Are contemporary African Americans really smarter than Europeans were a century ago?

Are contemporary African Americans really smarter than Europeans were a century ago?

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    What was their measured IQ in 1960?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      the tests get continually renormed, so their IQ relative to the average probably hasn't shifted much. the idea is that everyone has gotten inherently smarter presumably because of environmental improvements

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Hell no black americans cant even get D- GPAs on average

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      those grades are using current standards though which may have risen a lot

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        False
        https://www.huffpost.com/entry/1912-eighth-grade-exam_n_3744163

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          I don't know, I was doing much more complex math in 8th grade. Geometry, Algebra, etc. This is like 5th or 6th grade stuff.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Half of those are algebra...

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Yeah, but really basic Algebra

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          None of those questions are particularly hard, and you're missing the fact that students would have been trained to answer THOSE questions in particular back then anyway.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          None of those questions are particularly hard, and you're missing the fact that students would have been trained to answer THOSE questions in particular back then anyway.

          I think another thing also is that most countries don't have a tradition of having a middle school equivalent of the high school diploma anymore and associated with the regular tests they had in middle school instead.
          I'm from a country that still does middle school exams/diplomas so it doesn't seem particularly impressive.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Yeah but the original bait is about American blacks.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        If anything it's the opposite. These days test scores are the only thing that really matters to educators because federal funding is tied to them. Thus we have a system that only teaches people to take exans well, any actual learning is entirely accidental.

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Are wars eugenic?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      No. That's unironically something pop-history gays and MIC shareholders shill

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I’m sure this has nothing to do with the annual renormalization process applied to IQ test results. Same deal with SATs/GREs. Weak bait btw

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Intelligence only decreases with time, your test for idiots doesn't work.

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Lol... No. This doesn't even pass the common sense test if you think about it for a second and look at all the inventions and innovations by whites from that era. IQ has been observed to be decreasingly basically since its discovery as a concept, whites aren't even smarter than whites from a century ago.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Your counter-claim doesn't even pass the common sense test if you look at literacy rates from that era.

      >muh inventions
      mostly low-hanging fruit, but this is about the average IQ anyway.
      Read some popular science books from the early 20th and you'll see they were even bigger midwits.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >thinking literacy has frick all to do with intelligence
        You feel for the meme. It changes how your brain works but for all our modern literacy rates, people are still fricking moronic today, far more so than a century ago. Pinch test; look at the way people SPEAK now compared to a century ago "Umm... uhh like, uhh litty senpai".
        >mostly low-hanging fruit, but this is about the average IQ anyway.
        Read some popular science books from the early 20th and you'll see they were even bigger midwits
        Still more intelligent than modern African Americans (like you said, ON AVERAGE) which was the question of the entire thread. Which group that says more about I really couldn't tell you.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Pinch test; look at the way people SPEAK now compared to a century ago "Umm... uhh like, uhh litty senpai".

          An' I got me a tiddy live 'eathen
          Through buy in' supplies off 'er pa.
          Funny an' yellow an' faithful—
          Doll in a teacup she were,
          But we lived on the square, like a true-married pair,
          An' I learned about women from 'er!

          Then I come 'ome in the trooper,
          'Long of a kid o' sixteen—
          Girl from a convent at Meerut,
          The straightest I ever 'ave seen.
          Love at first sight was 'er trouble,
          She didn't know what it were;
          An' I wouldn't do such, 'cause I liked 'er too much,
          But—I learned about women from 'er!

          and this is from a poem.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            ‘’As anybody seen Bill ’Awkins?’
            ‘Now ’ow in the devil would I know?’
            ‘’E’s taken my girl out walkin’,
            An’ I’ve got to tell ’im so—
            Gawd—bless—’im!
            I’ve got to tell ’im so.’

            An’ s’pose you met Bill ’Awkins,
            Now what in the devil ’ud ye do?’
            ‘I’d open ’is cheek to ’is chin-strap buckle,
            An’ bung up ’is both eyes, too—
            Gawd—bless—’im!
            An’ bung up ’is both eyes, too!’

