RE: Crime Stats. There was work out there that showed the crime spike between the 60s and 00s in the US coinciding with 1) the move from segregation and the development of more independent African- American communities, 2) the more relaxed immigration policy, especially from South America(you've seen Scarface, probably). But because correlation != causality I would add a lot of other factors that were conducive to an uptick in criminal behaviour: the War in Vietnam and the massive disillusionment with the government, also late 70s and early 80s economic recession(conveniently the spike on the graph ;) ), a string of not so formidable presidents with horrendous public policy etc. So even though fertility is going down, some environmental factors are quite ripe for increase in criminality(with economic troubles being an almost sure fire trigger).
"The current generation of young people scores about a standard deviation higher (average d = 1.05) on the clinical scales, including Pd (Psychopathic Deviation), Pa (Paranoia), Ma (Hypomania), and D (Depression). "
That's huge if it represents a real increase, the average person in the current generation is at the 86th percentile of the comparison group. Another generation of "progress" to 98th percentile and we'll be undone.
On another note: For these purposes crime statistics should probably be age-adjusted and medical-tech adjusted for homicide.
MMPI is a weird self-report scale, and university students have undergone a selection change over time from elite towards less elite. These two factors reduce our confidence in these results, but Twenge has a lot of other evidence if you check out her work. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jean-Twenge/research
Maybe the test givers are just getting nicer and giving more lenient scores than they did in the past. That's how it was for me on the intelligence test I took, although I wasn't told whether it was for IQ.
My theory of the Flynn Effect is that early IQ test designers came up with tests that measured skills that tended to be more in demand and more trained for by daily life in the future. In particular, the push to come up with tests that were less culture-dependent brought about more futuristic tests like the the Raven's Matrices.
In this view, it's not wholly a coincidence that the Father of American IQ Testing (Lewis Terman) and the Father of Silicon Valley (Fred Terman) were father and son.
Didn't Hsu have a post some time ago arguing that while the total IQ score is increasing, scores on verbal tests, which he argues is one of the and maybe the most important factor in abstract reasoning (inb4 wordcels), are actually quite steady and even declining? I can't remember which post that was from though so there's your anecdotal evidence of reverse Flynn right here.
Vocabulary, general knowledge, arithmetic tests do not show much increase over time, that's one of the issues with interpreting total IQ going up as intelligence going up.
On the Wechsler, the subtests with the smallest Flynn Effects tend to be the most traditional and most culture-dependent: Reading comprehension, arithmetic, and general information. The less culture-dependent and more science fiction-like, the bigger the Flynn Effect. Thus, Raven's has had a huge Flynn Effect.
Check the work of Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley. If you look at the more g (general intelligence) weighted metrics iq is indeed going down. So is color acuity and reaction time, which both correlate to intelligence.
I did read it. The most glaring mistake is the reliance on the 1980s obesity spike, which seems like a nonlinear transformation issue. BMI increases are fairly linear when you check. In any case, I don't see anything particularly convincing wrt. the lithium evidence. This stuff should be easy to prove or disprove by someone familiar with the relevant datasets.
El Paso, Texas has famously high levels of lithium in the water supply. It also has low murder rates and relatively high school test scores for its Mexican-American population.
On the other hand, Ciudad Juarez across the Rio Grande has very high murder rates. I don't know about how much lithium there is in the water, but it's a curious general pattern that twin border towns tend to be lethal on the Mexican side and calm on the American side.
RE: Crime Stats. There was work out there that showed the crime spike between the 60s and 00s in the US coinciding with 1) the move from segregation and the development of more independent African- American communities, 2) the more relaxed immigration policy, especially from South America(you've seen Scarface, probably). But because correlation != causality I would add a lot of other factors that were conducive to an uptick in criminal behaviour: the War in Vietnam and the massive disillusionment with the government, also late 70s and early 80s economic recession(conveniently the spike on the graph ;) ), a string of not so formidable presidents with horrendous public policy etc. So even though fertility is going down, some environmental factors are quite ripe for increase in criminality(with economic troubles being an almost sure fire trigger).
"The current generation of young people scores about a standard deviation higher (average d = 1.05) on the clinical scales, including Pd (Psychopathic Deviation), Pa (Paranoia), Ma (Hypomania), and D (Depression). "
That's huge if it represents a real increase, the average person in the current generation is at the 86th percentile of the comparison group. Another generation of "progress" to 98th percentile and we'll be undone.
On another note: For these purposes crime statistics should probably be age-adjusted and medical-tech adjusted for homicide.
MMPI is a weird self-report scale, and university students have undergone a selection change over time from elite towards less elite. These two factors reduce our confidence in these results, but Twenge has a lot of other evidence if you check out her work. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jean-Twenge/research
Maybe the test givers are just getting nicer and giving more lenient scores than they did in the past. That's how it was for me on the intelligence test I took, although I wasn't told whether it was for IQ.
My theory of the Flynn Effect is that early IQ test designers came up with tests that measured skills that tended to be more in demand and more trained for by daily life in the future. In particular, the push to come up with tests that were less culture-dependent brought about more futuristic tests like the the Raven's Matrices.
In this view, it's not wholly a coincidence that the Father of American IQ Testing (Lewis Terman) and the Father of Silicon Valley (Fred Terman) were father and son.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-flynn-effect-across-time-and-space/
Didn't Hsu have a post some time ago arguing that while the total IQ score is increasing, scores on verbal tests, which he argues is one of the and maybe the most important factor in abstract reasoning (inb4 wordcels), are actually quite steady and even declining? I can't remember which post that was from though so there's your anecdotal evidence of reverse Flynn right here.
Vocabulary, general knowledge, arithmetic tests do not show much increase over time, that's one of the issues with interpreting total IQ going up as intelligence going up.
https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_ANPSY_123_0465--the-flynn-effect-and-its-paradoxes.htm
On the Wechsler, the subtests with the smallest Flynn Effects tend to be the most traditional and most culture-dependent: Reading comprehension, arithmetic, and general information. The less culture-dependent and more science fiction-like, the bigger the Flynn Effect. Thus, Raven's has had a huge Flynn Effect.
Huh, I was under the exact opposite impression for some reason. Good to have that fixed.
Check the work of Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley. If you look at the more g (general intelligence) weighted metrics iq is indeed going down. So is color acuity and reaction time, which both correlate to intelligence.
It's about 1.5 iq points per decade
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289613000470
This was already discussed in the post.
I did read it. The most glaring mistake is the reliance on the 1980s obesity spike, which seems like a nonlinear transformation issue. BMI increases are fairly linear when you check. In any case, I don't see anything particularly convincing wrt. the lithium evidence. This stuff should be easy to prove or disprove by someone familiar with the relevant datasets.
El Paso, Texas has famously high levels of lithium in the water supply. It also has low murder rates and relatively high school test scores for its Mexican-American population.
On the other hand, Ciudad Juarez across the Rio Grande has very high murder rates. I don't know about how much lithium there is in the water, but it's a curious general pattern that twin border towns tend to be lethal on the Mexican side and calm on the American side.
There is no obesity spike in the 1980s.