Ep. 369: Why Are We Getting Dumber? A Debate.
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I recently stumbled across a fascinating 2024 essay written by a Norwegian psychology professor. In this essay, he talks about how he was asked to teach a course about intelligence, and he was excited about this because he used to teach that class a lot, but hadn't recently. So he thought what he would do is he would open this class the way he always had before by talking about the so-called Flynn effect. Which is this observation originally made by James Flynn that IQs worldwide have been rising since roughly the post-World War II period. So here's what the professor wrote in his essay.
The Flynn effect has been rising steadily for so long that I thought I'd bring an updated graph, I'd update a graph to 2024 numbers because it's always fun to tell students that their generation is the smartest people who had ever lived. But then he added those new numbers to his old chart of rising IQs and was floored by what he discovered. IQs weren't going up anymore. And not only had IQ increases slowed down, in recent years, IQ scores had begun to decrease. His students were not the smartest generation to have ever lived.
they were getting dumber. Today I want to talk about this so-called reverse flint effect. There are some convincing arguments for why this is happening and I want to talk about these, but my main purpose is to then introduce an additional factor that I think is getting overlooked, but once we recognize this additional factor, it will give you some compelling opportunities for getting ahead in an increasingly stupid world. I'm Cal Newport and this It's deep questions.
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