For us it was done the morning after being on a training exercise in the forest whole weekend with most being lucky if they have gotten more then 3h of sleep per night for the last 2 nights. Also a certain portion answer it badly on purpose (don't want to end in leadership/speciality stuff due to longer service time).
But yeah main thing the military is complaining about new recruits is physical fitness being down (a lot) and thus a lot flunking out and maybe again in a couple years (most of these get permanent "not fit for duty during peace time" after a couple rounds with the doctors over a decade or so)
Also the P1 test to some extent tests your test taking skills. Specifically the kind where you know how to quickly scan over the questions and pick the easiest ones and answer them first. It has a time limit and more questions then most in general can answer within of.
And the last decade or so has indeed seen a reversal of the Flynn effect.
As you pointed out, IQ is not usable for research across time or across countries or cultures. You can only compare individuals in the same time and same population.
Honestly, iq tests are pointless unless you're selecting for people that are willing to invest time into worthless knowledge in order to win in a contest.
Which is a valid criteria, considering that these are the most motivated people... Its just not "intelligence", though that itself is just as pointless to measure.
I get the sense from the comment about BMI and "axe grinding" that you're really trying to make a dig at what conservative leaning people might call "SJWs". If that's the case, you're doing yourself a disservice by letting ideology obscure the very real scientific problems with IQ testing.
As I said before, the iq test mainly measures how much the participant is motivated... Or so many other reasons which are loosely correlated with professional success such as enjoying puzzles and figuring things out etc.
It just doesn't say anything about "intelligence", and measuring that is pointless, because it's not even possible to clearly define it... like so many terms, there are as many definitions for it as there are people in the room.
But even if you use the official definition of it being the ability to apply knowledge I'd still disagree with the usual iq tests measuring that. They're puzzles at best and measuring how someone can apply knowledge is not that easy to standardize.
This is wrong, and somewhat obviously so. Most people taking an IQ test have never taken one before, and have no preparation. Some of the biggest IQ datasets come from military enlistees. If IQ were not correlated with nebulously defined "intelligence" and were instead some measure of "motivation" and "enjoying puzzles" we wouldn't expect to see it improve generationally with access to better nutrition and early-childhood education. We also probably wouldn't expect to see significant improvements from the introduction of iodized salt, which alleviated shortage of iodine, critical for early brain development, on a population scale.
"Iodine deficiency during development impairs motivation and enjoyment of puzzles later in life" is a much less plausible claim than "IQ correlates with what we commonly understand to be 'intelligence'".
For a population studies this does not matter at all.
For individuals, practicing for IQ test might help a little but there seems to be a clear limit IQ limit that individuals can't overcome with practice.
Social isolation, anxiety, depression, mild cognitive impairment and avoidant behavior are all signs of untreated schizophrenia. It's possible in the past that those with sub-clinical schizotypal personalities self-medicated with tobacco. Removing that would result in a sub-segment of the population becoming significantly less functional in a pronounced way.
I always wonder when people post these numbers about IQ going up and down over time, what scales are we talking about here? like is it a difference of like 2 IQ points or is it like a difference of 20? Cause if it's 5 or less I can't imagine it would make any real functional difference to the country.
How is that kind of institutionalized sexism still legal?
Or are you asking why they don't extend the mandatory service to women? The reasons for that are somewhat historic and very _biotruth_. A country that fights a devastating war that wipes out 90% of the men but keeps the women can recover. A country that has 90% of the women wiped out but leaves the men is completely screwed.
To me this incredibly small risk does not seem to be worth holding one gender back over another, increasing the gender gap for no reason. Forcing someone to work just because of their gender seems very wrong to me.
The reality is that those sorts of rules are very much based on culture tradition ('historic'). It takes a long time for parts of our culture to change. Only a few countries have mandatory service for women (Finland's neighbors Norway and Sweden among them). Israel does as well, but has a large exception on religious grounds.
Also, mandatory service doesn't necessarily mean mandatory combat service, although I don't know how those countries just mentioned manage that.
Scenario B: 100 women, 100 men. 50 women and 50 men go off to war, 5 men and 5 women return. You have 55 women left in the population and 55 children for the next generation.
The limiting factor in human population growth is the number of women that can have children. The cold calculus might be distasteful, but it is there.
It's same excuse used when someone asks why safety of women comes before men, conveniently ignoring that the scenario itself is so far out, it's not going to happen.
multiple 200 by whatever number you feel will represent a true population.
Women can volunteer and some of them do.
There are some political interest in changing in mostly from the youth branches of the political parties but the "real" politicians mostly stick their fingers in their ears. I suppose it is more or less political suicide to try to change the statsu quo as would affect a huge amount of voters negatively.
Incidentally, this seems to be an argument towards smaller, culturally homogeneous countries, where it is much easier to feel connected to the whole set of your countrymen.
>> It depends if you think of your country as an accessory burden or as the ensemble of your fellows.
This "depends" clause doesn't logically follow, since the "slavery" label applies in either circumstance. If one's country is an "ensemble of your fellows", then volunteering for military service may logically follow from that; forcing others to do so, does not. In either case, whether one feels connected to one's country or not, being compelled by force to participate in the military can legitimately be seen as a form of slavery -- since the victim is unable to withdraw unilaterally from their compelled service.
If one cares deeply about their own countrymen, why would one want to enslave them, and remove their choice and freedom in the matter?
- Physical fitness has gone down, overweight goes up.
- Intelligence peaked among those who were born in 70's and has been in slight decline last 18 years. Similar results can be seen in other developed countries.
- Anxiety disorders and depression have increased.
- Social skills have gone up. Young men are more social and better at working together than any time before.
- At the same time there is small but growing group of young men with almost no social skills. They can't get friends or maintain friendships or work in a group.