part of psychology, I would hardly call it a "whole field".

> IQ tests measure something real and objective called the g factor

Sure, and NQ tests do too, because look how well graciousness correlates with cheerfulness! That can't be an accident, can it?

Less snarkily, a better analogy would be athletic ability. Suppose you take a bunch of people and measure how fast they can run, how well they can shoot free throws, and how far they can throw a football. Will the results be correlated? Of course, some people are more athletic than others. Does that mean there's a quantity called 'athleticism' that we can objectively measure with a number? No; and not because all people are equally athletic, but because you're trying to take a squishy subjective English language word and pretend it's a scalar value.

> I would hardly call it a "whole field".

The problem isn't the size of the field, it's that academics work within their field, they don't refute it. There's a very uncomfortable result about IQ tests that a generation of psychologists have tried to explain away, and I maintain that the reason they haven't succeeded is because they are institutionally incapable of saying, "Hey, maybe this is pseudoscience."

Respectfully, you chose the wrong hill to die on. Psychology has many squishy parts, but psychometry is basically the closest thing it has to a hard science.

The other comment adresses your NQ argument, but here's something I don't understand: "There's a very uncomfortable result about IQ tests that a generation of psychologists have tried to explain away"

This reeks of anti-intellectualism by the way ("can't trust the experts!"), but I am curious to know what you're referring to. It can't be the validity or reliability of IQ tests, surely? Both have been very solidly established for a long time.

> This reeks of anti-intellectualism by the way ("can't trust the experts!"), but I am curious to know what you're referring to.

I'm referring to HBD. Respectfully, if you're not familiar with that then you have a lot of prior art to catch up on before you expound on how well-grounded psychometry is.

HBD is so fringe I had a hard time googling it. Just because a subset of a subfield is politically motivated and hateful does not invalidate the whole field. That intelligence testing can be misrepresented to defend racism is an argument against humans, not against the science.

Meanwhile, unbiased research has shown for a long time that there is no significant variations in IQ between races when considering socioeconomic factors. We've determined this with, guess what, psychometry, and it is the overwhelming consensus in psychology. If this was your main gripe with it, rest assured that the field you so underestimate is entirely dismissive of it.

It seems to me you're just looking for ways to dismiss decades of research based on misinformation perpetuated, overwhelmingly, by non-experts. Congratulations, you are in this group.

Thoughts on this comment about the supposed hidebound nature of the field of psychometrics?

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

The problem is there are no sources and many claims. I can barely tell what point, if any, they're trying to make.

They don't seem to know about the g factor, which I've linked to many times today. The existence of it means one thing: smart is smart. If you're above average at "mental labor", you're also above average at learning the tools you can leverage to make your labor better faster. This would explain why the calculator didn't shatter the economic predictiveness of the g factor, and neither did the computer, and neither will ChatGPT until it becomes a true AGI. Until mental labor stops being a thing, g factor will always be a strong (though not absolute) predictor of economic success, and so will IQ tests, since they measure it.

I don't see how the comment is related to the article however. The g factor going down in general wouldn't change this correlation; it's still better to be smarter no matter what the average is.