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.

Careful here. STEM definitely requires critical thinking, but crtical thinking is not just 'formal proofs', which is only useful when you're dealing with problems that are already obviously formalizable. This is not the case with the majority of problems in the humanities, e.g. history, literature, and large swathes of philosophy where data is qualitative.

Humanities majors are equipped with their own toolbox of concepts the same way STEM majors are equipped with theirs. For example, a philosophy major would learn important distinctions such as analytic/synthetic, extension/intension, descriptive/prescriptive, a priori/a posteriori, ontological/epistemological, type/token and so on. These are not concepts that you read once and remember and you've 'learned' them. It takes a lot of reading and writing and thinking and arguing over the course of years to grok. When done well, it can greatly illuminate a problem. Expressing the argument formally or in symbolic logic is usually a trivial exercise afterwards, the nature of philosophical inquiry puts the 'critical thinking' prior to the formal parts.

For example, consider the SEP article on Two-Dimensional Semantics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/two-dimensional-semantics...

The article is riddled with formal sections containing matrices and symbolic logic. But these are not the argument itself, and the people who came up with this framework did not arrive at this analytically through formal proofs. Rather, the formal aspects are only used to aid the intuition and remove ambiguity for readers. The bulk of the thinking requires creative and precise conceptual analysis that borrows and reinterprets a variety of well-trodden ideas in other areas of philosophy.

The more sociological and cultural departments of humanities probably have their own set of skills that are considered their versions of critical thinking. I imagine in cultural theory, one probably needs to know several interpretations of history to analyze their problems, since that fields literally deals with how historical baggage muddies the way we even define said problems to begin with. A STEM education, in a vacuum, is not going to be equipped with those tools. Why would they be? To think critically about cultural theory requires understanding facts that are embedded in its subject specific concepts. My ability to work through proofs in discrete mathematics is not going to be helpful here. But my ability to analyze history through say, systems of power is probably going to be necessary. That kind of thinking is missing from STEM, and trivially so -- it literally has nothing to do with STEM.

That is not a failure or criticism of STEM. That would be akin to criticizing English Lit departments for not engaging with math. But (and this is often the context "critical thinking" as a boon that the humanities offers is brought up) being able to recognize a politician's actions as bullshit is going to require more than just 'formal proof' -- it's going to require an ability to sort through social, historical, qualitative, ethical, and philosophical landmines. That ability is critical thinking.

Your post all sounds very good. Have an upvote!

But here's the thing. How does this critical thinking methodology fit in with the strong leftward tilt? I don't know of any successful Marxist societies (forcible or voluntary), so why do critical thinkers think they can get Marxism to work?

Here's a topical example:

https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-...

When the facts don't fit Marxist theory, the researcher gets cancelled.

Here's what I see is the difference between humanities critical thinking, and STEM critical thinking. In STEM, if you design an airplane, and the airplane doesn't fly, no amount of wishful thinking and rhetorical reframing is going to make it fly. The humanities have no such constraint.

For another example, Seattle recently completed a $1 Billion new terminal at Seatac to accommodate new larger planes. After it was finished, they discovered that the airplanes did not fit in the slots for them. There's just no way to spin that one into a success.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-t...

The strong leftward tilt is because part of the political ideology of the left is that society is not currently already leftist (it obviously isn’t — we live in a capitalist world) and critical theorists analyze our society under the historical and structural conditions as to why our society is the way it is. More quantifiable explanations are going to draw from anthropology, economics, sociology and political science. More qualitative explanations are necessarily more philosophical, so that means drawing from thinkers like Marx. That should be expected.

That does not mean that every person in those departments is a communist. Marx simply did a lot of early table-setting for critiquing capitalism. Later thinkers did a lot to extend and refute him, so I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that critical theorists are trying to make “Marxism work”. To my knowledge, orthodox Marxists hate a lot of critical theory. Foucault, for example, is widely read in these circles, but as much as he criticized capitalism and society, he was ultimately a neoliberal. Politics is messy and critical theory is not a monolith.

The wishful thinking part cuts both ways. Leftists members of the academy would probably criticize liberals for wishful thinking that say, the capitalist status quo with some modifications could actually save us from climate catastrophe, or that the most sensitive and important parts of being human are not lost when we live under what they consider a structurally unjust system. Or the blind optimism that the “moral arc of history bends towards justice”.

Given that Marxist-Leninism has failed (although MLs would argue otherwise), I agree with the sentiment that it would be unwise to “try it again”. But an honest and charitable engagement with Marx would show that the claims he makes are rather minimal and broad. His relevance is tied to the fact that he can be reinterpreted, and it would be wrongheaded to see it as any more dogmatic than run of the mill non-leftist, folk politics. The guy simply had a lot to say about the industrial revolution.

You're not rebutting Walter's argument successfully. Everything you've said there is extremely subjective, difficult to pin down and mostly an emotional argument to begin with. Even your starting "obvious" premise that society isn't already leftist would get howls of disagreement from many quarters of society and because nothing that comes out of the humanities is in any way precise or rigorous it would be impossible to even resolve that dispute. You wouldn't even ever get to the point of arguing about whether Marx's claims were really "minimal" (lol) or whether he has "relevance" or was not "dogmatic"!

Whereas we built an airport and the plane doesn't fit is something not something anyone can argue about. Either the planes fit or they don't. Humanities academia devolves into Marxism so fast exactly because it's not pinned down by reality in that way, which is why it should just be abolished. Why should the rest of us be forced to pay for gibberish like "cyborg techno-feminism"?

You’re making a lot of criticisms, but you haven’t shown me why what I’ve said is extremely subjective, or why it’s an emotional argument.

First of all, it is obvious that society isn’t already leftist. If you’re citing “many quarters of society howling in disagreement”, you’ll have to show me to 1) the data and 2) this somehow changes the actual nature of our society. Do you actually think that we live in a leftist society? I certainly do not see a plurality of worker co-ops walking down the street, and last I checked, the vast majority of the means of production are still privately owned. I am not going to explain my argument again as to why this gives critical theory a leftist bent.

Your argument seems to be motivated by the fact you don’t like some of the conclusions drawn out by academics in the humanities because they don’t fit your priors. To me, it’s obvious you fall right Dunning-Kruger’s trap, having read and understood virtually nothing about the subjects in question if you’re citing “cyborg techno feminism” as an example of “Marxist devolution”. You’re really proving the point here that a lack of engagement with the humanities leads to a lack critical thinking.

If you believe Dunning-Kruger is fictitious, you can't use it as an appellation on those who don't.

Yes, I was pointing out the irony.