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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25034 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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Yes of course, it’s a laughably high threshold. That said there are some (dubious) estimates that the average Anglo IQ in the Victorian era may have been as high as 108, so gentry landowners having a say 116 average really wouldn’t be out of the question.

That said there are some (dubious) estimates that the average Anglo IQ in the Victorian era may have been as high as 108

Wild. Where can I find out more?

Example link

Basic argument: Victorians had faster reaction times than moderns. Reaction time (which is known to be about 20% correlated with IQ at an individual level) may be a better measure of true population-level g if the Flynn effect (rising population-average IQ test scores over time) is driven by education and not g. If you convert the average Victorian reaction time into an IQ based on the modern reaction time-IQ curve, you get 108. And a 8 IQ-point drop in genetic g is consistent with what you would predict based on dysgenic fertility over the intervening 150 years.

Counterpoint - why do we think that "ability to function in modern society" is better measured by reaction time than performance on IQ tests? All the work which validates the IQ-functionality correlation uses test scores and not reaction time.

what you would predict based on dysgenic fertility

How does that work? Under what population parameters?

There's an obvious potential confounder, and it seems to be present. I checked the first American study showing 208ms (Thompson, H. B. (1903). The mental traits of sex. An experimental investigation of the normal mind in men and women. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.) and the subjects it used were University of Chicago students.

I checked a later American study (Anger, W. K., Cassitto, M. G., Liang, Y. -X., Amador, R., Hooisma, J., Chrislip, D.W., et al. (1993). Comparison of performance from three continents on the WHO-recommended Neurobehavioral) showing 275.9ms. It used subjects living in working class and entry-level white collar housing. The University of Chicago is an elite university and in 1903, universities in general were considerably more elite than today (or 1993). These are different populations.

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