1,318 words
It’s hardly encouraging to read an article about declining American intelligence that features typos in both the headline and the first sentence, but I suppose it drives home the point.
“American IQ’s [sic] Are Dropping. Here’s Why It Might Not Be A Bad Thing,” reads the headline in something called fatherly.com.
So far, so bad. Then comes the first sentence:
New research from Northwestern University in Illinois finds that American’s [sic] IQs are dropping.
The sole bright spot is that someone figured out how to properly render the plural form of “IQ” during the brief window of time in between writing the headline and the first sentence, but then they had to go and wreck that temporary blip of progress by spitting out the singular possessive form of “American” rather than the plural form.
In the process of getting one thing right, they got two things wrong. As the saying goes, “one step forward, two steps back.”
Whoever cobbled together that typo-addled headline and first sentence unwittingly proved the study’s point. The much vaunted “Flynn effect” — a term that was allegedly coined by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in 1994’s The Bell Curve — refers to New Zealand-based political scientist James Flynn’s observation ten years earlier that scores on standardized intelligence tests had been steadily rising throughout the twentieth century.
At a certain point in time, though — the specific point depends on which study you read — IQ researchers noticed that the Flynn effect had halted and showed signs of a decline. This troubling but entirely noticeable trend is variously referred to as “reversed Flynn effect,” “negative Flynn effect,” or, as I have so adorably coined it, the “Flunk Effect.”
The new “research from Northwestern University in Illinois” — as opposed to, oh, Northwestern University in Nebraska or Northwestern University in Mississippi, or the University of Miami in Ohio, or perhaps even Ruth’s Chris Steak House — is titled “Looking for Flynn effects in a recent online U.S. adult sample: Examining shifts within the SAPA Project.” It comes from the May-June 2023 issue of Intelligence, and I am clearly not intelligent enough to discern why I was able to read the whole study today, when, if I’m not mistaken, we’re still in March 2023.
The four main bullet points at the study’s beginning read thusly:
- A reverse Flynn effect was found for composite ability scores with large US adult sample from 2006 to 2018 and 2011 to 2018.
- Domain scores of matrix reasoning, letter and number series, verbal reasoning showed evidence of declining scores.
- Three-dimensional rotation scores generally increased from 2011 to 2018.
- Differences in ability scores were present regardless of age, education, or gender.
Well, what about race? Hello?
The study was lopsided gender-wise, as “participants were disproportionately female identifying (65.03%) and between the ages of 18 and 90.”
They had to use the term “female identifying,” didn’t they? You bet your sweet bippy they did; in her faculty profile, study co-author Elizabeth M. Dworak lists her pronouns as “she, her, hers.”
The study’s results are likewise further muddied by the fact that they don’t rely on major and more widely-known IQ tests such as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale or the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, but instead on the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project (SAPA) — whose 250 or so questions only feature 35 designed to measure cognitive ability — and the International Cognitive Ability Resource (ICAR), which I’d never heard of before and which should disqualify its legitimacy based on that fact alone. On the ICAR, only 60 of the 150 questions focus on tasks that generally measure what has come to be known as IQ. The researchers claim they only focused on the pertinent cognitive-ability questions on each test, and I suppose we’ll all have to sit here in the dark and take them at their word.
You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.
In a press release from Northwestern University — the one in Illinois — Dworak cautions readers from assuming that the lower American test scores signify that “Americans are getting less intelligent. . . . It could just be that they’re getting worse at taking tests or specifically worse at taking these kinds of tests.”
Ah, the old “IQ tests only measure one’s ability at taking IQ tests” canard. It makes as much sense as saying that “winning a baseball game only measures a team’s ability at playing baseball” or “making money only measures one’s ability to make money.”
By the standard measurements, school-aged Americans are losing the ability to take tests. According to a New York Times headline from October 2022, “Math Scores Fell in Nearly Every State, and Reading Dipped on National Exam.” The Times goes on to explain, “U.S. students in most states and across almost all demographic groups have experienced troubling setbacks in both math and reading, according to an authoritative national exam released on Monday.”
