One of my favorite topics is the well-documented increase in human intelligence recorded over the past century. James R. Flynn’s exhaustive research in IQ testing showed a worldwide average increase in IQ of about three points per decade. When intelligence is measured strictly via IQ test scores, however, there is some evidence to suggest that this growth may have slowed (or even halted) in recent years.
Writing at FutureBlogger, Alvis Brigis argues that any measure of the progress (or slowing) of human intelligence has got to take the system as a whole into consideration. We “do” intelligence in a very different environment than was available even to our very recent ancestors, and that environment itself may be part of the overall intelligence picture:
[S]tructures like Google, Facebook, simulations of our world and the Web itself become extensions of intelligence rather than discrete units removed from discrete human brains. As such structures evolve and grow, so too does “our” intelligence.
My co-blogger Stephen has often made a similar point, claiming all of the information available via Google as part of his own memory. How can we not be smarter when we carry around what are essentially brain prostheses and continually interact with an environment that can so dramatically increase the information available to us and the speed at which we can process problems?Although it’s interesting that Alvis mentions Facebook –personally, I didn’t feel that Facebook was extending my intelligence all that much that time I tried out the SuperPoke feature on all my friends and, rather than giving everyone the intended “high five” I somehow accidentally “slipped them all a little tongue.”
Funny? Maybe. Smart? Maybe not. (I’m pretty sure my boss was one of the recipients of my unexpected affection.)
But embarrassing incidents such as that aside, it’s interesting to note that many of the activities I participate in on Facebook have an intelligence component. I like to play Texas Hold Em, which as I have written previously is one of the finest test environments for pure outcome management. I also like to play a game called Who Has the Biggest Brain, which is a flat-out IQ competition between Facebook participants. Plus, it is via Facebook that I learned about Superstruct, a massively multi-player online game where the core skill forecasting the future.
Photo by sanctu
These kinds of activities go to Alvis’ second point about intelligence, the idea that accelerating technological change provides an ongoing set of “software upgrades” to our basic abstraction and processing capability. Just playing the games listed above force one to become smarter in order to stay competitive. Of course, the standard criticism is to question whether this sort of thing represents an actual leap in intelligence, and a commenter to Alvis’ post does exactly that:
We can of course talk about “paradigm shiftsâ€, “memes†and exponential growth of everything. But a very simple and plausible explanation of Flynn Effect is greater familiarity with multiple-choice questions and experience with brain-teaser IQ problems.
In other words, we haven’t really gotten any smarter; we’re just better test-takers (and game-players.) I’m not so sure that this criticism holds up. It seems to me that any “familiarity” with multiple-choice tests that would actually enable a test-taker to improve his or her performance would involve meta-analysis of the structure of the test, including attempts to look for patterns and second-guess the author of the test. There is no question in my mind that one can improve one’s performance answering “brain-teaser IQ problems.” Years ago, a co-worker and I kept a book of such puzzles at the office and read one to each other every day (eventually we went through several volumes of them.) We definitely got better at decoding these puzzles and we both improved our average hit-rate over time. So did we actually get any smarter or did we just learn a trick? As with multiple-choice questions, I don’t think one simply becomes “familiar” with these kinds of puzzles. We had to learn new thinking strategies and new ways of approaching the problem at hand in order to come up with consistent right answers. Are the skills we developed limited only to solving brain-teaser puzzles? I don’t see why they would be. Maybe they made us especially good at solving those kinds of puzzles, but that doesn’t mean they have no applicability elsewhere. Likewise, earlier test-takers how start cracking the code on multiple-choice tests developed pattern recognition and meta-analysis skills that would have applicability in many other settings. Being a better test-taker, or game-player, requires becoming smarter. There’s no getting around it.
In addition to IQ scores, I think it’s important to look at factors such as scientific literacy. All the hand-wringing (and high-fiving) over stupid Americans notwithstanding, the US nearly tripled its level of scientific literacy over a period of about 20 years. I wonder how much of that has to do with the tremendous increase in computer literacy that has occurred over the same period of time? In any case, it’s hard to make the argument that people aren’t really getting smarter in the face of evidence such as this — unless you want to make the case that understanding science is just some kind of “trick.” If that’s the case, then I’m no longer clear on what would constitute “real” intelligence, and I’m not even sure I care.
It seems to me that we’re getting plenty smart just by learning all these tricks.