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A comment on Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests. Parent comment

Re:Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Rese... by dragonwriter on Monday September 01, 2014 @02:29PM (#8254121)
The premise you (rightly) reject is misreported -- the actual reason reaction time is being used as a proxy for IQ is that it has been established to have a correlation with IQ, not for the stupid reason reported in the HuffPo article. (Its like whoever wrote that article didn't even read the abstract of the paper its about.)

OTOH, I'm not convinced there is enough of an understanding of that correlation (particularly an understanding of what other factors contribute to reaction time variations and how they have varied over the time in question) to simply assume that it can be treated as invariant in conditions other than those in which the correlation has been studied.

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Re:Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Rese... by lutusp on Monday September 01, 2014 @03:04PM (#8254245)
An argument against the significance of the correlation is that old people's reaction times decline, while their intelligence may continue to increase. Consequently a test that measured abilities other than reaction time would favor that age group over a test series based on reaction time.
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