            ‘Look ’ere, where ’e comes, Bill ’Awkins!
            Now what in the devil will you say?’
            ‘It isn’t fit an’ proper to be fightin’ on a Sunday,
            So I’ll pass ’im the time o’ day—
            Gawd—bless—’im!
            I’ll pass ’im the time o’ day!’

            needless to say real people were rather less eloquent than even that

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            ‘What the devil do you want now? Stampin’ all over the house. ‘You can’t go through there! It’s privit! I do wish to goodness you’d git!’
            ‘Where the blazes is that there dog o’ mine got to?’ he muttered. ‘Did you see a dog?’
            ‘No! What do I want with your dog?’
            ‘Look here! that there dog was lyin’ there agin the wall when I went to sleep. He wouldn’t stir from me, or my swag, in a year, if he wasn’t dragged. He’s been blanky well touched, and I wouldn’ter lost him for a fiver. Are you sure you ain’t seen a dog? Where’s them two chaps that was playin’ cards when I wenter sleep?’

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      that's why I was asking as it seems a bit.. counter-intuitive.
      how would you explain the Flynn effect in that case?

      >thinking literacy has frick all to do with intelligence
      You feel for the meme. It changes how your brain works but for all our modern literacy rates, people are still fricking moronic today, far more so than a century ago. Pinch test; look at the way people SPEAK now compared to a century ago "Umm... uhh like, uhh litty senpai".
      >mostly low-hanging fruit, but this is about the average IQ anyway.
      Read some popular science books from the early 20th and you'll see they were even bigger midwits
      Still more intelligent than modern African Americans (like you said, ON AVERAGE) which was the question of the entire thread. Which group that says more about I really couldn't tell you.

      >Still more intelligent than modern African Americans (like you said, ON AVERAGE)
      doesn't seem like a fair comparison as popular science writers don't represent the average white person. even if they tend to be 'midwits' they'd be on the right hand side of the midwit distribution.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >how would you explain the Flynn effect in that case?
        Because children attend school longer now and have become much more familiar with the testing of school-related material. It's not a direct correlate of like what someone's "intelligence stat" like in a videogame would be.
        >doesn't seem like a fair comparison as popular science writers don't represent the average white person. even if they tend to be 'midwits' they'd be on the right hand side of the midwit distribution.
        Sure. But that's not the comparison that I was making, really. The problem here is that IQ is always adjusted to 100 for the average so whatever the hell it was 100 years ago is almost impossible to compare to today (beyond the reasons that I mentioned above). That being the case, I'm comparing the outliers instead and just assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that whites and blacks have the same rate and % of outliers. I realize that there would have been far fewer black ones in the past due to limitations put upon them by society but the fact that those limitations do not exist today (and in fact blacks are even given certain advantages, scholarships, affirmative action ect) yet the rates of these outliers don't seem to have changed kind of points to the conclusion that the average hasn't changed either. Tl;dr: I'm basing my assumptions off a makeshift proxy due to incomplete data.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Ironically IQ is a makeshift proxy based on incomplete data. We’re nowhere near as clever as we believe ourselves to be.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          it's generally thought that education doesn't have much impact on IQ though and in the case of the Flynn effect that appears to be especially true
          >Because children attend school longer now and have become much more familiar with the testing of school-related material, one might expect the greatest gains to occur on such school content-related tests as vocabulary, arithmetic or general information. Just the opposite is the case: abilities such as these have experienced relatively small gains and even occasional decreases over the years. Meta-analytic findings indicate that Flynn effects occur for tests assessing both fluid and crystallized abilities.

          >Sure. But that's not the comparison that I was making, really.
          I mean it literally was
          >Read some popular science books from the early 20th and you'll see they were even bigger midwits
          >Still more intelligent than modern African Americans (like you said, ON AVERAGE) which was the question of the entire thread.
          so you're saying that white pop sci writers from the early 20th century were smarter than modern blacks which wouldn't be too surprising even assuming that the average white from that time was less intelligent than the average black currently.
          >The problem here is that IQ is always adjusted to 100 for the average so whatever the hell it was 100 years ago is almost impossible to compare to today (beyond the reasons that I mentioned above).
          I'm aware, that's the whole point of the Flynn effect after all, and it can be inferred from the results of each new wave of test takers that IQ has been rising about 3 points a decade. therefore 100 years ago the average white person would be 70 IQ by today's standards, which would be considered borderline moronic these days.
          I get where you're coming from but there could be a few other factors to consider like their culture being anti-intellectual, just having a much smaller population even compared to whites back then, diminishing (too long

