Only some, not all, human populations produce any significant amount of science, and there is no sign that is about to change. Every one of those populations that does produce science has sub-replacement fertility and is also undergoing selection for lower IQ.
Gwern:
One of the more interesting ways science may die is something I call the ‘Agularity’: the average age of productivity keeps rising, so at some point either no one sane will invest that much of their lifetime into maybe being able to contribute or there will simply be too little time to do much new work before the normal decline with age starts around 40-50.
Jones has a series of papers on this aging phenomenon: “Age and Great Invention” 2006; “The burden of knowledge and the ‘death of the Renaissance man’”, 2005; “Age dynamics in scientific creativity”, 2011; etc.
Gregory Cochran:
Every one of those populations that does produce science has sub-replacement fertility and is also undergoing selection for lower IQ.
What happened to the Flynn Effect?
I’d note that average intelligence is largely irrelevant here. My guess is that with selective mating, the tail has thickened at least at the top end. You know anything about this? Of course, if they always just renormalize the tests to make them gaussian, it will be hard to see.
Gwern:
One of the more interesting ways science may die is something I call the ‘Agularity’: the average age of productivity keeps rising, so at some point either no one sane will invest that much of their lifetime into maybe being able to contribute or there will simply be too little time to do much new work before the normal decline with age starts around 40-50.
With better nutrition, longer lives, an increasing percentage of scientists, we should expect the age of productivity to go up.
And do a lot of people in grad school strike you as particularly sane? It’s a bunch of crazy folks who like thinking all day, with the most obsessive being the most successful as the years go by. Do you think they’re all going to rush off to work at Walmart, or all become lawyers?
Have you been following the Flynn effect research? It’s dead, Jim.
My guess is that with selective mating, the tail has thickened at least at the top end.
We don’t see it.
With better nutrition, longer lives, an increasing percentage of scientists, we should expect the age of productivity to go up.
None of that really follows. Better nutrition may change the baseline without affecting the arc of mental growth and decline; lives can be extended likewise; an increasing percentage of scientists doesn’t help, and arguably by diminishing returns may hurt any average. Further, even if we established that any effects existed (like the former Flynn effect), that effect would have to overcome the underlying aging/delaying trend. It hasn’t yet*, so why do you expect it to do so in the future?
* Note, by the way, this implies nutrition and life expectancy are pretty hopeless: we already reaped all the gains there were from iodine and cheap calories, and life expectancy increases are decelerating in the US.
Do you think they’re all going to rush off to work at Walmart, or all become lawyers?
Yeah, pretty much. There’s a lots of non-science jobs, you know, and with tenure disappearing, where do you think all those grad students are going to? Where did smart people go back when 1% of the population went to college? All sorts of places.
Have you been following the Flynn effect research? It’s dead, Jim.
Speaking of Jim Flynn, he has a new book out: Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century. On page 5 it says this:
Nations with data about IQ trends stand at 31. Scandinavian nations had robust gains but these peaked about 1990 and since then, may have gone into mild decline. Several other nations show persistent gains. Americans are still gaining at their historic rate of 0.30 points per year (WAIS 1995-2006; WISC 1989-2002). British children were a bit below that on Raven’s from 1980 to 2008, but their current rate of gain is higher than in the earlier period from 1943 to 1980. German adults were still making vocabulary gains in 2007 at a slightly higher rate than US adults. South Korean children gained at double the US rate between 1989 and 2002 (Emanuelsson, Reuterberg, & Svensson, 1993; Flynn, 2009a, 2009b; Pietschnig, Voracek, & Formann, 2010; Schneider, 2006; Sundet, Barlaug, & Torjussen, 2004; Teasdale & Owen, 1989, 2000; te Nijenhuis, 2011; te Nijenhuis et al., 2008).
The US & UK generate something like 28% of the world’s research papers; the US is the biggest source of papers and the UK the third biggest. In between is China, about which Flynn says (p. 64):
China’s mean IQ is already at least the equal of developed western nations and her high rate of growth appears unstoppable.
However, his recent data for China only cover 5-6-year-olds, who apparently gained 0.2 points a year between 1984 & 2006 on the WPPSI. All in all, though, it seems like the 3 most dominant countries for science papers (accounting for about 38% of global output between them) still have a Flynn effect.
Also, here’s something tangential but nonetheless interesting that I spotted:
China’s gone from middle of the pack to a leader in publishing papers over the last 20 years
Without looking at the details: I regard Scandinavian countries as the ‘peak’ or ceiling for the US, since they have invested heavily in health and education in ways the US haven’t and which we can see in other metrics like height and longevity. (The specifics don’t matter here, I think, whether the US is being dragged down by minorities or this is intrinsic to wealth inequality or whatever.)