Almost all demographics? Why so unspecific?
Just last week in response to cratering test 2022 scores across New York State — for example, “in Schenectady, no eighth grader who took the math test scored as proficient” — the Board of Regents announced that they will lower the minimum proficiency score and declare it to be “the new normal.”
On Monday, a self-identified black man named Darrell Owens published an article on his Substack account titled “Half of Black Students Can Barely Read.” It’s unclear whether this means that the other half of black students can’t read at all, or whether they sure can read purty danged good. Owens’ article focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area:
Including students who are close but still not proficient: 71.5% of Black [sic] high school juniors in San Francisco cannot read at a proficient level, compared to 20.3% of Asian students, 22.6% of White [sic] students, 32% of Filipino students and 61.8% of Hispanic students. . . . These are not numbers from a red state in the Deep South but San Francisco.
Is he trying to say that black students have trouble reading wherever you find them? Sounds pretty racist to me!
Owens also notes that Asians tend to make more money than whites, who tend to make more money than Hispanics, who tend to make more money than blacks.
And of course he blames the “racialized results” on the educational system. Far be it from me to allege that the educational system is decent anywhere in America, but did it ever occur to any of these numbnuts that although teachers, schools, and textbooks may be lacking, perhaps the main problem leading to these disparities is that some groups of students are innately dumber than others?
Owens says that it’s goofy to think that black people don’t esteem education, and he relies on a single unintentionally hilarious anecdote to “prove” it:
Moreover the idea that Black [sic] people don’t value education is absurd. My father was illiterate and was very conscious about it.
Owens — because he’s black — lauds the recent proposal to toss $5 million in “reparations” at every eligible black San Francisco adult as a “smart” idea:
Ensuring students with truancy or criminal records have parents at home who can supervisor [sic] their children, or give those kids spending money to keep them away from thefts and drug dealing is smart.
I kid the blacks, of course. The Flunk Effect is real, and it appears to be adversely affecting “almost” all demographics, not only the blacks. And I would never deny that environment plays a role in it; I’m simply mocking those who entirely rule out the role of genetics because it’s not only impolite to do so, it’s effectively forbidden and may soon be illegal.
Blame the environment all you want; I don’t mind. You can blame nutrition, pollution, educators, dysgenic fertility, and especially diminishing attention spans induced by smartphone poisoning.
Blame both nurture and nature. I won’t tell anybody. Your secret is safe with me.
But I must avert my eyes from this increasingly dopey world. I can no longer bear to stare at the endumbification of everything, the savagely doltish stuperstitions that so enrapture and enthrall this nation of 332 million blockheads. The future’s so dumb, I gotta wear shades.
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.
- First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “Paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.
- Third, Paywall members have the ability to edit their comments.
- Fourth, Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:
Paywall Gift Subscriptions
If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:
- your payment
- the recipient’s name
- the recipient’s email address
- your name
- your email address
To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.
26 comments
With each passing day the film Idiocracy becomes more documentary and less humor movie.
The only thing that can be considered fictional at this point is the timeline. It will take a hell of a lot less time than 500 years to get there.
That movie is so unintentionally hilarious in places. All of the examples of the declining intelligence of humanity the movie shows feature, you guessed it, white folks. Yep, that’s what’s causing it—all those dastardly white folks watching their monster truck rallies and eating their frozen tater tots!
But also notice how nearly everyone has an Hispanic sounding surname.
On today’s Radio Rennaissance podcast Jared Taylor read a comment I sent to him earlier this week regarding Idiocracy.
That hilarious anecdote alone was worth the price of admission.
(Did you really mean to write “and I would never deny that environment plays no role in it”?)
No I didn’t, and it’s been changed. Just like Bill Cosby, I plead guilty to the crime of hypocrisy.
If you can see two Bill Cosbys, it’s already too late…
I dare say the average American IQ is dropping – back in 2006 the population was approx 67% white, it’s now approx 56% and dropping. Yet 94% of that 56% is quite happy and welcoming of their fellow whites marrying negroids.
