Why this is, is an interesting question but it hits on too many taboo topics. Though perhaps rational discussion becoming taboo is itself a part of the reason. When you accept reality, whatever it gives you, you're obviously going to have a far more rational population and better outcomes than one that insists on bending reality to fit a desired narrative, even when it obviously does not. After all this is precisely what brought Greater Arabia from the center of education and learning in the world to rather the opposite. It wasn't religion, but letting ideology dominate reality instead of the other way around.
[1] - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-...
I'm sure you fail to see the contradiction in claiming that "rational discussion" is a taboo while clearly not stating your hypothesis.
In the same vein, your hypothesis obviates the fact that "rational discussion" in topics of interpreting social studies requires building out on a ton of assumptions that are weakly held and the reason why the social scientists abstain from giving clear-cut answers is because the topic has too much depth and nuance to make strong statements with confidence.
One of the very few highly replicable, predictive, and valuable aspects of the social sciences is IQ, which the modern more pseudo-science oriented work actively seeks to undermine. It's a remarkable display of academic and intellectual decline, while people simply look on impassively. At this point all we need is some fires and a fiddle.
So for instance with all Western work on the reversal of Flynn Effect they will go out of their way to insist that it doesn't mean people are becoming less intelligent, even though every single measurement we have that correlates to such (such as test scores) suggests that is exactly what is happening. And they will go one step further and work to actively undermine issues that are obviously in play like dysgenic fertility. Two well accepted facts are that (1) intelligence is highly heritable and (2) intelligence is inversely correlated with fertility. Put the two together and what do you get? Dysgenics, on a scale that can play out very rapidly.
But no.. people aren't becoming less intelligent, they're merely becoming less capable at everything intelligence is associated with. And dysgenic fertility? Nah impossible. FFS.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psycholo...
What are those "taboo topics?" Can you state this plainly rather than obliquely?
Uh, this is Hacker News, we literally reject others's realities and substitute our own.
When it comes to gains, you're probably thinking of average outcomes (which don't reflect wealth inequality) instead of median outcomes. In no universe does ignorance benefit one's financial situation, unless we're talking about looking the other way when it comes to exploitation. In which case, yes, ignorance helps the wealthy tremendously.
Dworak, a research assistant professor at Northwestern University and one of the authors on the study, is very clear that these results don’t necessarily mean Americans are getting less intelligent. “It doesn’t mean their mental ability is lower or higher; it’s just a difference in scores that are favoring older or newer samples,” she said in a press release. “It could just be that they’re getting worse at taking tests or specifically worse at taking these kinds of tests.”
No wait, they say nothing of the kind. And it seems people are getting better at 3D-thinking and decline is not the same in every topic measured so…
Man, your referencecreally does not support the narrative to which you are trying to bend the reality.
She finds that people are scoring significantly worse on most measurable aspects of IQ and so she concludes that they may simply be getting worse at taking tests? Let's imagine in a parallel world (or China...) she did the same study and found that scores were increasing. Would she have suggested it may simply be because people are getting better at taking tests? Almost certainly not, because it's a highly improbable explanation with no foundational basis whatsoever. If you don't think the tests you're using to evaluate something are evaluating that thing, then why would you use those tests?
So why would she make the claim in one scenario, but not the other? Because of ideology. We obviously want IQs to be going up, and so the ideological value is given at least equal weighting, if not more, against the significantly more probable 'natural' explanation when the 'natural' explanation goes against ideological desires.
In my opinion we just have it too easy nowadays. Too much entertainment, screens and not enough challenges to keep kids thinking they need to be as sharp as they can be.
So, not so much taboo as "a bullshit".
I wonder to what extent demographic shifts account for the observed reversal? It would be interesting to tease out what happens where composition remains constant, i.e. Poland. Though I doubt this explains the entire effect.
> By contrast they're still rapidly increasing in the 'Global South'.
seems like the Flynn effect doing its thing just as it did in western countries in the 20th century.
