An Overview of The Flynn Effect
Have People Gotten Smarter?
I seldom interact with people who bring up the Flynn Effect as an argument anymore, but a lot of people have contacted me for a refutation on it. The quick one is this quote right here. Just copy and paste it and move along with your day.
“In actual practice tests are periodically renormed so that the mean remains at 100. The result of this recentering is that the tests maintain their predictive validity, indicating that the FE gains are indeed hollow. If the gains were real and the tests were renormed, people at a given IQ would be getting smarter and this would show up in the predictive validity.” — Williams, 2011
or this one if somebody brings it up in the context of race:
“The results appear to me correct: the magnitude of white/ black IQ differences on Wechsler subtests at any given time is correlated with the g loadings of the subtests; the magnitude of IQ gains over time on subtests is not usually so correlated; the causes of the two phenomena are not the same. I have acknowledged this many times (Flynn, 2008, p. 79; 2012, p.136).” — Flynn, 2013
Keep reading if you are dealing with advanced midwitt theorists who will demand a more in depth explanation. You can search google and find a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, however, midwitts are not even smart enough to recognize that the abstract and the numbers often do not agree in those studies (ie a fit index of .998 is not failure — measurement error is real).
Also, statistical realities like the rank order of GI, Silent, Boomer, Gen X, and Millenial highly correlating with chronological order in terms of all sorts of variables can be lines of evidence, but the focal point should be why they are wrong.
It is much better to go through the conceptual reasons for why they are wrong because the midwitts like ideas better than numbers. If they liked numbers, they would not say that crime statistics are an invalid source. Who would have thought that I need to consider socioeconomic factors when dealing with rape statistics? Clearly, they like concepts better than stats.
The Better Question is “Are People Secretly Getting Dumber?”
One study, which was done by Harvard researchers that came to a weird conclusion. In their abstract they say:
“Findings by age and ability level challenge generalizing IQ trends throughout the general population.” — Platt et al., 2019 (pdf link)
Luckily, I know how to read the whole paper. The degree to which their findings provide empirical support for dysygenics makes it unfathomable that they would not just say so. Then again, I am not a midwitt.
By midwitt, I mean people that are not high enough in autistic traits to see what is right before their eyes due to their conformist nature. This is not to say that they are low IQ or even average IQ (I bet that they are smart). Obviously, autistic traits can be a superpower (see Emil Kirkegaard), or your greatest weakness that leads you to be a fat communist (see Ian Kochinski, also known as “Vaush”).
The study only measures fluid intelligence, the way dysgenics would most readily manifest, and here is one graph of the findings.
Wow, it is almost like we did not know this! If you have read my work on the issue of race and IQ, the response to this graph should not be surprising.
This is a good reminder that reading abstracts is a really bad way of learning about a topic. The people that read the abstract and move on will probably attribute this trend to socioeconomics (read “are midwitts”).
It appears that the genetic endowments has declined with time and we know this due to a phenomenon known as the Wilson Effect.
As age increases, the proportion of the population IQ variance that can be attributed to genetic factors increases. This is very important that people understand I am not making this up.
The alt hype has written all about the heritability of intelligence on his website, go ahead and check it out. His page on heritability is a lot less controversial than much of what he has posted on site, in fact, it is not debatable at all. This is what the Wilson Effect looks like, you can google it, the heritability increases with age.
This is similar to the race differences. The divergence between what heritability can tell us and what liberals believe is a matter of huge concern. Obviously, the race differences grow with age and they do not buy that either.
Another divergence is the correlations with g-loadings. The more g-loaded subtests do not tend to show as large of gains as the less g-loaded ones. While this does not mean that there have been NO gains on g, it does mean that the majority is on the specific abilities (Rushton & Jensen, 2010; Te Nijenhuis & van der Flier, 2013). Now that we see scores declining, and declining more so on the subtests with higher g-loadings, what should we make of it? I have gone over many times that more g loaded tests are more heritable, this is a cross cultural phenomenon, the phenotypic and genotypic g loadings strongly correlate, and this is observable in other primates (Rushton & Jensen, 1999; te Nijenhuis et al., 2014; Dreary et al., 2006; Woodley et al., 2015).
