The Flynn Effect: making our genius predecessors seem stupid

[JasonPratt]

I'm finishing up editing a chapter for a friend's book on the sociology involved in doing science (not sure if the whole book is about this or only this chapter), and ran across mention of a sociological effect that I've noticed before in the past but which I hadn't heard described with such precision: the tendency to treat our ancestors as more stupid because they didn't have operational access to technology and ideas that we take for granted. The effect started kicking strongly into gear (in Western Civilization anyway) during the late Enlightenment, with what was essentially a paradigm shift of respect for and recovery of the wisdom of older cultures (on which the Renaissance had been based), with the competitive supercession of our ancestors' work by contemporary standards and achievements. A sterotypical result was the promotion of the idea that Columbus was opposed by people (especially among the clergy) who thought the Earth is flat, when primary records show he was opposed by people (especially among the clergy) who had correctly estimated the rough circumference of the planet and thought, correctly, that he had so wildly undercalc'd it that he would never survive to loop back to the Far East. (As it was, he barely made it to the Caribbean.)

In this case, my friend is writing about how IQ tests have been designed in the past several generations -- which have contributed to a similar result, even though not necessarily with the same propaganda intentions.

There is a phenomenon in the study of human intelligence, dealing with IQ scores, called "the Flynn Effect", named for James R. Flynn who promoted it, although the effect was discovered by Richard Lynn in 1977. The Flynn Effect makes a good possible argument for the socially constructed nature of science.   The way the effect works is this: when IQ tests are revised they set the average at 100 and the standard deviation at 15. Each time there's a new revision they take a new sample (which will be among younger people than the last batch of sample test takers) and again set the average at 100. When test takers take the older tests their scores are significantly above 100. When researchers project back to the old standards they find that takers of the test 100 years ago would score as low as 70 on the modern tests instead of the average 100. By effect it appears people are getting smarter. The problem is that such results make it appear that our ancestors in recent times were extremely stupid. They must have been far too stupid to run even a low tech world that was nevertheless fairly complex for people with IQ's of 50-70!

Journalist Andrew Brown has an important observation based upon a lecture by Flynn that he recently attended.

The thing that I found really fascinating in Flynn's lecture was his discussion of what makes for very low IQ scores. It is one of the paradoxes of the Flynn Effect that it implies not only that our children will be smarter than we are, but that our recent ancestors were extremely stupid. Extrapolating back to 1900 on the two fastest-improving components of the IQ tests suggests that schoolchildren then would have had a mean IQ of either 50 or 70. "How did Englishmen play cricket in 1900?" asked Flynn. "Taking their mean IQ at face value, most of them would need a minder to position them in the field, tell them when to bat, and tell them when the innings was over."

The answer, he says, is that IQ tests measure (among other things) "post-scientific operational thinking": thinking about the world in scientific categories. He uses the example of a possible IQ test question, "What do foxes and hounds have in common?" In post scientific operational thinking the right answer is, "They are both mammals," and not, "We use the hound to hunt the fox," as a pre scientific child would say.

[Boggit]

A sterotypical result was the promotion of the idea that Columbus was opposed by people (especially among the clergy) who thought the Earth is flat, when primary records show he was opposed by people (especially among the clergy) who had correctly estimated the rough circumference of the planet and thought, correctly, that he had so wildly undercalc'd it that he would never survive to loop back to the Far East. (As it was, he barely made it to the Caribbean.)

In this case, my friend is writing about how IQ tests have been designed in the past several generations -- which have contributed to a similar result, even though not necessarily with the same propaganda intentions.

The world's not flat????? :o  ;)

You'll be telling us next that the world wasn't created in 4004BC https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/ussher.htm or that somehow we're descended from apes!! :o  ::) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species

That's it! I'm off to atone for such heretical thoughts by wearing a flea ridden hair shirt as penance... :D ;)

All joking apart - they're good quotes, and I enjoyed reading them. :) I'm comforted by the assertion that I'm getting smarter, when I was led to believe people are getting dumber...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8fm3Z7jgWM