IQ tests are always controversial, but they may tell us something. According to a Northwestern study, American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the ‘Reverse Flynn Effect’:
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Certainly my ability to concentrate and do deep work has worsened over the years. Looking forward to reading it. Thanks.
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Looking for Flynn effects in a recent online U.S. adult sample: Examining shifts within the SAPA Project - ScienceDirect is the referenced paper.
However, there could be selection effects in who chose to take the test in 2006 versus 2018, as stated in the paper:
“The archival data used in this study were collected through the SAPA Project (https://www.sapa-project.org/; Condon and Revelle, 2015, Condon and Revelle, 2016; Condon, Roney, and Revelle, 2017; Revelle et al., 2017), a free web-based personality survey that uses stratified matrix sampling methodology to administer items. Since 2004, the SAPA Project has successfully collected cross-sectional data from over 1.5 million participants across the world. Generally, participants have found the survey through varying mechanisms such as search engines, posts on social media, or websites related to personality or psychometrics.”
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My long-held hypothesis has been that we no longer need to rely on our memories for much. Our devices have become external memories, putting the answer to just about anything at our fingertips, literally. There is no need to keep much in our heads, so our storage and recall muscles are getting flabby. When we were growing up, “Look it up” meant going the dictionary or encyclopedia which was labor intensive and tended to imprint the research reward in our minds. Technology now ensures we don’t have to store much of anything in our heads. How often have you been asked for a something as simple as the phone number of a family member (or even your own!) and had to look at your contacts list? Our devices can even find our keys and tell us where our kids are. Probably the only thing I can accurately recall without assistance these days is the date of the War of 1812. Layer on the ability of AI to produce content, and our heads will probably just become decorative holders for our eyes and hairdos (pretty sure I know a few for whom this has already happened).
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I just read this article:
Sea-Tac Airport’s new $1B international terminal too tight a squeeze for 20 big jets | The Seattle Times
It turns out that 20% of the gates at the newly built international terminal at SeaTac airport can’t accommodate wide-body jets as they were intended to. The terminal was 4 years behind schedule and nearly 3 times over budget (not a surprise anymore these days). I’m not sure if this has anything to do with us getting dumber, but it’s unfortunately indicative of how incompetent that we’ve become, at least in some industries.
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That sounds like the problem that France had with the new trains a while back where they were too wide for many of the stations.
From the article:
“If you’re thinking about what society cares about and what it’s emphasizing and reinforcing every day,” she says, “there’s a possibility of that being reflected in performance on an ability test.”
A few other hypotheses have been put forth to try and explain the reverse Flynn Effect, such as falling nutritional standards, the worsening of school systems, social media, increased air pollution, or the idea that people just be less interested in portions of the SPAP Project personality survey.”
This seems to skip over so many other possible explanations. EyeM mentioned one upthread (attention span) - definitely a strong contender. And what about Roe v Wade, aging population, improved health care (e.g post stroke and post head injury…improved survival), trends in migration, improved access of researchers to a greater cross section of people due to technology, altered use of language in general by young people (included changes in day to day grammar), etc. I’d think the improvement in spatial reasoning would be a strike against certain factors on their list and my list. Unless video games have improved spatial ability…a theory I’ve heard about laparoscopic surgeons.
I used to worry that we had to be selective in what information to store in our brains because we only have a finite amount of storage space there and any excess may cause an information overflow… 
Errors like these have been made in the past. The Iowa class battleships (all four of which are now museums) were originally intended to use leftover main guns from previous cancelled battleships. But the ship was designed with turrets too small for those guns to fit, so a new type of gun had to be designed to fit into the turrets.
A more recent pre-2006 example is the Mars Climate Orbiter, which was lost due to incorrect use of metric versus imperial units.
Errors occurred in legislation as well. In 2004, an inadvertent change to a law regarding working on Sabbath repealed all exemptions to the law.
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People have said this since ancient history. To quote Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus,
The story I heard is set in Naucratis in Egypt, where there was one of the ancient gods of Egypt––the one to whom the bird they call the “ibis” is sacred, whose name is Theuth. This deity was the inventor of numbers, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, of games involving draughts and dice––and especially of writing. At the time, the king of the whole of Egypt around the capital city of the inland region (the city the Greeks call “Egyptian Thebes”), was Thamous, or Amon, as the Greeks call him. Theuth came to Thamous and showed him the branches of expertise he had invented, and suggested that they should be spread throughout Egypt. Thamous asked him what good each one would do, and subjected Theuth’s explanations to criticism if he thought he was going wrong and praise if thought he was right.
The story goes that Thamous expressed himself at length to Theuth about each of the branches of expertise, both for and against them. It would take a long time to go through all Thamous’ views, but when it was the turn of writing, Theuth said, “Your highness, this science will increase the intelligence of the people of Egypt and improve their memories. For this invention is a potion for memory and intelligence.” But Thamous replied, “You are most ingenious, Theuth. But one person has the ability to bring branches of expertise into existence, another to assess the extent to which they will harm or benefit those who use them. The loyalty you feel to writing, as its originator, has just led you to tell me the opposite of its true effect. It will atrophy people’s memories. Trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources, and so writing will make the things they have learnt disappear from their minds. Your invention is a potion for jogging the memory, not for remembering. You provide your students with the appearance of intelligence, not real intelligence. Because your students will be widely read, though without any contact with a teacher, they will seem to be men of wide knowledge, when they will usually be ignorant. And this spurious appearance of intelligence will make them difficult company.”
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Once again, it seems that privilege obscures some really important factors.
