Tests in Norway have shown that ‘we’ (and I speak for the entire human race here; everyone on the entire fucking planet!) are getting thicker. More stupid. More dense. Less ‘intelligent’. And I think they’re right. I think you are getting more stupid every day.

Apparently, after the last war, ‘intelligence’ increased over the decades progressively. It was called the ‘Flynn effect’. No idea who ‘Flynn’ was but he was clever. Then, with people born about 1975, reaching adulthood by the 1990s, the tide turned and IQ test scores started dropping by 3 points or so every decade.

The tests were done on Norwegian men going into national service. So really, it says nothing about women. Who may be getting cleverer as ‘we’ get thicker, or may follow suit with the boys in the name of ‘equality’. And you can’t knock the sample size because they’ve tested 730,000 people, which is certainly a significant number. Yet its flawed. Fatally flawed.

Mainly because of the big question: how do you measure ‘intelligence’? The old measures, like skill with a football, the ability to find pornographic material in a desert, doing wheelspins in the car park at Tescos, may no longer be relevant in the post-digital world. Maybe these people, the daft ones, have other skills of a technical nature which the old ‘IQ’ tests just don’t pick up on. Surely if ‘intelligence’ is evolving, as it will, then testing needs to evolve too, to represent this. But they can’t do that because then you’re effectively testing different things.

One thing’s for sure: newspaper researchers are definitely getting more stupid. The article in the Times suggested that IQ may be dropping because of the way children are taught languages and maths. But ‘IQ’ was NEVER about learning, studying or cramming. It was supposed to be ‘innate’ and unchangeable through life. Above all academic stuff. That’s why they invented daft tests of increasingly obscure series of things, connections, similarities and differences, because maths and English didn’t work on these innate and ‘inherited’ functions.

IQ is a load of bollocks. Always has been. It was invented by Victorian English rich white men who wanted methods of proving their racial superiority and created tests that demonstrated that very point. IQ, due to its very ‘innate’ and ‘hereditary’ nature has always been abused by Eugenicists, like Hitler, who found yet another way to improve ‘The Race’, by sterilising or just killing the sub-normally intelligent. Others have done and still do similar. So we hate ‘IQ’, even though we’ve got Mensa certification an’ everything.

As many have said; IQ tests measure the ability to do IQ tests. And pretty much nothing else.

Yours cleverly

A xxxx