Moving on to the US: his use of averages is interesting, but this doesn’t tell me too much − 2006 was a while ago, and mightn’t there be falls or plateaus? And on what base is this increase coming, and how is it distributed? If the Flynn effect is operating only in lower IQ ranges, as has long been suggested since stuff like better nutrition would then handily account for it, this has no real relevance to questions of cutting-edge science, which is done pretty much solely by >120 IQ ranges.
The British example really confuses me, because I was under the distinct impression that one of Flynn’s researches has been on how the British Flynn effect has stopped and reversed (specifically, “Requiem for nutrition as the cause of IQ gains: Raven’s gains in Britain 1938–2008” Flynn 2009).
China is an interesting example and a potential counter-example, but my basic question is this: the age frontier has been increasing over the 20th century, the century in which another very smart East Asian country grew from poverty to one of the richest nations around and invested commensurate amounts into R&D, winning 16 Nobels (including non-STEM). I mean Japan, of course.
(Chinese plagiarism is a serious concern, as are general cultural critiques of ‘unoriginality’, but before I rested any claims on that, I’d want to know whether there were similar issues in America or Europe or Japan especially—whether there really is a difference in kind, or just a difference in stage of development. Plagiarism/unoriginality may just be teething problems, if you will.)
So if Japan’s own development & Flynn effect did not—apparently—reverse the age frontier, why do you expect China to reverse it?
Moving on to the US: his use of averages is interesting, but this doesn’t tell me too much − 2006 was a while ago, and mightn’t there be falls or plateaus?
It’s always possible, but I’m unware of subsequent standardization samples showing that.
And on what base is this increase coming, and how is it distributed?
Not sure, I haven’t seen US data for that in Flynn’s book. I’ve only seen details about the low vs. high ends of the distribution for Britain.
The British example really confuses me, because I was under the distinct impression that one of Flynn’s researches has been on how the British Flynn effect has stopped and reversed (specifically, “Requiem for nutrition as the cause of IQ gains: Raven’s gains in Britain 1938–2008” Flynn 2009).
(That paper’s the “Flynn, 2009a” cited in the snippet I quoted, incidentally.) Looking more closely into Flynn’s full discussion of the British data in the book clarifies things. The data come from two Raven’s Matrices tests, the CPM and the SPM. The CPM covered ages 5-11 and the SPM ages 7-15 (pages 45 & 46). On the CPM the Flynn effect was faster from the 1980s onwards but on the SPM it was slower; Flynn detected that this was an age effect, and so compared the CPM & SPM over their common age range of 7-11. Over that range both tests had an accelerating Flynn effect (p. 47), and I assume this is where Flynn’s conclusion that the UK has a stronger recent Flynn effect comes from.
However, considering the SPM alone over its entire age range, there was a net slowing down of the Flynn effect (0.15 points per year for 1979-2008 vs. 0.23 points per year for 1938-1979), because at the highest ages tested the Flynn effect went into reverse (a 1.9 point IQ drop from 1979 to 2008 for 14- & 15-year-olds). Presumably it’s this data that suggested a reversal of the UK Flynn effect to you, and your inference differed from Flynn’s because the two of you looked at different slices of the data. Flynn focused on younger children, who have rising IQs, and you remembered the data from older children, who have falling IQs. (It’s a shame there are no recent adult data to resolve which trend the grown-ups are following.)
China is an interesting example and a potential counter-example, but my basic question is this: the age frontier
So if Japan’s own development & Flynn effect did not—apparently—reverse the age frontier, why do you expect China to reverse it?
I don’t disagree with you about the age frontier. The part of your comment that brought me up short was “Have you been following the Flynn effect research? It’s dead, Jim.”, because it didn’t jibe with what I remembered from Flynn’s book. The rest of your comment looked good to me.
As for plagiarism in Chinese science, I suspect it probably is just a teething problem that’ll work itself out in a few decades. My intent wasn’t to roll out a stock stereotype about Chinese culture being unoriginal but simply to note a sideline the paper might touch upon.
However, considering the SPM alone over its entire age range, there was a net slowing down of the Flynn effect (0.15 points per year for 1979-2008 vs. 0.23 points per year for 1938-1979), because at the highest ages tested the Flynn effect went into reverse (a 1.9 point IQ drop from 1979 to 2008 for 14- & 15-year-olds). Presumably it’s this data that suggested a reversal of the UK Flynn effect to you, and your inference differed from Flynn’s because the two of you looked at different slices of the data. Flynn focused on younger children, who have rising IQs, and you remembered the data from older children, who have falling IQs. (It’s a shame there are no recent adult data to resolve which trend the grown-ups are following.)
