A high IQ. Why does it matter? Is it Overrated ??

[Mike]

Posted by Dilettante (here)

Posted by Mike (here)
I think I understand the spirit of your post - and empathize with it on some level - but it also sounds quite a bit like the degrowth communism being promoted by the WEF. Deliberately making ourselves poorer now to hypothetically heal the planet sometime in the distant future doesn't make much sense to me. Significantly reducing the use of nuclear power and fossil fuels will cause the death of millions of people. I feel a far greater responsibility to human beings than the animals and insects. In a perfect world we'd have access to free energy, which would conveniently unburden us from this type of dilemma, but that's a whole other topic...

I don't think you can eliminate hierarchies and arrive at anything else but communism. When people envision a spiritual utopia, it's natural to eliminate hierarchies because I think most of us associate them with power and corruption. Of course they are susceptible to those things, but I'd argue that the main driving force behind hierarchies is competence. Once it's revealed that someone is better or more competent than someone else in some domain or other, a hierarchy organically forms. So hierarchy is inevitable in that way. And if you attempt to flatten out the hierarchies, you kill competence. And if you kill competence, you kill society. So I think we should embrace hierarchy, not seek to eliminate it.

Is this forum communism? Doesn't seem like it to me. Is there a strict hierarchy? Not really. A rhizomatic structure if you will. Replicated in real life in small communities where through the power of the Internet, clusters of people have been able to disconnect from the centralized system in different and varied ways.

Large-scale communism doesn't work any better than large-scale capitalism does because we're really just arguing about how to distribute the same number of resources in different ways. It's the rate of resource extraction that matters. I mentioned the Christian communes because those were a multitude of small communities that practiced a certain devotion to a lifestyle that was sustainable for hundreds of years, not because I'm communist.

Will we be poorer? Well, what do you define as poor? For myself, it seems that I don't need much more than a neat place to venture to every now and then, a good book to read, my laptop and the endless Internet, and some good food. In fact, the more material "wealth" I've been able to give up, the less of a burden it is to truly be free in how I see it. Able to move without stress.

Imagine if we could all partake in our own personal Hajj in life. Not saying you have to be Muslim or journey to Mecca, but I find the intention behind the journey to be very beautiful. Life could be an adventure! But, I think that adventure is getting snuffed out by hoarding materials and hoarding ideologies. For me, wealth is found in my relationships, experiences, knowledge, and wisdom - with only a few prized possessions anymore.

The real question my generation faces is if we'll afford to have children and if we can manage to keep them alive and sane long enough to do the same thing.

I addressed the free/cheap energy potential of suppressed technology and my answer was that it's not about energy, it's about mindset. You could give an elephant gun to a child, but what good would that do?

I'm actually partial to the world you're describing by the way. I think we're pretty similar. I'm kind of spartan, and trend towards the ascetic life. I like simple. And I like the idea of preserving the earth, and I don't like waste and excess. And I value the environment. So that all resonates with me personally.

But I'm also hyper sensitive to anything that reeks of communism. History shows us where this type of utopian thinking has led us, and it ain't pretty. Hierarchy and capitalism more closely aligns with human nature, as much as we hate to admit it. And while I'm aware of all the dangers and deficiencies, I'm immensely grateful for everything it's blessed us with. There's that quote: "capitalism is the worst economic approach, except for every other one". Perhaps that applies.

Avalon may not have a strict hierarchy, but it certainly has a hierarchy.. both an organic, unspoken one and a formal one. It would collapse into chaos without them. Hierarchy is not only necessary but unavoidable. And to circle back to the topic of IQ, I think it kind of elicits unpleasant reactions because of our conditioned reactions to hierarchy (in Incredible Hulk voice: Hierarchy bad!!). It forces us to acknowledge uncomfortable facts, and places some people higher than others. Ego gets involved, and of course some people will feel lesser as a result. I'm keenly aware of all those things because I feel that way! I think I'd rather stab my eyeballs with needles than take an IQ test and share it with the world. But it's not an excuse to diminish it's importance.

