The initial statement confuses me: “According to the pyschologically accepted Flynn effect, across the 20th century, the average I.Q. increased 3 points per decade[.]”
As I understand it, the intelligence quotient is adjusted so that for every test the average score is 100. This means that the average score will never rise; it is by definition 100.
Derleth
How do you mean recalibrate the test? The average score is by definition 100 IQ, so even if on average people are scoring higher than they did before the calculations are still routine. Unadjusted scores are expected to wildly vary between different tests; after all, it would be extremely difficult to make a test of equal difficulty.
That’s the rub, I don’t assume he’s right. I think he’s completely full of shit. Intelligence tests are not precise measuring tools like a vernier caliper. They do measure intelligence but lumped in with a lot of specific knowledge and language skills. Trying to make an era neutral I.Q. test is going to be more difficult than making a culture neutral test.
The increase in IQ tests could just be a result of better education and a better knowledge of how to take IQ tests.
But aside from that, the fallacy is the assumption that when you find a trend, it has always been that way and will always continue that way. The Flynn Effect could merely be a minor random variation over the short time the tests have been used.
Look, if there is a trend in IQ test scores, then it means… that there’s a trend in IQ test scores. Nothing more, and nobody seems to be claiming anything more as a fact.
Phage: From what I understand about how they alter the tests over time, it is the case that if I got one score on a modern test, I’d get a higher score on an older test. I could keep taking older and older tests to get higher and higher scores. That’s what I meant with recalibration: The tests are being `recentered’ around the current average, which is higher than any prior average.
You’ve neglected another equally important trend - height. Using 20th-century trends in height, it’s easy to show that people in Shakespeare’s time were but a few inches tall (on average - the truly short ones had negative height).
The size of surviving artifacts such as clothes, furniture and buildings are a bit hard to square with this, until you consider that these are just the sorts of blunders that people with zero or negative intelligence could be expected to make.
The thing about people with negative intelligence is that they themselves do not maintain it, no no no no no
Instead they suck intelligence from everyone around them untill there IQ is positive. That’s how we get large groups of retards.