Back in the day we would joke saying to a chum ‘why don’t you move to Australia and increase the average IQ of both countries’
Almost all the books I’ve read in the past 2 years have been sought out either at counter-currents or because of something I read here. In fact, I just took a break from reading Race, Intelligence, and Bias in Academe by Roger Pearson. In the opening chapter After outlining how The Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics (University of London) was taken over by Marxists (and a Quaker or two) through successive retirements of their heads, he mentions that a key book in the propaganda campaign against eugenics was the book “In the name of Eugenics” by Daniel J. Kevles. Recalling something ELSE I had recently read, I thought ‘I should look up all these names;’ I’m not good at recognizing the common names of different races (except for maybe blacks) and I started with this guy Kevles. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to find there was no early life section on Wikipedia. On encyclopedia.com 1939 I saw that his parents were David and Anne Rothstein. That one I recognize. Thanks Counter-Currents! What an education. Definitely should have done this instead of college 20 years ago. But 20 years ago I wouldn’t have believed any of it. Philosopher John Searle was quoted in the book “The Diversity Delusion” that his college was now accepting students who can barely even read. Having worked for the state here in WA I too noticed some reading deficiency problems. The author of the book The Intelligence Paradox claims that high IQ people are notoriously bad at real world solutions to relationship problems.
It is a good strategy for the Left to promote and celebrate, or at least excuse, the dumbing down of white populations: it makes the underachievement of Blacks and the coarseness of their urban culture seem less unpalatable.
“Moreover the idea that Black [sic] people don’t value education is absurd. My father was illiterate and was very conscious about it.”
I can’t believe someone was actually stupid enough to write this. Then again, when I read Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” I was continually asking myself why she would fill her book with so many stereotypically unflattering incidents from her life. If your life history only confirms the worst stereotypes of your race, perhaps memoir isn’t the literary form you should embrace.
I have never read Maya Angelou, but I have read Iceberg Slim’s Pimp. I’m amazed at how that book is held in such high regard in the “black community” because it’s about as unflattering of a group as can be.
For the hell of it, I’m going to post a link to my recent essay at Gates of Vienna describing a composition faculty meeting from some years past.
Chained to the New Trivium | Gates of Vienna
I roll my eyes at the ‘Flynn Effect’ and reading into all these other secular trends. It was always unstable and ephemeral. The crime rates were never going to continue to decline as diversity increased. Eventually these people will all regress to the mean in every way from intelligence to violence. Everything is built for diversity to commandeer like that line from Field of Dreams: ‘If you build it, he (they) will come.’ Then it just leads to catabolic collapse once the tragedy-of-the-commons occurs. Glitzy public transportation becomes a hub for nonwhite migration into the cities and a means for diverse redistribution ferried into white suburbia to commingle and bastardize the indigenous European majority. Therefore there is no point investing in any civic institutions because it gets used, abused and misused by diversity. They never fully assimilate, but rather fall into a quiescence, which fools every statistician and neoliberal optimist into thinking the new normal of egalitarianism has finally set in amongst multiculturalism. Like a werewolf in the moonlight, these people are just one strange happening (George Floyd) away from defaulting back to their natural setting. Even the ‘proper’ ones are incapable of professionalism because they simply overdo everything from police brutality to prosecutorial misconduct (as we see with Trump) reflecting on their inability to understand the constitutionality or even recite the Bill of Rights because they are merely deputized thugs. Scott Adams is right. The best strategy is perpetual white flight. That isn’t cowardice. We aren’t allowed to fight back, so we have to do the next best thing: Strategic withdrawal like the Russians have done many times. Then natural selection takes over, which is finally reaching a crescendo with annual negative growth rates set to occur within the black population. Our problems are many, but nothing compared to that of the codependency of diversity upon the master race, which is getting worse every year.
Not perpetual white flight. We are running out of places to flee to. We need prowhites to ingather into a handful of defensible territories, where we will rebuild ourselves, at least internally (each prowhite becoming stronger himself, and wrt his family) and locally-politically. Eventually, we will break out for secession when system-wide collapse begins.