[onawah]

Ethical questions for genius scientists

Posted by onawah (here)
Not to be a spoiler, but speaking of "smart fabrics", I am just now finally watching the Netflix series "3 Body Problem, in which one of the main characters in Season 1, a scientist who has been developing a ground breaking "nanofabric" capable of earning her and her company a fortune, is facing an ethical question which may mean life or death for her and for her invention, as well as for the fate of the company of which she is the primary scientific researcher.
She knows (by means of a mysterious kind of hallucination that she has in common with another scientist) that if she continues with the invention's development, it will mean her death and probably her company's failure and the death of many others. There have been suicides of several other scientists in different fields who have apparently been facing similar dilemmas.
But she also knows that if she discontinues the development, though she may survive, her ethical motives for using her intellectual gifts for commercial purposes thus far and her whole life'smodus operandimust come under her own very close scrutiny, while at the same time she will be under great pressure from without to continue with the project, because it is so lucrative.
She eventually is persuaded to continue with the developing of nanofabric, only to become very remorseful and terrified by the weaponry it is used to create.

The core theme of the series is a discovery which explains the reason for a periodic solar cycle which regularly causes calamaties on a planet (or planets-all similar to Earth) which some of these scientists have been visiting via a virtual reality device that seems to have somehow materialized anonymously from a far more advanced civilization.
Sometimes most of the population of the particular virtual planet in question die by fire from an apparent micronova and sometimes by other effects of the 3 suns converging.
The scientists in the virtual reality are presented with the problem of discovering what is the cause and the solution for saving the populace of the virtual planet(s) from these regularly occurring cataclysms.

What has always interested me greatly about good scifi (and "3 Body Problem", both the books and the series, have received rave reviews (the Netflix series creators are also credited with the "Game of Thrones" series), is that they are often very prophetic about scientific discoveries which have yet to be made, or at least, yet to be made public. ("Matrix" being one of the more obvious example. )

In this case, what the "3 Body Problem" itself is, is primarily a theory developed by one scientist participating in the virtual reality, postulating that the devastating solar cycles are caused by the virtual planet(s) actually being in a system that has 3 Suns.
While in reality on planet Earth now, the solar cycle that our own solar system and the rest of the Milky Way is apparently regularly affected by in devastating ways is what the late Dr. Paul la Violette named the "Galactic Superwave", which issues forth regularly from the Great Central Sun and activates every star as it traverses the Milky Way.
So the fictional cause and the actual theoretical cause differ in that in reality, the regular solar cycles of our own Sun is the indirect cause of the regular cataclysms, the direct cause being the Galactic Superwave.
While the fictional cause (so far at least) is the problem of the 3 Suns which regularly devastate the virtual planet(s).
(But I'm still only on episode 3 of season 1 and have not read the books yet, so I'm sure there are more complexities to come.)

I don't know if there has been a rash of suicidal scientists in our present reality as there is in the series, but it would not surprise me, and I imagine that many scientists are having huge personal dilemmas revolving around personal ethics these days.
It also would not surprise me if some of today's scientists, like many scifi writers seem to have been, are being tutored and/or influenced in some way by off-world or other-dimensional beings who are knowledgable about solar cycles, the dangers of nanotechnology and other critical issues.
(Though Earth scientists may be unaware of being influenced thusly.)

The task put before the fictional scientists is to figure out how to save the virtual planet from the next approaching catastrophe.
It would seem that if the real problem has been put to today's actual scientists, they have yet to inform the public about it in much detail.
Although those who are awake and aware understand what is apparently coming, and some of them at least are revealing their findings, which are being recorded and collated by people like Ben Davidson of SpaceWeatherNews. See:
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/sho...s-and-Ice-Ages

While some, like archeologist Dr. Robert Schoch, are tutoring the public about recent, definitive findings indicating how people in the past have survived cataclysms like the ones which apparently are presently looming in Earth's near future (a micronova followed by a brief Ice Age.

This applies to the discussions on several other threads where I will be "replying with quote".
I'm no scientist, but to me as an intuitive, this issue is presently the foremost one for Earth, by which all others relatively pale in comparison.
As for the Netflix series, filming of a second season is said to be starting sometime this year and I've read that a third season has been approved as well.
(Final spoiler: the story begins with a female Chinese physicist who figures out how to send a message identifying the location of the human race and does so.
The message is received by an alien race whose planet has been destroyed and who decide, after realizing what a conflicted race humanity is, that humans are no better than bugs. So they begin to travel toward Earth with the aim to destroy humanity and take the planet for themselves.)