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >diminishing
            returns when it comes to innovation, I mean innovation in general has dried up over the years right

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            also of course east Asians have higher IQ but haven't been as innovative, so clearly there are other factors when it comes to that.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >it's generally thought that education doesn't have much impact on IQ though and in the case of the Flynn effect that appears to be especially true
            children attend school longer now and have become much more familiar with the testing of school-related material, one might expect the greatest gains to occur on such school content-related tests as vocabulary, arithmetic or general information. Just the opposite is the case: abilities such as these have experienced relatively small gains and even occasional decreases over the years. Meta-analytic findings indicate that Flynn effects occur for tests assessing both fluid and crystallized abilities.
            If you say so. I would call that an anomaly though, there's no way that is a usual situation that just happens. I would attribute that growth to "nurture", first-world conditions. Proper nutrition ect, things that never existed in the past.
            >Sure. But that's not the comparison that I was making, really.
            >I mean it literally was
            Well that wasn't my intention so idk what to tell you. Frick me for being inarticulate I guess? The whole point of me bringing up outliers and then using that to guess the averages is that we don't have good data on either but at least with the outliers they have tangible achievements to compare
            > therefore 100 years ago the average white person would be 70 IQ by today's standards, which would be considered borderline moronic these days.
            That just doesn't seem like it's possible unless I'm vastly ignorant of the average person vs elite sample sizes. I met my great grandfather, he was alive until I was 16 and he was an electrical engineer, I can't really fathom all his friends and contemporaries having an average IQ of 70. Just seems hard to believe.
            >I get where you're coming from but there could be a few other factors to consider like their culture being anti-intellectual, just having a much smaller population even compared to whites back then
            Yes, I tried to account for those (cont

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            I tried to account for those or at least mention that they exist in the form of actual, legitimate oppression that black people faced in the 1920's. I think where my guesswork actually breaks though was when I assumed that blacks and whites have the same rate of outliers which may or may not be true and a century in retrospect is now impossible to figure out, not to mention compounding effects of the things you and I already mentioned. I change my answer to OP's in light of that, I don't think it's possible to say one way or another.

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    People who find it absurd don't realize the increase seems to correlate with a general increase in brain size and weight:
    https://pumpkinperson.com/2018/08/25/more-evidence-for-increasing-brain-size-over-the-20th-century/

    >brain weight of white males in their 20s in the early 20th century
    >1361g
    >brain weight of 25 yo black males in the 80s
    >1375g
    >brain weight of 25 yo white males in the 80s
    >1570g

    Now brain size/weight isn't everything, but it's quite remarkable that it increased 15% in the same population in a century or less, during the same period IQ was significantly increasing.

    This is data presented by Jensen and Lynn btw, noted hereditarians.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Presumably the 20th century was a very eugenic one for North Americans. Early-middle industrial environments opened up a lot of new positions for white collar workers, and the culture encouraged having children. Anecdotally, as an example, my grandfather was born in a shack, went to MIT (in another country, for him), and had three kids, two of whom had massive craniums like him. He was 6' tall despite growing up in abject poverty and notably stronger in both mind and body than a lot of his peers. I've seen pictures of his immediate ancestors. All weak, small village people. He got whatever the right combination of genes was, and then proceeded to outperform those who surrounded him.

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The growth of the middle class was probably a demographic expansion of a select cohort of the most exceptional in the lower classes, like my grandfather. The most clever guy in the village or the town would go on to have an expansive lineage thanks to the wealth freed up by both postwar booms. As much as some people hate it, people coming from abroad today are so heavily selected for education that it should continue the trend. However, at the same time, the middle class is shrinking and childbearing is being made both culturally and economically untenable for all but the ultra-rich. I have a feeling we might actually see a decline in brain size and IQ over the next few decades as a result. Ironically, the statistically smarter ones that make it to the top are the same people depressing the fertility of the often not any less intelligent in the classes immediately underneath them. We're looking at a return to the medieval world of a mass society of dunces run by scintillating (and sometimes foreign-originating) elites.

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