Japan: -3
S Korea: -1
Singapore: +1
Taiwan: +9
---
Germany: -45
France: -38
Sweden: -33
US: -10
This is an issue with the western industrialized world. Which ought to make the analysis simple since we can look at what those countries have done differently than their East Asian counterparts and stop pursing those actions as national policy
*edit for formatting
See graphs on PISA 2025 homepage : https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum...
So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers. Seriously, this should be a major signal to keep screens and AI solutions out of classrooms. That's not solving everything but at least students would be given a few hours window of de-brainroting everyday. I'm open to accept that AI can have a positive impact on education but people and tools are apparently not ready and for the moment using it is a net negative.
I believe it is probably a combination of several factors:
- Social media and doomscrolling without sufficient parental controls: Several OECD countries are already addressing this by introducing or considering restrictions on teenagers’ access to social media.
- App UX/UI: Many apps are designed to compete for our attention, which can gradually reduce our ability to sustain focus.
- LLMs: The impact of AI is more recent and still needs to be properly assessed. However, LLMs could significantly affect attention and critical thinking for both adults and children, especially as we increasingly delegate parts of our thinking to AI models.
- Changes in the education system: In France, for example, mathematics was removed as a mandatory subject for some high-school tracks for a period of time. In my view, that was a major mistake.
- COVID-19: Many students experienced significant gaps in their education during the pandemic, with the effects often being more pronounced among students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Surely this time banning things will improve test scores!
Even before you get to the scores in the report, it shows what percentage of students come from schools that have banned phones. There doesn't seem to be any obvious correlation where banning phones from school gives better results. Eg Estonia averaged 520 points with 26% of students from schools that ban phones. 88.9% of students were in NZ schools where cellphones are banned, but NZ averaged 511 points.
I think before we start banning more "random" things we should consider whether these bans actually produce results. Let the countries that are making these changes run their banning experiment and the rest of us should wait and see whether their scores meaningfully improve afterwards.
Phones also enable classroom distractions, waste teachers time, and enable antisocial behaviours kids like the engage such as bullying.
These days it's reversed, only 20% pass.
I was told this was the case around 2005 when I studied there.
The exam has not changed in difficulty.
Has what students are expected to know changed since the 60s? For instance, have there been any, I dunno, new developments in technology over the past 60-odd years?
No, basic algebra and calculus has not changed.
And I think this wasn't a "just my class" kind of thing.
> Hasty responses (percentage of responses that are both incorrect and fast – average across reading items)
Spain is at 9.7%, which is a bit over 8.9% oecd average.
Is there evidence for this attitude not generalizing?
Social and cultural expectations and conventions are extremely important. Even in supposedly laissez-faire Western countries where traditional cultural expectations have withered to the point of laxity, people still live their lives according to convention and expectation, even if those conventions and expectations are increasingly vulgar and dictated by powerful interest. (Indeed, the fertility crisis is determined largely by patterns of convention. It used to be that, for most people, it was expected that you would marry and have children earlier rather than later. Now, our cultural expectations actually penalize that kind of behavior. You're supposed to "find yourself", "play the field", or "build up your career" first.)
Human beings operate more by convention than by moral reasoning. Society needs an environment demands good things from them. Even when we know what the right or good course of action is through moral reasoning and discernment, it is very helpful for social convention and culture to support those choices.
The law is also traditionally a source of guardrails that help people attain better lives.
Appreciate this stuff gets political very quickly, but I'm curious what did England do that Scotland and Wales did not do (or vice versa)?
However, perhaps Gove’s reforms in placing emphasis on STEM-subjects and reading finally start to have an effect.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
"The school curriculum in England is the responsibility of the Westminster Government. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are responsible for setting their own curriculum policies."