Posted by palehorse (here)

Posted by onawah (here)
The Internet of Bodies & Crypto Mining – A Hidden Connection
Forbidden.News
Mar 06, 2025
https://forbiddennews.substack.com/p...m_medium=email

"SMART FABRICS CAN CAPTURE BODY HEAT, MOTION-POWERED GENERATORS CAN CONVERT FOOTSTEPS INTO ELECTRICITY & RESEARCHERS ARE EXPLORING BRAINWAVE-POWERED INTERFACES

...


Real-World Examples of Bio-Mining

Some early-stage projects have already started integrating bio-energy into technology. Smart fabrics can capture body heat, motion-powered generators can convert footsteps into electricity, and researchers are exploring brainwave-powered interfaces. Could this be the future of crypto mining?

In 2017, a Dutch startup experimented with using body heat to mind cryptocurrency. Volunteers lay on heat-harvesting pads that generated electricity, which in turn powered mining operations. The result? Small but real earnings.

The Ethical and Privacy Dilemmas

But with great innovation comes ethical concerns. Could this technology be exploited? What happens if corporations find a way to monetize human-generated energy on a large scale? And what of privacy? What if they went further than heat and mined our own biological data?

The Future of Crypto and the Human Body

We stand on the brink of a revolution, where human existence itself becomes an economic force. Imagine a city powered by the human such as a 15-minute city. The question remains: Will this be a utopia of shared energy or a dystopia of exploitation? Experiments that torture, mutilate have shown us the answer.

ForbiddenNews Substack is a reader-supported publication. "

This short clip tells a lot

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IojqOMWTgv8

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Bill asked me to comment on this thread. When Bill asks, I respond.

So-called “intelligence” was a family theme, as my father’s IQ is in the 160-170 range while my mother’s was probably about 90. Kind of like with hybrids, the outcome was children whose IQs were either in the genius range or they were mentally disabled.

The rise of complex life resulted in the development of organs, the brain evolved to coordinate the activity among the many moving parts of complex life, and neurons have always been energy hogs.

In the study of animals, predators generally had bigger brains than their prey. Herd behaviors that assisted survival did not need great brainpower, and predators learned how to outsmart them (such as ambush predation, pack hunting with a division of labor).

Mammals were always relatively brainy, and it is thought to be because of the heightened senses needed to avoid becoming dinosaur snacks. Primates were relatively brainy for mammals, thought to be from navigating the arboreal environment (it added another dimension to navigation), and primates see in full color, which is unusual for mammals, probably to see ripe fruit.

Apes are thought to have evolved out of necessity, as some marginal monkeys left the shrinking tropical canopy in the cooling and drying to our ice age. Gorillas live in the heart of the rainforest, and chimps traded brawn for brains. One likely reason why chimps are smarter than gorillas is to remember when and where ripening fruit is. Chimps and gorillas have been observed foraging together (only in the abundant wet season), and gorillas follow their smart chimp friends who know where the ripe fruit is.

Some apes learned to walk upright several million years ago, and it is currently thought that it happened multiple times, in the growing grasslands and shrinking forests. The prominent hypothesis today is that bipeds had their hands freed for new tasks. Over three million years ago, some of those bipeds began making stone tools and the rapid growth of bipedal ape brains began. Those rock-wielding apes began driving species to extinction, and giant tortoises were among the earliest casualties. It is the most dramatic known brain growth in the journey of life on Earth. One of the few comparisons is the growth of lungs when fish moved to land.

Over a million years of that new tool-wielding lifestyle saw the human-line’s brain double in size, and Homo erectus arrived on the evolutionary scene. A Homo erectus could walk down the street with some minor facial prosthetics and would likely pass unnoticed. There is lively scientific debate today on just how capable those early Homo erecti were. Did they invent fire? Language? Darwin said that the control of fire and the invention of language were humanity’s two greatest inventions, and I’ll buy that. I just read last week that bone tools were found that are 1.5 million years old, which is no surprise. I have long suspected that early Homo erectus was very smart and capable, and new discoveries regularly push back dates of the feats of life on Earth, including the human journey.

Today, scientists think that what separates us from our ape brethren is our ability to use symbols. It takes extra cognitive oomph for that. As smart as chimps are, they will never learn to read.