Secession IS white flight. Please stop trying to be a contrarian.
I’m not trying to be anything. Here is your statement:
The best strategy is perpetual white flight. That isn’t cowardice. We aren’t allowed to fight back, so we have to do the next best thing: Strategic withdrawal like the Russians have done many times.
“White flight” is 100% NOT understood in the American political mind to be identical with secession. “Secession” refers to a people/territory seeking to exit an existing polity so as to achieve new sovereignty and self-government. “White flight” refers to the phenomenon of whites constantly uprooting themselves and moving to whiter places once their neighborhoods or cities cross a certain threshold of nonwhite residents. Historical instances of Russian “strategic withdrawal” had nothing to do with secessionist goals or methods. American white flight is merely a collectively losing individual strategy for coping with the problems associated with imperialistic diversity.
You are indeed being a contrarian. You do this to so many of my comments in your quest to be different. Please keep your negative individualism away from my collectivism. You simply cannot keep your libertarian priors out of this. I’m not going to slow down just because you don’t understand what I’m saying or more importantly what you yourself are doing. I’ve dealt with this antisocial personality so many times in this movement and I’ve just had it. Try and keep up instead of trying to be an eternal reply guy. At this point you either are incredibly low-IQ, lazily undisciplined or purposely obtuse and want pointless arguments. I will not give that to you anymore. Please stop polluting my comment thread with your lack of creativity.
(to below) That’s the funniest, least relevant, and most bizarre comment I’ve ever read here. I reply directly to something you wrote which was poorly conceived or expressed, and you run off with a bunch of non sequiturs. Disagreeing with you is not synonymous with being a “contrarian”, as you or anyone else defines that term. Your understanding of the term “white flight” in incorrect, as is your recommendation of it.
And as for the individualist vs collectivist debate, the latter have a tremendous amount to learn from the former. The issues are hardly new and undiscussed.
This will be my last response to you. Too many times you have to add your irrelevant need to ‘correct’ people who actually post strategies here, which is a CONTRARIAN weakness. You will get this reply every time you try to derail my comments henceforth. I have not read a single shred of originality from you in any of your posts. You only do these contrarian replies because you’re a reply guy who adds nothing to any discussion. You only piggyback off effort-posts and seek to derail them because it is a personality defect in quite a few antisocial contrarians in this movement. It’s a strange need for attention to try and ‘pick apart’ grammar. I think you should go and try and be a ‘grammar Nazi’ somewhere else even though you failed at that too. You’re like somebody who incorrectly uses ‘whom’ while trying to overcorrect an actual linguist. It’s a pathology that so many abnormal people in this movement default to since they can’t function anywhere else in society.
You are obviously either mentally ill, or a fucking idiot. I assure you, nothing you have ever said or ever could say would be worth 1% of what I have contributed here. Your IQ is probably 25 pts lower than mine; your education is obviously pitiful next to mine. You cannot even address a straightforward rejoinder to your original stupid and verbose comment without “personalizing” it (which is a classic progressive, “don’t trigger me” emotivist approach to discussion). You frankly don’t belong here. I had not even previously noticed you. I certainly have never searched out your comments. But perhaps henceforth, I shall. I suggest you “up” your game.
Just quit while you’re behind. This is beyond embarrassing.
Just look around, listen to the majority of callers to radio talk shows and check out what Americans view as entertainment, you won’t be able to disagree that this nation is getting dumber. But, you can skip the above and remember that 80 million people voted in a clown who clearly had signs of dementia for President.
“listen to the majority of callers to radio talk show”.
Too true. Have you ever listened to financial guru Dave Ramsey who has made a fortune out of telling dim-bulbs the truly startling concept of getting ahead, or at least not getting behind, involves spending less than you earn.
Ramsey’s status, ’tis true, is a perfect comment on US society.
among the universities with ambiguous identities to suit the times: Florida International University, and Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Comments are closed.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.