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.

> I doubt the programs themselves are worse for critical thinking (good luck controlling for confounds), but it's not obvious they're better, either.

A lot of engineers I’ve encountered who have little social science or humanities experience seem to not be well equipped to critically evaluate works in those disciplines when they do encounter them. Which makes them vulnerable to crackpot ideology, or just latching onto the first thing they encounter that makes sense to them.

It works both ways though. Many a non-technical CEO has been talked into buying some worthless overpriced piece of enterprise software over the objections of their IT department.

But your experience isn't universal or even common. Most of the engineers I've encountered can and do critically evaluate work in social science and the humanities, correctly conclude it's built on a very flimsy foundation of scientism, has little value and that this is why social science/humanities academics are so vulnerable to crackpot ideologies. Something much more strongly associated with universities than engineering organizations. Critical theory did not come from Boeing.

> Most of the engineers I've encountered can and do critically evaluate work in social science and the humanities, correctly conclude it's built on a very flimsy foundation of scientism, has little value

"correctly conclude", huh. You're basically saying "people with similar backgrounds as mine reject the theories proposed by people with very different backgrounds, and I think they're quite right".

I probably have a similar background as you do compared with a professor in social science, so I might agree with your conclusion (that a lot of theories in humanities are flimsy), but I see nothing to indicate (except your assertion) that those engineers you know actually evaluate work in social sciences and the humanities critically. Maybe they reject them because they sound so alien and unfamiliar?

If you mean they're "critical" because they don't easily buy into those crackpot theories, perhaps consider the crackpot theories in the software engineering profession -- Agile methodology? Test driven development? Best way to interview programmers? Benefits of using $fad_framework? These are actually questions that could in theory be answered using social science methodologies. Yet what we do as a profession is simply cargo cult what the big names do. IMHO a tech CEO being sold on useless "Agile" methodologies is basically the equivalent of "a non-technical CEO has been talked into buying some worthless overpriced piece of enterprise software".