Hm, maybe I’m missing something on how the tests interact, but if the older range up to 2008 on the SPM was falling, doesn’t that tell you how the adults are going to turn out simply because they are closer to being adults than the younger counterparts?
Hm, maybe I’m missing something on how the tests interact, but if the older range up to 2008 on the SPM was falling, doesn’t that tell you how the adults are going to turn out simply because they are closer to being adults than the younger counterparts?
A priori, it does seem like the older kid trend should be more relevant to adults than the younger kid trend.
However, British IQ gains might have a V-shaped relationship with age: solid gains in younger kids, lesser gains (or indeed losses) in teenagers, and a return to higher gains in adulthood. As written that probably sounds like a wilful disregard of Occam’s razor, but there is some precedent.
I went back to Flynn’s original 1987 article “Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations” and looked up Great Britain. The only Matrices results seem to be for the SPM, but as well as the familiar 1938-1979 results, there’s an adult IQ gain estimate. Flynn got it by comparing a 1940 sample of militiamen (average age 22) at a WW2 training depot to the 15½-year-olds in the 1979 sample, adjusting the gain estimate to partially offset the teenagers’ age disadvantage.
Comparing the adult(ish) gains to the child gains reveals something like a V-shaped trend: ages 8-11 gained 0.25 points/year, ages 12-14 gained 0.11 points/year, and the 15½-year-olds outpaced the militiamen by 0.18 points/year. In this case, the older kids’ gain rate was no better as an estimate of the (pseudo-)adult rate than the younger kids’ rate.
Interesting stuff from the comment section.
Gregory Cochran:
Gwern:
What happened to the Flynn Effect?
I’d note that average intelligence is largely irrelevant here. My guess is that with selective mating, the tail has thickened at least at the top end. You know anything about this? Of course, if they always just renormalize the tests to make them gaussian, it will be hard to see.
With better nutrition, longer lives, an increasing percentage of scientists, we should expect the age of productivity to go up.
And do a lot of people in grad school strike you as particularly sane? It’s a bunch of crazy folks who like thinking all day, with the most obsessive being the most successful as the years go by. Do you think they’re all going to rush off to work at Walmart, or all become lawyers?
Have you been following the Flynn effect research? It’s dead, Jim.
We don’t see it.
None of that really follows. Better nutrition may change the baseline without affecting the arc of mental growth and decline; lives can be extended likewise; an increasing percentage of scientists doesn’t help, and arguably by diminishing returns may hurt any average. Further, even if we established that any effects existed (like the former Flynn effect), that effect would have to overcome the underlying aging/delaying trend. It hasn’t yet*, so why do you expect it to do so in the future?
* Note, by the way, this implies nutrition and life expectancy are pretty hopeless: we already reaped all the gains there were from iodine and cheap calories, and life expectancy increases are decelerating in the US.
Yeah, pretty much. There’s a lots of non-science jobs, you know, and with tenure disappearing, where do you think all those grad students are going to? Where did smart people go back when 1% of the population went to college? All sorts of places.
Speaking of Jim Flynn, he has a new book out: Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century. On page 5 it says this:
The US & UK generate something like 28% of the world’s research papers; the US is the biggest source of papers and the UK the third biggest. In between is China, about which Flynn says (p. 64):
However, his recent data for China only cover 5-6-year-olds, who apparently gained 0.2 points a year between 1984 & 2006 on the WPPSI. All in all, though, it seems like the 3 most dominant countries for science papers (accounting for about 38% of global output between them) still have a Flynn effect.
Also, here’s something tangential but nonetheless interesting that I spotted:
China’s gone from middle of the pack to a leader in publishing papers over the last 20 years
science in China has a serious plagiarism problem
scroll back up to that first graph: plagarism grows from basically nothing c. 1991 to dozens of instances in the last few years
(Maybe the PNAS paper comments on this coincidence of timing, I haven’t read it yet.)
[Belated edit to fix “gows” typo.]
Without looking at the details: I regard Scandinavian countries as the ‘peak’ or ceiling for the US, since they have invested heavily in health and education in ways the US haven’t and which we can see in other metrics like height and longevity. (The specifics don’t matter here, I think, whether the US is being dragged down by minorities or this is intrinsic to wealth inequality or whatever.)
