Aibu to think we're entering a new "dark age"?

[Sorrelle]

Over-reliance on social media, living in our little bubbles; economic nationalism rather than globalisation; growing inequality; growth of illiberal democracies... Anyone agree?

I follow that, almond.

Did you mean that to ego?

My argument was that IQ scores are whole numbers, and set such that the score that attracts the largest number of people is 100. So you can't find 50% of people scoring below 100.

But what's generally understood as 'average' is the mean, which always has half above and half below by definition.

The methods of deviation analysis being disputed above are actually applied to IQ in order to maintain a statistical distribution that makes sense in the real world as a mean average, taking known variants into account.

I just love your rich person's complacent attitude to taking on £27 k debt in fees alone. It is not a debt working class people can seriously take on at the start of their lives. I don't know why anyone goes to Uni now, frankly, I wouldn't and my kids won't be able to. This debt economy is not sustainable.

Why are working class people more disadvantaged than middle class? If Student A is middle class, has a student loan, gets a degree and a good job and Student B is working class, has a student loan and gets the same degree and job they will be paying the same amount of repayments, so their background makes no difference.

Means don't have half above and half below.

If I pay you 5 quid, Jeanne 5 quid, Ego 5 quid and myself 85 quid, the mean salary is 25 quid, and 3 of the four of us will be below the mean wage.

Anyway, more on IQ calculation here:
(there is also a link there to IQ levels of different occupations.

www.iqcomparisonsite.com/IQBasics.aspx

Apologies if someone has already pointed this out but the Flynn effect argues not that we are necessarily getting more intelligent but that we are getting better at taking the types of tests that measure intelligence.

That is our knowledge is becoming less grounded in/constrained by our physical environment and more abstract.

Another thing that helps is to think of the standard deviation as a method of describing a supermajority or two-thirds (actually it's 68%) of a population. That's why the standard deviation is such an important concept. The mean (average) IQ is 100, with 50% above and 50% below, but the range for a person with average intelligence is considered to be 90-100 and 50% of the population falls within this range. (All of these numbers/calculations are based on the concept/tests beginning in Europe France and later in the United States.) The range for the standard deviation or supermajority of 85-115 is expressed as a 15 point standard deviation -- meaning 15 points below 100 or 85 and 15 points above 100 or 115. The smaller the number of the standard deviation, the more homogeneous (IQ-wise, of course) the tested population.

Just realized I missed a page of the thread and have restated parts of others' posts! It is such a fascinating subject!

DS (who is studying economics) and I were having a conversation about this type of thing the other day after watching "The Hunger Games" London being the "capital" You may well laugh but it's happening :/

PFR, I think that the test puts 50% of people within scores of 90-109. Is that right?

And obviously those are not 'raw' scores. Presumably people sitting tests that IQ baselines are then devised from will get a score based on the number right in those tests, and then if you are in the 50th centile on the test score, your IQ is then calculated as being 100. So your raw score may be 30, but that puts you as one of the people who was ranked 50th in the test, so your IQ is then calculated as 100.

In fact the ranks are in the earlier link, I believe.

The standard deviation can then only be smaller for people measured against a pre existing set of baselines data.

So if you are in the original group that one of the IQ scores are devised from, the standard deviation must always be the same for the transformed scores. There must always be 50% whose transformed (not raw)scores are devised as falling between 90 and 109.

But then another group may sit the test and be compared to the baseline group and their standard deviation may be different. For example we could get a different standard deviation if teachers sat an IQ test and compared their marks to the baseline data, but we would never use teachers as the baseline.

Does that sound right?!

'The mean (average) IQ is 100, with 50% above and 50% below..'

IQ scores are ordinal data. You cannot calculate a mean using ordinal data, only ratio or interval data. IQ scores can only have a mode and a median.

I have also now realised that this thread is not in chat, but in AIBU, so will not vanish in 30 days!!

So after this embarrassing battle to make sense of IQ calculations, I shall now go and name change!

Yes, the number 100 (as the mean and the average IQ point of the early test populations) was, I believe, chosen as a tool for comparing scores above and below the average score and for the ease in using direct calculation of percentages. It would be interesting to view the manner in which raw scores relate to the stated IQ scores on different tests and populations over time! You've made an interesting point about the 50% of the original population whose scores are labeled 90-100. Since the Flynn affect has raised raw scores but the number 100 is still set as the average -- it would be interesting to know if the difference in raw scores from the mean remains at the same actual percentage for the 50% labeled as in the 90-110 average range!