The human-line’s brain kept growing, the tools kept getting more sophisticated, and sometime around 60,000 years ago, humans became behaviorally modern. Interestingly, the Michael channel said that it was also when humans became ensouled, or sentient, if you will. Michael said that ensoulment/sentience was a key part of the evolution of consciousness through the physical plane. Ensouled species are able to reason at levels that non-ensouled species cannot, and the perils and opportunities of life as an ensouled species is how souls grow through the physical plane. And it is not easy!

I fondly recall a T. S. Eliot quote from his most famous poem:

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

I read that in my first year of college, during that brain-breaking year of academic shock, and I sympathized with the allure of bagging it all and becoming a pair of claws.

Humans are likely no more intelligent, individually, than we were 60,000 years ago. But our collective intelligence has grown by orders of magnitude, especially since the invention of the printing press. And now, we are on the cusp of an AI-run world.

So, “intelligence” has been a key human theme since the beginning, but masters such as Jesus came to remind us that it is all about love. At a one-in-1,000 level of “intelligence,” as measured by those notorious IQ tests ( ), this is probably my smartest lifetime, and I have been trying to get all of the juice out of that orange. Intelligence in the service of love is probably the height of human accomplishment, while intelligence wedded to frightened egos leads to the greatest evils.

Michael said that few souls ever awaken past their social conditioning, and have chosen to grow through the fires of karma. It does not have to be that way, and souls can choose to grow through joy. That is my game. I suspect that if a soul has a “smart” lifetime and uses that “intelligence” to harm others, future lifetimes will be spent as an idiot, to balance that karma. On “intelligence” and our world, one of my favorite touchstones was Michael Roads’s (R.I.P. Michael!) visit to two Earths, about 300 years into our future. Both were technologically advanced and highly “intelligent,” but one of them chose love while the other didn’t. A Disney movie could not begin to portray the loving world, while the other made Blade Runner seem like an optimistic future.

Give me heart over head any day, but the head has its important place. The human journey would not have existed without it.

Best,

Wade

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Bruce G Charlton (here)
But none of the highest IQ cohort were geniuses, and the two geniuses (one of them was Claude Shannon who invented transistors and information theory; I forget the other one) did Not score in the highest category of IQ (on the particular day the testing was done, at any rate), and were not part of the follow-up study.

If one is looking for a healer who works with her hands and touch, one does not test those hands the same way one would if looking for a lumberjack to fall a large tree, just with his ax, the fastest possible.

The complex layering and interplay of talents, of both our inborn potential for and development of each, in the ever changing and diverse circumstances in which we each find ourselves each moment of our existence, boggles our ability to inventory and measure.

Posted by Bruce G Charlton (here)
High intelligence, creativity and motivation may be found separately, but all are needed.

Yes.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
He was so excited about this that he rushed around trying to share his discovery with all the other little kids in his preschool class. They had no interest at all, and just laughed at him and teased him. He was so hurt by the rejection of his excitement that ...

Having just one person in one's childhood who deeply values you, even as they might, with a bit of laugh, admit they don't understand half of what you say, can be the critical difference between being hurt and closed down by such childhood rejections, and sloughing off such rejections as a gardener might slough off the failure of 99 of his 100 seeds of a rare flower to germinate. That gardener can go on to keep planting seeds, rare and common, easy and challenging ... for that is his way.

===

Regarding those of above average IQ who are most hostile to those significantly smarter ... perhaps that is because those smart, hostile people have been indoctrinated into and accepted the role of being the guards of our intellectual prisons. Those who work outside of those prisons, tearing down its walls, are a grave threat.

[rgray222]

Human Intelligence Sharply Declining

The benchmarks are not looking good, folks.

No, it's not just you — people really are less smart than they used to be.

As the Financial Times reports, assessments show that people across age groups are having trouble concentrating and losing reasoning, problem-solving, and information-processing skills — all facets of the hard-to-pin-down metric that "intelligence" is supposed to measure.

These results, the FT reports, are gleaned from benchmarking tests that track cognitive skills in teens and young adults. From the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study documenting concentration difficulties of 18-year-old Americans to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that measures the learning skills of 15-year-olds around the world, years of research suggest that young people are struggling with reduced attention spans and weakening critical thinking skills.

Though there has been a demonstrably steep decline in cognitive skills since the COVID-19 pandemic due to the educational disruption it presented, these trends have been in evidence since at least the mid-2010s, suggesting that whatever is going on runs much deeper and has lasted far longer than the pandemic.

