Smarter and smarter . . . ?
The Flynn effect
In 1987 an American expatriate at the University of Otago in New Zealand reported a striking result relating to intelligence tests. James Flynn’s examination of studies from fourteen countries over multiple generations revealed that young people were getting smarter—a lot smarter. Their IQ test scores were increasing by as much as 25 points in a single generation. This jump was sufficient to push an average score into the 95th percentile and to make a bright kid into an Einstein.
The Flynn effect, as it was called, was great enough that the various groups that created and administered intelligence tests had to make them harder and harder, in order to preserve their statistical models, which required the typical median score in any year to be 100.
Other studies confirmed Flynn’s results, leaving scientists to account for them. Broadly speaking, explanations fell into the two archetypal categories of nature and nurture. Young people might be inheriting better brains. Or they might be getting more out of existing brains.
The magnitude of the increase in such a short period, evolutionarily speaking, seemed to rule out the nature explanation. Evolution doesn’t work that quickly.
Nurture was more plausible. During the period of Flynn’s study—the middle several decades of the 20th century—many of the countries he sampled experienced dramatic improvements in child nutrition and general health, as well as greater access to education and other brain-stimulating activities. These factors would account for the higher scores.
They also raised the question whether the improvement would continue.
The answer was no. The improvement diminished and then ceased during the 1990s.
What happened?
Patterns of the slowing suggested that the improvement had brought young people who previously performed below innate capacity—on account of stress during the Great Depression or World War II, for example—closer to the maximum their genes allowed. Once the nurture issues had been resolved, the constraints of nature kicked in.
Then something even less expected occurred. Starting in the 1990s, the Flynn mechanism slipped into reverse. After rising 3 points per decade for most of a century, average intelligence scores declined, in some cases by the same amount they had been rising.
For similar reasons to those adduced on the rise, the decline was attributed to environmental causes rather than to inheritance. But which environmental causes? There was no depression or war comparable to those of the 1930s and 1940s to blame the decline on.
A likely culprit was technology. Electronic calculators reduced the need for students to learn mathematical skills and therefore for schools to teach them. Personal computers and the internet made information readily available, devaluating memorization of facts. Computers and the internet contributed to changes in reading habits in students. They read fewer books and more short pieces, and this may have dulled their ability to hold long chains of reasoning in mind.
The reverse Flynn effect preceded smart phones and social media, though these might have contributed to it after the beginning of the 21st century.
Curiously, while scores declined in numerical reasoning, verbal skill and problem-solving, they increased in visualization and spatial reasoning. No solid evidence explained this anomaly, but it was consistent with the growing popularity of video games, which challenged and presumably strengthened visualization and spatial reasoning skills.
As often happens, pundits and others were quick to cite the results that suited their purposes. Though relatively few people had celebrated the smarting up of the generations of the 20th century, many decried the dumbing down of the kids of the 21st century. The decriers targeted permissive parents, selfish teachers’ unions and woke culture.
More than a few of both insiders and outsiders cautioned against overinterpreting the results of tests. The punctilious pointed out that the tests measure not intelligence per se but the ability to take intelligence tests. Some noted that if computers and the internet had caused certain skills to atrophy, this was no bigger a deal than that automobiles caused the average American’s horse-riding skills to atrophy.
James Flynn died at eighty-six in 2020. He hadn’t christened the Flynn effect, and he was often uncomfortable at having the label hung on him. He might have grown more uncomfortable had he lived into the age of widely available artificial intelligence, which multiplied the handwringing a hundredfold.
Considering that certain technology seems to degrade IQ and function, maybe a change of procedure is warranted.
Rather than turning over all the reigns, perhaps the wiser course is to treat AI as good tools, letting Chat and Claude serve as editors and research aides, not as surrogate writers using our name.
The writer has always worked with instruments, after all, from quill and a little bottle of ink, to the typewriter, to whatever now sits on her desk. The question has never been the tool. It is who is doing the writing… or the flying
The early jets let a person cross an ocean without flapping a wing, a far cry from Icarus, who tried the same trick with wax and feathers and wound up in the drink.
The 707 and DC-8 did the job. The later, heavily automated airplanes gave the pilot far more information, letting him thread the needle with a precision, and efficiency, the older ones did not match.
Yet this came at a cost: the aircraft proved harder to fly, not easier. The pilots needed to master more complex systems and procedures. (And, I’ve often said to colleagues, “Watch this thing like the dumbest student pilot you’ve ever instructed.”)
But I have seen pilots surrender to the automation, lose situational awareness, and just sort of ride along: the old man and dog joke about flying the Airbus, where the man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to bite the man if he touches anything.
The accident record bears this out:
The pilots of Air France 447 rode a fully functioning airplane into the ocean because none of them could tell, once the automation quit, what the aircraft was doing without it.
Asiana 214 came in short of the runway because the crew trusted an autothrottle that had, in fact, disengaged.
The machines had not failed. The men “flying” them had stopped watching or didn’t understand them.
To fly them well, the new airplanes need well seasoned, well trained pilots.
So AI, used as instruments, hand a writer more information and more precision, but ask more of her judgment, too.
Used as a pilotless craft, they carry the whole flight, and the writer becomes a passenger in her own work.
Icarus attempted ocean flying with wax and feathers; the old writer set down his words with a quill and a little ink bottle. Both were flying, so to speak, on their own power.
The question the new instruments raise is whether the writer using them is still using her fundamental skills and is fundamentally engaged.
I love this. I am a boomer and took SATs in the late 1960s in an era before widespread coaching. I did very well but intelligence is not really one thing or even 2 things. So even though I had 700s in both math and verbal, I was not like many of my peers. They were often puzzlers and were great at memorizing formulas - and happy to accept them as is. I hated puzzles, and tried to see if the formulas worked in life. I also was far more visual (and went to art school).
SATs and other tests serve a useful purpose - to screen our those with little chance to succeed (in engineering for example). or to see where remediation would help. But we still don't know what intelligence is.
Re the ability to take tests, as someone who ended up in the insurance industry (it turns out fine arts is a lousy career choice) the ability to take a test is quite useful. Every license requires a test. I had 2 investment licenses. And professionals or all sorts need to pass tests. So if you are a good test takes - it is a useful skill.