A quick reminder on how to interpret the study of the Japanese g-loadings and heritabilities correlation: the more subtests you add, the bigger the correlation gets. Look at some of the studies within the meta analysis that had a higher number of subtests such as Shikisma et al., 2009 which was over a .5 correlation.
“There is a clear, quite strong moderator effect for the number of subtests: data points with a smaller number of subtests have a mean r = .31, whereas data points with a larger number of subtests have a mean r = .45.” — te Nijenhuis et al., 2014
And the divergence continues, it is not like they might be right, the train has left the station. A review of reaction times over time (Silverman, 2010) shows that the reaction times of modern humans are not nearly as good as our ancestors. The author has some weird explanation like toxin accumulation, but come on… the water that they were drinking back in had a little more to worry about than fluoride. We certainly live in a cleaner society than our ancestors did during the Victorian Era.
Despite claims that we are just as quick or perhaps even quicker, it seems that due to the way software and hardware self correct for time lag in a way that Francis Galton was not able to, the plausibility of equal reaction speed between us and our ancestors is an illusion (Woodley of Menie et al., 2015)
Considering that there is a huge gap between the 1989 and 2005/2006 studies on this chart, we should be concerned. It is highly likely that true mean reaction in the 2000s is between the two estimates given. It is unlikely that the 1989 estimates are that bad that this would mean the times are equal.
Lastly, much of the test scores are likely to be a result of people getting better at taking tests. Test taking is a bit of a skill. It is not like being bad at tests or good at them can override the effects of being a standard deviation above or below average.
The Flynn Effect gains are higher on tests that have more rules (Armstrong & Woodley, 2014). While causality cannot be proven, we can make predictions. I think that it is reasonable to predict that the trend will continue in countries that do more standardized testing, and be strongest in those that do the most.
Moreover, the gains from the Flynn Effect shrink even further when you control for guessing (Woodley et al., 2014). This converges with test rules. Over time, due to allegations of test bias and demand for better results, the degree to which rules are explained has increased. The better you understand the rules, the easier it is to guess on the subtests. Reasonable answer, but we do not know for sure yet. This does not contradict the notion that more complex tasks are more g-loaded. There are probably more rules in football than chess, but which is a more cognitively complex activity? I will give you a hint, Jamaal Charles ran in the special olympics as a child and was a superstar in the NFL for some time — you will not find chess grandmasters that have very low IQ’s.
In Conclusion
People are getting dumber. The reason that I suspect many “scientists,” “researchers,” and “experts,” will not admit this is due to the fact that admitting this would remove the best argument to convince large numbers of people that the races have equal intelligence in one sentence. Obviously, due to the fertility patterns, equality is an untenable hypothesis.
Maybe it is a daddy issues? Disdain for elders (such as a father) is not uncommon amongst the liberal women that teach these university classes in psychology, so saying “ah ha ha, people are smarter,” is much easier to say. For somebody that has tremendous respect for their father and his intellectual capacity, this is not so easy to throw out as an explanation.
I do not really believe that a lot of these things are conscious motives the way that somebody is consciously going to defend their religion. This is one of the scariest things about the woke ideology — people do not even know that it is an underlying force within them that manifests in everything that they do. If you think that I am being hyperbolic, where does the majority of campus faculty come from ideologically?
If you say that professors are moderate by American standards, remember the woman from Iowa at the Democrat Caucus who was SHOCKED to find out that Mayor Pete Buttigieg was a homosexual.
By American standards, the overwhelming majority of professors are liberal and very liberal. Psychology professors and sociology professors are especially liberal. Their views are contaminated heavily by a bias that is de facto anti white — even if they may be white themselves and not hate white people, it is that their bias is pro-non white. I do not mean that they are neutral, I mean that they like other people better than their own race.
When they respond to questions about race and IQ with their scientifically unacceptable theories about human intelligence going up with time because of socioeconomics: to a normal, agreeable, midwitt audience of university students, it will not lead to questions like “what percentage of African American NBA players have kids that become doctors and lawyers?” That’s a tough pill to swallow.