Obviously, there's no single answer as to why people seem to be struggling with cognitive skills, but one key indicator is the sharp decline in reading and the world's changing relationship to the way we consume information and media. In 2022, for example, the National Endowment for the Arts found that just 37.6 percent of Americans said they'd read a novel or short story in the year prior — a share down from 41.5 percent in 2017 and 45.2 percent in 2012.

It would be easy enough to blame this decline on people reading less (and, presumably, scrolling online brainrot more). But according to 2023 results from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the same international consortium that puts out the PISA survey, 34 percent of adults in the United States scored at the lowest levels of numeracy, which essentially means that they lack the ability to work with numbers. A year prior, that share was just 29 percent.

Beyond changes in media consumption and the mediums in which we take it, it appears, as the FT notes, our relationship to information generally is shifting too. While there certainly are ways to use tech that don't cause harm to cognition, studies show that "screen time" as we know it today hurts verbal functioning in children and makes it harder for college-age adults to concentrate and retain information.

There isn't any reason to suggest that human intellect has been harmed, the publication counters — but in "both potential and execution," our intelligence is definitely on the downturn.

Source: https://futurism.com/neoscope/human-...clining-trends

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by rgray222 (here)
Human Intelligence Sharply Declining

The benchmarks are not looking good, folks.

No, it's not just you — people really are less smart than they used to be.

There are quite a few pieces now about how the use of AI is gradually making people dumber. They simply don't have to think so much any more.

Here are just two of many articles:

• AI reduces critical thinking
• AI could lower our IQ — and ChatGPT agrees

[Ernie Nemeth]

When I was in grade school, I remember learning how to estimate an answer in mathematics so that you can know if your answer is correct.

A generation later, I was trying to teach my daughter the same thing. The problem was the school was teaching them the hit and miss method. It is a ludicrous method, where the use of logic, common sense and the basic mechanics of mathematics are not only rejected entirely but actively discouraged. No need to think, no need for memorizing math tables, no need to cogitate - just apply the corresponding rule and fall back on rote training.

The state of our education system is a disgrace.


Compare today's education to Farrady's situation long ago:


https://www.theguardian.com/science/...ntist-einstein

[Bruce G Charlton]

There are many reasons why intelligence is declining; and some are genetic and inherited (because much of measurable differences in intelligence is inherited - there is about 80% correlation in a correlation graph of parents and their children's measured intelligence - i.e. approximately the relatedness of the r=0.8 graph shown here).

I was involved in work that provided objective evidence (e.g. simple reaction times) that intelligence had decline a lot since Victorian times.

The amount of decline is difficult to quantify, in the sense that IQ is comparative and an interval (not ratio) scale - that is, IQ puts people in rank order of intelligence ,rather than providing a quantitative measurement of intelligence.

But the decline of reaction time speeds in more than a standard deviation; which would mean something like the averagely intelligent person in Victorian times (semi-skilled; e.g. a coal miner or shipyard worker) would have the intelligence of a modern high school teacher.

My best guess at the main reason for this is the accumulation of deleterious genes, due to the massive (?fifty-fold) reduction in infant and child mortality rates.

*

Therefore; I see so-called AI as more a a symptom of already reduced intelligence, than a cause of it.

People with the abilities of 150 years ago (including their greater creativity than nowadays) would have laughed in a pitying way at the results of what impresses people as AI nowadays!

I also see the problems of AI as being more a matter of corruption of spiritual values, than of intelligence.

I can (I believe) observe this value-corruption happening in real time, in those people who interact significantly with "AI". By their embrace of "machine thinking" they voluntarily drag heir minds down towards the level of machines.

[Sue (Ayt)]

Posted by Bruce G Charlton (here)
There are many reasons why intelligence is declining; and some are genetic and inherited (because much of measurable differences in intelligence is inherited - there is about 80% correlation in a correlation graph of parents and their children's measured intelligence - i.e. approximately the relatedness of the r=0.8 graph shown here).

I was involved in work that provided objective evidence (e.g. simple reaction times) that intelligence had decline a lot since Victorian times.

The amount of decline is difficult to quantify, in the sense that IQ is comparative and an interval (not ratio) scale - that is, IQ puts people in rank order of intelligence ,rather than providing a quantitative measurement of intelligence.

But the decline of reaction time speeds in more than a standard deviation; which would mean something like the averagely intelligent person in Victorian times (semi-skilled; e.g. a coal miner or shipyard worker) would have the intelligence of a modern high school teacher.