Moving on to the US: his use of averages is interesting, but this doesn’t tell me too much − 2006 was a while ago, and mightn’t there be falls or plateaus? And on what base is this increase coming, and how is it distributed? If the Flynn effect is operating only in lower IQ ranges, as has long been suggested since stuff like better nutrition would then handily account for it, this has no real relevance to questions of cutting-edge science, which is done pretty much solely by >120 IQ ranges.
The British example really confuses me, because I was under the distinct impression that one of Flynn’s researches has been on how the British Flynn effect has stopped and reversed (specifically, “Requiem for nutrition as the cause of IQ gains: Raven’s gains in Britain 1938–2008” Flynn 2009).
China is an interesting example and a potential counter-example, but my basic question is this: the age frontier has been increasing over the 20th century, the century in which another very smart East Asian country grew from poverty to one of the richest nations around and invested commensurate amounts into R&D, winning 16 Nobels (including non-STEM). I mean Japan, of course.
(Chinese plagiarism is a serious concern, as are general cultural critiques of ‘unoriginality’, but before I rested any claims on that, I’d want to know whether there were similar issues in America or Europe or Japan especially—whether there really is a difference in kind, or just a difference in stage of development. Plagiarism/unoriginality may just be teething problems, if you will.)
So if Japan’s own development & Flynn effect did not—apparently—reverse the age frontier, why do you expect China to reverse it?
It’s always possible, but I’m unware of subsequent standardization samples showing that.
Not sure, I haven’t seen US data for that in Flynn’s book. I’ve only seen details about the low vs. high ends of the distribution for Britain.
(That paper’s the “Flynn, 2009a” cited in the snippet I quoted, incidentally.) Looking more closely into Flynn’s full discussion of the British data in the book clarifies things. The data come from two Raven’s Matrices tests, the CPM and the SPM. The CPM covered ages 5-11 and the SPM ages 7-15 (pages 45 & 46). On the CPM the Flynn effect was faster from the 1980s onwards but on the SPM it was slower; Flynn detected that this was an age effect, and so compared the CPM & SPM over their common age range of 7-11. Over that range both tests had an accelerating Flynn effect (p. 47), and I assume this is where Flynn’s conclusion that the UK has a stronger recent Flynn effect comes from.
However, considering the SPM alone over its entire age range, there was a net slowing down of the Flynn effect (0.15 points per year for 1979-2008 vs. 0.23 points per year for 1938-1979), because at the highest ages tested the Flynn effect went into reverse (a 1.9 point IQ drop from 1979 to 2008 for 14- & 15-year-olds). Presumably it’s this data that suggested a reversal of the UK Flynn effect to you, and your inference differed from Flynn’s because the two of you looked at different slices of the data. Flynn focused on younger children, who have rising IQs, and you remembered the data from older children, who have falling IQs. (It’s a shame there are no recent adult data to resolve which trend the grown-ups are following.)
I don’t disagree with you about the age frontier. The part of your comment that brought me up short was “Have you been following the Flynn effect research? It’s dead, Jim.”, because it didn’t jibe with what I remembered from Flynn’s book. The rest of your comment looked good to me.
As for plagiarism in Chinese science, I suspect it probably is just a teething problem that’ll work itself out in a few decades. My intent wasn’t to roll out a stock stereotype about Chinese culture being unoriginal but simply to note a sideline the paper might touch upon.
Hm, maybe I’m missing something on how the tests interact, but if the older range up to 2008 on the SPM was falling, doesn’t that tell you how the adults are going to turn out simply because they are closer to being adults than the younger counterparts?
(Guess I’ll have to read his book eventually.)
A priori, it does seem like the older kid trend should be more relevant to adults than the younger kid trend.
However, British IQ gains might have a V-shaped relationship with age: solid gains in younger kids, lesser gains (or indeed losses) in teenagers, and a return to higher gains in adulthood. As written that probably sounds like a wilful disregard of Occam’s razor, but there is some precedent.
I went back to Flynn’s original 1987 article “Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations” and looked up Great Britain. The only Matrices results seem to be for the SPM, but as well as the familiar 1938-1979 results, there’s an adult IQ gain estimate. Flynn got it by comparing a 1940 sample of militiamen (average age 22) at a WW2 training depot to the 15½-year-olds in the 1979 sample, adjusting the gain estimate to partially offset the teenagers’ age disadvantage.
Comparing the adult(ish) gains to the child gains reveals something like a V-shaped trend: ages 8-11 gained 0.25 points/year, ages 12-14 gained 0.11 points/year, and the 15½-year-olds outpaced the militiamen by 0.18 points/year. In this case, the older kids’ gain rate was no better as an estimate of the (pseudo-)adult rate than the younger kids’ rate.
Could you amplify that? It’s stopped happening, or it never did?