I'm throwing in the towel, too! It's been very interesting, even though I feel like an idiot.

Just realized I typed Flynn AFFECT! Horrible shame. Flynn effect.

I feel very sorry for my kids generation actually. The social media is crap for vulnerable kids mental health, then there's the empty aspirational materialism/consumerism, the weird idea that a full range of gadgets is essential and that a secondary aged child is hard done by if they don't have a phone with internet access. This links to the hours sat with screens, unable to have a fully home life. The lack of real cooking skills/fitness and how increasingly large children are becoming. As a result my parents generation will live longer then my children's generation!! I don't consider my children's generation to have a particularly balanced lifestyle. Obviously there will be children who's parents go against the grain and make more wholesome choices for their children. Obviously gadgets can be used in a positive way, ihowever the negative impact seems even more pronounced these days.

Ha - thought I'd read all the pages but clearly not

But what's generally understood as 'average' is the mean, which always has half above and half below by definition
Nope.

Think of house prices. 9 houses priced at £10,000, 1 house priced at £1m. What's the mean house price? How many houses are priced below the mean?

House price means are routinely cited as the 'average' because it artficially inflates the market (which tends to have very big outliers at the top end). Would be more representative to see mode - what's the most common price bracket in the area?

X post with almond

You can't compare an average teenager now to a war poet of 1918 and say we are less intelligent now. Compare the war poet to a poet now. Or a teenager now to a teenager fighting a war they didn't understand then.

Maid, almond and others - I wasn't going to bother with this, but it's irritating me so better out than in, for my peace of mind!

"But what's generally understood as 'average' is the mean, which always has half above and half below by definition."

Half the quantity, not half the number of quantities.

Ten things for sale. Nine are priced at £5, one is £50.
Total for the lot: £95.
Mean (average) price: £9.50.
If you buy all ten, they work out at £9.50 each.

The median and the mode are both £5.

In my post, I did follow that statement with a comment about the IQ calculators using standard deviations and known variants to produce a working index (with average = 100) but I'll just not get into that

"Why are working class people more disadvantaged than middle class? If Student A is middle class, has a student loan, gets a degree and a good job and Student B is working class, has a student loan and gets the same degree and job they will be paying the same amount of repayments, so their background makes no difference"

I would say there are two differences. Firstly it is actually a lot harder for working class people to break into largely middle class professions than it is for middle classes, for psychological reasons. Whatever the theory of recruitment the fact is that most people recruit people similar to them, with whom they can communicate well and have shared interests with, so working class people have to be much much better to be selected (I speak there from my own experience and that of my dh and other cross-class people I know). Plus working class people tend to have lower aspirations due to confidence and just different experiences. So they will find it harder to get into high paying jobs anyway. This is how the class system maintains itself.

Secondly middle class youngsters will typically - I know this isn't universal, but typically - get and expect financial support from their parents throughout their lives, the 'mum and dad bank'. They might get given cars as birthday presents or given a deposit for a mortgage for example. For working class youngsters that support isn't there, in fact they're more likely to be supporting other family members as the one who made it good. That is what they will expect. That is a significant difference when it comes to starting off life with debt. Gifts of deposits alone are immensely valuable, wish someone would give me one! Remember nowadays that student loans are taken into account when applying for mortgages, and there are now plans to make students start repaying loans earlier at lower wage levels, so that junior doctor will be even more stretched.

I also feel for todays youngsters, it is a horrible state of affairs. I come from a time when £400 debt was considered a major debt, I really struggle to understand how in just 15 years society has become so sanguine about youngsters starting off in life with £50k debt around their neck. Back then that would have been enough to buy two houses - and there's another story. Coupled with a broken jobmarket, with so few jobs available, most left insecure, and those in professional employment stressed out through overwork. The system will crash again, and soon.

Agree, bigkids. I also don't think we can reasonably say the 'dark ages' were characterised by stupidity. All ages have featured some superhuman minds, alongside the usual range from very bright to intellectually disabled.

I do agree with the OP in general - taking their wider view of what 'dark ages' means - that we seem to be careering towards medievalism in terms of oligarchy & feudalism, inequality, limitations & control, and so on.

But this is not how humanity in general sees progress, so I'm hopeful that humanity in general will put a stop to it before the Hunger Games scenario becomes reality ... history says we can't be relied on to do so, however.

Mean, median and mode don't tell you much without more details - No, they don't, Ego. A fact which our esteemed government uses to malicious advantage.

YYYY, NoTech :(

I don't understand how people are not seeing this.