My best guess at the main reason for this is the accumulation of deleterious genes, due to the massive (?fifty-fold) reduction in infant and child mortality rates.

*

Therefore; I see so-called AI as more a a symptom of already reduced intelligence, than a cause of it.

People with the abilities of 150 years ago (including their greater creativity than nowadays) would have laughed in a pitying way at the results of what impresses people as AI nowadays!

I also see the problems of AI as being more a matter of corruption of spiritual values, than of intelligence.

I can (I believe) observe this value-corruption happening in real time, in those people who interact significantly with "AI". By their embrace of "machine thinking" they voluntarily drag heir minds down towards the level of machines.

Reading this, the opening of the movie "Idiocracy" popped to mind:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA

[Dilettante]

Posted by rgray222 (here)
Human Intelligence Sharply Declining

[...]

As the Financial Times reports, assessments show that people across age groups are having trouble concentrating and losing reasoning, problem-solving, and information-processing skills — all facets of the hard-to-pin-down metric that "intelligence" is supposed to measure.

I found a great resource that has collated a bunch of declining education measures at this link:

https://www.edwardconard.com/macro-r...e/test-scores/

Some highlights:







Those are just recent declines.

Think about civilization, especially industrial and technological civilization, which makes life more comfortable and demands of survival further and further away. All of this has made us dumber! We're a self-domesticated species, after all. Domesticated animals are always dumber than their wild counterparts.

If you took someone from ancient Sumer and raised them in the modern world on a proper diet, it would likely shock you how capable that person would be compared to the majority today.

This is a gross thought, but the elite obviously don't want a smart populous anymore. They either want 1) dumb brutes to destroy the remains of America's crumbling infrastructure so they can restart or 2) meat puppets to be controlled entirely by biotechnology.

[onawah]

Toxic chemicals in the air, food, water, pharmaceuticals, increasingly toxic electromagnetic fields blanketing everywhere more and more all the time, higher and higher stress levels, ever-diminishing connection to Nature-- all those things affect human brains, bodies and hearts, and human intelligence is linked to all of them.

[Bruce G Charlton]

Posted by Dilettante (here)

Posted by rgray222 (here)
Human Intelligence Sharply Declining

[...]

As the Financial Times reports, assessments show that people across age groups are having trouble concentrating and losing reasoning, problem-solving, and information-processing skills — all facets of the hard-to-pin-down metric that "intelligence" is supposed to measure.

I found a great resource that has collated a bunch of declining education measures at this link:

https://www.edwardconard.com/macro-r...e/test-scores/

Some highlights:







Those are just recent declines.

Think about civilization, especially industrial and technological civilization, which makes life more comfortable and demands of survival further and further away. All of this has made us dumber! We're a self-domesticated species, after all. Domesticated animals are always dumber than their wild counterparts.

If you took someone from ancient Sumer and raised them in the modern world on a proper diet, it would likely shock you how capable that person would be compared to the majority today.

This is a gross thought, but the elite obviously don't want a smart populous anymore. They either want 1) dumb brutes to destroy the remains of America's crumbling infrastructure so they can restart or 2) meat puppets to be controlled entirely by biotechnology.

Bear in mind that these data are test scores, not objective measurements of brain functioning.

Test scores can increase, or decrease, for many reasons not to do with underlying intelligence. Grade inflation is a real thing, and has many causes - including increased rates of cheating.

Indeed, IQ test scores rose throughout the twentieth century (the Lynn-Flynn effect) , but that does not mean that intelligence itself rose; because IQ testing (like almost all testing) is comparative, it puts students in rank order, best to worst - it does not measure their absolute intelligence.

Objective measures that correlate significantly (although not with a high correlation) with IQ testing - such as simple reaction time, brain size (also skull size), colour discrimination etc - show evidence of declining through the twentieth century, even though IQ test raw scores were increasing.

[Dilettante]

Posted by Bruce G Charlton (here)
Bear in mind that these data are test scores, not objective measurements of brain functioning.

Test scores can increase, or decrease, for many reasons not to do with underlying intelligence. Grade inflation is a real thing, and has many causes - including increased rates of cheating.

Indeed, IQ test scores rose throughout the twentieth century (the Lynn-Flynn effect) , but that does not mean that intelligence itself rose; because IQ testing (like almost all testing) is comparative, it puts students in rank order, best to worst - it does not measure their absolute intelligence.

