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.

If we interpret the claim charitably as 'STEM majors do not confer critical thinking skills to a greater degree than other majors', I don't think it's obviously unfair, with some caveats.

Solving a problem with one or more right answers is very different from critical thinking. Anecdotally I've seen people coming from a heavy STEM background struggle with nuance and ambiguity more than people coming from a well-rounded or heavy humanities background. I doubt the programs themselves are worse for critical thinking (good luck controlling for confounds), but it's not obvious they're better, either.

> Anecdotally I've seen people coming from a heavy STEM background struggle with nuance and ambiguity more than people coming from a well-rounded or heavy humanities background.

Engineers deal with ambiguity all the time. They do so in a logical and systematic fashion using statistics and probability. Noise is an unfortunate fact of life.

We're talking about undergraduate degree programs, which for STEM consist substantially of problem sets and tests that have right answers. Sometimes they're just answers, sometimes they're more like Pareto frontiers, sometimes they're programs, but in any case the bulk of the work is verifiable, which is a luxury. It's a bit (but only a bit) like the difference between solving a chess puzzle and actually playing chess. We teach people with puzzles, then send them out into the world to play real games.

They do teach statistics in undergrad engineering though.

They do, substantially in the form of problem sets and tests that have right answers. This is the point; it's not a counterpoint.