All other things being equal, a person who is not familiar with IQ tests will do a lot better than a person who is not familiar with IQ tests. In 2006, it is highly likely that a much larger proportion of the test takers were familiar with IQ tests.
So the first factor is that access to the internet has increased by orders of magnitude over that period. In 2006, the internet was largely dominated by kids who were very familiar with IQ tests. These were the more intellectually inclined kids, or, as they were called, “Nerds”. These were the kids who were most likely to have exposed to IQ tests, and were familiar with how they were set up.
That’s one.
Another factor which affects exposure to IQ tests is SES. In 2006 a far larger proportion of kids who had access to the internet were high SES kids. So, another reason why kids in 2006 who were on th einternet were more likely to have had experience with IQ tests.
That’s two.
Back to one - the Nerds were also much more likely to have had practice with the sorts of questions on the IQ tests, and are, therefore better at these type of questions in general, even if they did not have experience with IQ tests specifically.
That’s three possible reasons that the test scores dropped, which does not require any complex explanations, regarding smart devices.
However, the researchers seem to ignore the fact that income distribution of kids on the internet in 2006 is very different than that of the kids on the internet today. Or perhaps, as I wrote, it’s privilege, and they are simply not conditioned to think about the fact that the access that poor people have to things like internet is not the same as theirs (the researchers’) is.
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According to the authors, participants of the study aren’t kids. They’re all adults between the ages of 18 and 90 (with medium of 29). The authors also claim that
There was a war in 1812?! 
On the other hand, I think I know a lot more about a wider range of subjects. Technology has made me much more news aware and understanding of the political process, more aware of health news, celebrity news. I have probably tried more DIY/Home improvement projects because I had free lessons on YouTube.
Technology makes me feel safer in the car and driving. More connected.
Agree on the shorter attention span perhaps, more distractible. Price to pay I suppose.
I agree with this, but I think what I actually store from my wide-ranging reading is more the index than the detail because I know I can always go back to the full story if I need to. So, while I can recall the highlights (“Yes, I read something about that a while ago…”), most of the particulars escape me when my mind used to be a steel trap for detail. There was a time when I needed to be able to pull that detail from my head; now I hold all knowledge in my hand.
OTOH, I may be blaming technology instead of aging. A few years ago, I posted on the Memory and Aging thread that I was experiencing:
a notable decline in the ability to find the right word quickly, and it still scares me as I used to be able to speak rapidly and fluently without thinking. Now, I feel like I’m slowly searching my word quiver and still ending up with a lame arrow, a bit off-target. I’ve also started to do things like opening the wrong drawer or kitchen cabinet when reaching for common items that should be reflex. I also can’t recall with certainty whether or not I’ve seen a particular (not recent) movie that I once could find instantly in my mental library. What frightens me is that I used to be known for my memory, almost photographic. That is completely gone. My memory palace is failing me. I don’t think anyone notices the decline because they can’t see my mental search and I function well, but I am becoming depressed about it.
Perhaps it is more comforting to believe my decline is caused by my iPad rather than the advance of the Grim Reaper.
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That makes it even more questionable.
First, even legally, 18 year olds are not considered “adults” in the USA, otherwise the state governments would not be able to restrict what they can buy.
Second, the SES differences in access to the internet and in experience with IQ tests were also present back then. In fact, among adults, access was even more tilted by SES. However, looking more closely at the results, all of these explanations are thrown into doubt, including any long-term tends related to SES.
An important trend, which factor that the authors do not address, is that their scores are stable, or even increasing, between 2006 and 2011, drop between 2011 and 2014, and then stabilize again.
This is not a long-term decrease between 2006 and 2018. This is a sudden drop between 2011 and 2014.
This can be a result of a change in methodology or some other extrinsic factor, and the authors seem to be pretending that it is not the major characteristic of their data. Until they address the fact that their entire supposed 2006-2018 “trend” is really only a 2011-2014 trend, I see absolutely no reason to give any credence to any of their "explanations.
I do not understand why they ignore this. At least one author should know better.
Also, I recommend that people read the article, not the Poplar Mechanics article. They research, while flawed, is not making the claims that the new release is claiming that they are making.
Again, the research flawed in many ways, including ignoring SES factors and the fact that everything is happening over short period, but at least they are not making the clickbait claims that are in the Poplar Mechanics title.
I swear, Popular Mechanics is getting worse every year.
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Stupid machines…
(grin)
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What I find interesting about this thread is not the questionable conclusion from the questionable study, but rather the importance some people seem to place on determining that everyone is dumb and getting dumber.
What is not clear is how random this test is and whether the 2006 sample is comparable to the 2018 sample. I know they say they stratified by age and education, but again this is from the internet and people may not give factual information. Further, the testing conditions are not controlled. How do these tests compare to actual IQ tests? And is this a “real” difference or a statistical result.
it is interesting, though, that if an actual result, this may be a ceiling effect, regression to the mean, or the impact of more media, less reading (although books seem to quite popular these days) or something else.
DAGNABBIT!!!
That should, of course, be:
“All other things being equal, a person who is familiar with IQ tests will do a lot better than a person who is not familiar with IQ tests.”
A while ago, I heard this anecdote: someone famous and very brainy (don’t remember exactly who) was asked if they knew the formula for calculating so and so. The person said that they didn’t remember and got ridiculed for not knowing such a simple textbook thing. To which the person replied that while they did not remember the formula, they knew precisely in what section of a particular reference book they can look it up. 
It is not about googling, it it all about knowing how to google. 