Objective measures that correlate significantly (although not with a high correlation) with IQ testing - such as simple reaction time, brain size (also skull size), colour discrimination etc - show evidence of declining through the twentieth century, even though IQ test raw scores were increasing.

I completely agree!

It’s just difficult if not impossible to get widespread data on those more robust measures. I would also trust test scores like the SAT and ACT more than grades, as they better correlate to college performance than grades do because they are closer to an IQ test than grades. And yes, IQ is just correlated to g, not an absolute measure of it.

Regardless, it’s obvious that many students in America are falling through the cracks since COVID. Not to mention the effects on socialization all of this has had. Our culture doesn’t seem to believe this is much of a problem — or, at least, not as big of a problem as I see it to be.

[Ratszinger]

Having a higher than norm IQ can be an advantage. I mean you think of things and see things others apparently just don't notice. I can tell at a glance when math is off usually and not even quite put my finger on why but it's just not going to add up.
When we had 30 acres of land in TN that was a bit of a burden to us my brother in law expressed an interest in the land. Well, we had owned it so long that I had to look up what we paid for it and it was cheap by the standards when we sold it to him. So the capitol gains tax was substantial. I hired an attorney in TN to take care of the details and he laid it out, sale price, protit, tax we would have to pay for the gains and I wasn't happy at all. Further I thought to myself of a way out of paying that much tax and was a bit pissed the attorney with his years of experience didn't think of it. It made me ask why I even hired the guy. I rewrote the contract, changed the price to sell that 30 acres to my brother in law for $15,000 which was just about 1500 over what we paid when we got it So we had to pay a tax on gains of 1500 instead of over $15,000. Then having looked I realized that being a family member at the time that Sid, my brother-in-law could write a check to one of both of us, but he wrote it, a gift of $15,000 that is tax free and you don't even have to tell the IRS about it because it's a gift. At the time the max was 15k for a family member so we got that tax free. I got the $30K I wanted for the land in the end and just created a situation that both put me in a better spot tax payment wise to the IRS and him in a better position for buying land cheap that was already worth double the price on paper that he paid. When he sells it he'll have to deal with that but I doubt he'll even sell it. He lives there unlike us. Taking care of land in TN from OK is not something I care to do in this day of squatters everywhere. Been there done that.

[HopSan]

Dear BGC, others,

I am late in commenting, but here my experience about sharply diminishing IQ:

1. When I started my studies of Computer Science around mid-1980's in one of hardest places to get into, in Finland,
my co-students felt relatively stupid. I was eagerly expecting 'brainiac' future friends, but it did not happen.

2. I could not understand. My very humble background did not prepare me to such bland environment - at all.

3. It was obvious, when seeing the quality of work only some years earlier, that I was, at most, at a high-school-level of environment.

4. Even the professors seemed seriously lacking in mental power. And I was less than a nobody!

5. My disappointment was un-believable, shocking, and it took many years to recover.

[onawah]

Bill Ryan's insights here have revelance to this discussion:
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/sho...=1#post1420679

Something which definitely should not be left out of the list of reasons why IQ is declining is the very alarming growing rate of autism due to toxic vaccines, and the amount of damage, disability (and death) that vaccines and pharmaceuticals are causing worldwide.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by onawah (here)
Bill Ryan's insights here have revelance to this discussion:
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/sho...=1#post1420679

Something which definitely should not be left out of the list of reasons why IQ is declining is the very alarming growing rate of autism due to toxic vaccines, and the amount of damage, disability (and death) that vaccines and pharmaceuticals are causing worldwide.

Fully agreed. Human lifetimes are increasing, but human health (in the real meaning of the term) is not. And real health absolutely impacts the ability to think clearly, well and intelligently.

A major factor also is that for the last 250,000 years we've had to be pretty smart to just survive. Darwinian Natural Selection is only a small part of the whole evolution story (I'm sure of that), but most not-very-bright hunter-gatherers just didn't make it to parenthood. Life itself took care of all the eugenics.

Now, however, everyone in the world, even those in relatively poor countries, is 'carried' by the modern system. The irony, though, is that it has to be possible that the effects of natural selection may be returning, though in a different form: relatively unintelligent people may now starting to self-destruct in a whole bunch of ways through all kinds of self-harm that modern society makes easily available.

