Rising social media or declining reason?

It is a glib piece of speculation, I don't buy his conclusions, but it has some interesting data in it. From Falling IQ scores may explain why politics has turned so nasty by Dan Hannan.

But I do believe that social media may have contributed to the problem in a different way. Screen addiction is shortening our attention span and lowering our cognitive ability, thus making us less able to entertain the idea that people we dislike might nonetheless have useful things to say.

The fall in IQ scores in the West is perhaps the most under-reported story of our era. For most of the twentieth century, IQ rose by around three points per decade globally, probably because of better nutrition. But that trend has recently gone into reverse in developed countries.

You hadn’t heard? I’m not surprised. Journalists and politicians won’t go near the subject and you can see why. Consider the theories offered by neuroscientists for the decline. Some argued it had to do with the rising age of motherhood, because the children of older mothers tend to have lower IQs, other things being equal. No one likes to say this, because it can come across as “older moms have dumb kids,” which is not true. (My wife and I were 44 when our youngest child was born, and my own parents were also elderly, but that didn’t make me too thick to grasp the concept of statistical distributions.)

Other theories were even more explosive. For example, that unintelligent people were having more kids, or that the fall in average scores reflected immigration from places with lower IQs.

But a new study from Norway, which examines IQ scores from 730,000 men (standardized tests are part of military service there) disproves all these ideas, because it shows IQ dropping within the same families. Men born in 1991 score, on average, five points lower than men born in 1975. There must, in other words, be an environmental explanation, and the chronology throws up a clear suspect: the rise in screen-time.

Kids brought up with Facebook and Instagram are more politically bigoted, not because they don’t hear alternative opinions, but because they don’t learn the concentration necessary to listen to opponents — a difficult and unnatural skill.

To put it another way, today’s American elections are mild compared to those of, say, 1800 or 1860. The relative tolerance that characterized the twentieth-century reflected rising education and rising intelligence, which made voters more capable of empathy with opponents. Reverse that rise and people will revert to the more primitive but easier rule-of-thumb: my tribe good, your tribe bad.

I had not heard of that Norwegian study. Intriguing. I am still not fully on board that IQ is declining. Could be, but it is relatively recent and I have not seen a lot of rigorous studies yet, especially across multiple OECD countries, for me to be confident that the supposed phenomenon is real. But if it is real, then the Norwegian study is quite significant.

And if it is real, is it really due to social media use? Again possibly but not yet convincingly. Not convincing yet because the data is still too sparse. And while journalists who write these stories are probably intense exploiters of social media, Americans at large are less so. Facebook is an exception with 68% of the population using Facebook. Otherwise, social media use is relatively light.

Only 21% of Americans use Twitter

Only 28% use Instagram.

Only 26% use Pinterest.

And these aren't additive. Most users of Twitter are also users of Instagram as an example.

Even with Facebook and its commanding presence, I am skeptical of the 68% number. What would be useful to know is what percent of the population uses Facebook frequently, i.e. daily. If they are using it once a week to catch-up with their graduating high school class 1982 which is having a reunion, that is an entirely different thing than someone who interacts with Facebook for two hours each day.

So if the population using social media is relatively low and especially if the population of intense users is small, then that calls into question (in my mind) whether social media could really be the cause of a population-wide IQ decline.

To be fair, there is at least a couple of caveats that increase that likelihood. First, social media tends to be used most intensely by the younger age cohorts. Those are the ones in whom we should be seeing the Flynn effect occurring most strongly. If social media is truly having an effect, then it will show up among the youngest the soonest and with the greatest impact. If new cohorts are not gaining 3 points a decade but actually losing a couple of points, that will have a mathematically material impact on the overall population average. In addition, the older cohorts after long stable IQs in their middle years are already prone to losing a few IQ points. Natural decline from an aging population combined with an induced decline among the youngest cohorts would indeed represent a double whammy which could show up quite quickly.

The second caveat is also there in the Pew Report - social media is more heavily used by brighter people. If social media does have a detrimental impact and that impact is being felt disproportionately among the brightest portion of the population, that again would represent a negative impact multiplier.

So there are reasons to give some putative credence to the idea of social media as a causal agent, but I think that we are a fair ways away from having good evidence to support it yet.

But it does suggest an alternative hypothesis, equally threadbare in terms of evidence but also equally temporally correlated and equally plausible. This alternative hypothesis is that there are five factors in combination which are working together to reduce both the quality of cognitive processing as well as the quantity and those two factors together might manifest as the appearance of a reduced IQ mean.

This could be characterized as a Gresham's law of cognitive quality - Instead of bad money drives out good, the law would state that bad arguments and faith-based belief sets drive out good arguments and empirical facts. More formally, if there are two forms of argument (or facts) in circulation, which are accepted by social norms as having similar face value, the more valuable arguments or empirical facts will gradually disappear from circulation. A sort of Pyrrhic victory of the Least Common Denominator of cognitive processing. We might call this the LCD Law of Cognitive Processing.

The five trends of the past thirty years, which correspond with the putative reversal of the Flynn effect would be:

Cultivation of participation ethos over achievement - It is a standard trope that our educational institutions have been infected by the effects of bad psychological research with the idea that children must be motivated to learn; to motivate them we have to cultivate their self-esteem; and to cultivate self-esteem, everyone should receive equal recognition. Its as if psychologists and teachers had never encountered real humans who thrive on competition and know fake awards when they see them. Reducing real recognition reduces motivation to learn.

Cultivation of emotional reasoning over logical reasoning - It is also notable the extent to which the ethos of critical theory/multicultural theory/postmodernism have infected our schools and institutions of higher learning. In this confused environment, there are no absolute truths, knowledge is socially constructed, and emotion trumps reason.

Prevalence of cognitive pollution and faith-based belief sets - When all around you, teachers and TV shows and social media are churning out cognitive pollution which stands in contrast to stark empirical realities, it diminishes the reward for actually knowing real things. If success depends on accepting empirical lies, it increases the cost of independent reasoning based on reality.

The trivialization of truth - Back to the insidious consequence of indulging the neo-marxisms such as postmodernism and critical theory where truth is socially constructed. Everything can be true if you wish to believe it. You can choose your race, you can choose your gender, you can choose your facts (contra Daniel Patrick Moynihan) and it will all be true. In such an environment, we debase empirical research and absolute facts and coherent reasoning. Magical thinking is available to everyone with no effort.

Sayre's Law - "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." When the cognitive ecosystem is infested with people shouting and proclaiming trivialities with all the depth of emotion their shallow selves can muster, we are creating a negative incentive to rationalism and empiricism.

We see all of these trends almost daily but a crystalizing instance which brings most of the trends together was the howling critical theory postmodernist mob of emotionally distraught Yale students harassing and insulting a distiguished professor over the insult received from an email suggesting that the choice of Halloween costumes was not a material crisis for adults.


Double click to enlarge.

In an environment such as this, we have, in many places, created a huge disincentive to seek truth, to labor at sorting the wheat from the chaff in terms of evidence, to learn, to acquire knowledge. With such disincentives (and they are especially pervasive in social media) why would anyone do the types of things which bolster IQ? So perhaps the correlation of rising social media and declining IQ (if that is real) is masking the real issue - we have created an anti-intellectual, anti-empirical, anti-rational environment which punishes truth seekers and cognitive explorers. If that hypothesis is correct, then it would not be surprising to see a decline in IQ scores.

But it is all speculation for the time being.