Whether this impacts the future course of humanity really does depend on whether those very people get to have children or not.

(@Bruce, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!)

[Harmony]

It is possible that many types of intellegences are not even thought of or labelled because they have not been realised or spoken of in normal education. New discoveries relating to energy and frequencies and it’s interconnection to consciousness are uncovering what has always been there, but don't at all fully understand. Our evolution, our motives to evolve with long term spiritual values will be paramount to our survival or we could self destruct.


If we have the intellect to make new discoveries and only motives of an exploitive nature that is a very immature kind of god complex, then start to play around with a very narrow band of real knowledge, we have what we are facing right now.

[Bruce G Charlton]

Hi Bill -

I thought quite a bit about these issues and published some ideas - this was a blog where I compiled them (it can be word searched for specific topics using the search box in the top left corner), this book includes some of them.

But bear in mind that almost all of these were written from within the professional paradigm and assumptions of academic evolutionary biology, psychiatry, and psychology.

"Life itself took care of all the eugenics" - Yes, and to a much greater degree than most people realize. A significant majority of children died in the womb, around birth, or before sexual maturity - probably more than 2/3 overall; and a very high percentage of the children of poor and sick people - probably quite close to 100%.

But this began to reverse from the early 1800s, starting probably in England and then across the developed world. More and more of the children of poorer, less intelligent, sick, and indeed criminal parents survived and had children of their own; until it became normal for those who would have reared only a few percent of their children, to have most of the children - by now, this is for several generations in a row.

This is natural selection operating very powerfully, because intelligence is highly heritable (about 80% of variance in IQ tests being statistically-explained by heredity). By contrast, environment and upbringing have very little effect on measured intelligence - as evidenced by twin studies, twin adoption studies (with different parents) and the like.

On top of this, as technologies for fertility control allowed sex without procreation, there has been sub-fertility (less than 2 children per women) - starting with the highest classes and especially the most intelligent women. For the past 100 years plus; the most intelligent women have been having about an average of 0.5 children and less - less than 1/4 of replacement fertility.

So now, and for several generations, natural selection is favouring lower intelligence, less education, greater than average sickness, and criminal behaviours - all of which are (to some significant degree, although far from completely) heritable.

Demographically, there are massive changes afoot with bigger then ever previously known fertility differences in different nations. The highest fertility in human history (largest numbers of surviving children per family) can be seen in some nations, especially in Africa - where the median average age is in the teens; the average person in Niger is 15 years old - half the population less than 15!

While other developed nations have an average age higher than ever in history: an average person in Japan is about 50 years old - half the population older than fifty.

So at a global level of natural selection, the populations of developed nations are being rapidly replaced by those of the poorest nations; and this will accelerate because there are so many women of childbearing age in the poorest places, and so very few in the most developed nations.

BUT - what has made all this possible is the economic and medical developments from the developed nations, which are now on the verge of demographic collapse. For example, pre-contact sub-Saharan Africa probably used to have a very low population of roughly 100,000 in total (and a prosperous one, in world terms - plenty of food for the survivors) because so many died of "tropical diseases" - now Africa's population is about 1.5 billion, and increasing by 100,000 every three years.

World population has been about 1 billion through history and before the Industrial Revolution. It only reached two billion 100 years ago - since when another 6 billion have been added to the world.

If the Industrial Revolution collapses because the developed nations collapse - which I think is likely to happen, and quite soon (not least because the global establishment are accelerating it) - then we can expect Giga-Death, i.e. the death of maybe six or seven billions - who currently survive only because of the industrial revolution.

The industrial revolution is also likely to collapse because our civilization needs a high level of average intelligence to sustain itself - and the demographically collapsing nations include the most intelligent, and the fastest growing nations the lowest average intelligence - and these differences are large and significant.

So Demographic natural selection is reducing intelligence very rapidly at a global average level, and within developed nations, due to severe (and chosen) subfertility in native populations, plus open-ended mass immigration from lower intelligence populations.

I think it likely that the top level of the global establishment already know all this stuff, and are deliberately concealing and suppressing it - and some of "Their" apparently irrational behaviours can perhaps be explained in terms of trying to "control" (i.e. deliberately cause and thereby manage) the incipient Giga-Death (by the old Apocalyptic killers: disease - including poisoning, starvation, and lethal violence) and of course ensure their own survival and thriving throughout!