Stable, above OECD average: Taiwan, Macao, Korea, Estonia, United Kingdom, Poland, Lithuania, Italy, New Zealand
Stable, around or below OECD average: United States, Slovakia, Greece, Croatia, Qatar, Montenegro, Mongolia, Mexico, Brunei
Dropping, previously above OECD average: Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Slovenia, Latvia, Portugal, Norway, Spain, France, Hungary
Dropping, around or below OECD average: Iceland, Israel, Malta, Serbia, Chile, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Malaysia, Romania, Peru, Ukraine, North Macedonia
Improving, all below OECD average: Türkiye, Thailand, UAE, Philippines, Jordan, Georgia, Cambodia
The U.S. is at 17.8% top performers, well behind Japan and Korea but around the same as Canada and Switzerland. But the U.S. is significantly ahead of the big EU countries: Germany is at 14%, France is at 9.8%, Italy is at 10.1% and Spain is at 7%.
PISA 2025 was the largest assessment to date, involving 760 000 students across 91 countries and economies.
It’s the damn phone.
In Finland in 2016 (Nr. 1 in the early 2000’s) there was a reform towards what I believe is called constructivism in pedagogy, ie. kids learn by themselves and the teacher simply facilitates learning, there should be play and games as way to learn etc. There’s no evidence any of this works, but you don’t need as many teachers nor as qualified, so that’s good right? Besides, their new iPads will this them. This is an Apple/Google/whatever school now. Who needs text books?
I think we simply threw a generation of kids under the buss to sell each other toys and dumb software and to keep bunch of VC’s in San Fran happy. Education started to decline, because as a society we stopped caring about education.
So, a good education system's effects are compounded for younger children w.r.t. higher education.
So, these education systems need a check and tune-up to adapt them to current age and perform at their peak again.
Given the big gap between the east and the west... does anybody know if these are somehow less used/abused in asian countries?
Any other reason why this gap might happen?
Thanks
If some third type of country didn't do doomscrolling but ignored their homework to play outside, that's better than scrolling but it's still not homework.
FTFA: “Digital distraction also affects the wider classroom. More than one in four students said that classmates were distracted by digital devices in most or every science lesson. Students surrounded by distracted classmates performed less well, were less engaged in learning and felt less connected to their school. Students who say they did not use AI to draft text for writing assignments outperformed those who say they did. Among frequent users, however, students who used AI to help them learn and were taught how to assess the quality of AI-generated information tended to perform better than those who received no such guidance.”
Poland's math score dropped by just 5 points. As for other tests:
Science: -4
Reading: -7.
Much like with GDP per capita, my country is climbing the rankings, but only via walkover.
I thought the reason that China and Singapore were so far ahead of everyone else was that they were urban populations vs everyone else include rural areas.
I assumed that Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang were purely urban, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I'm very curious about this as well, because BSJZ is almost an entire proficiency level above (almost) everyone else. That's an insane gap.
Finland -45
Bulgaria -38
Malaysia -62
Israel -33
Serbia -44
Indonesia: -24
Full data is on Table 2.9, page 101 in the report: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum...
Since you and others have brought up immigration I felt the need to review this thesis. For the OECD plotting foreign born population against Pisa math changes gets a decent correlation (Spearman r = −0.384; p = 0.017). Obviously foreign born is an imperfect proxy for classroom demographics, but it's a start. Definitely a trend, not a huge one, but hard to ignore. I'm honestly surprised that it is not discussed much in a 400 page report with correlation plots between composite indices (a sign of a very extensive data analytics project). Total failure on the part of the researchers). Putting aside any racial claims, I would leave open the possibility that training a large percentage of kids in a language they don't really understand is not likely be be as effective as speaking a language that they do understand. Seems pretty obvious actually. In fact if you drop the English speaking countries from the OECD list (English is very commonly spoken across the globe), then the correlation coefficient goes up to −0.55; p = 0.001).
Harsh educations don’t work. Neither does modern coddling, prevalent in the West. If any adversity prompts a mental health crisis, you’re at a global disadvantage. Economically and, I’d argue, in terms of quality of life.
The AI they’re talking about is not EdTech AI-based teaching tools. It’s students who use ChatGPT to handle work for them so they can ignore any teaching parts.
Apples and oranges. Using this study to draw conclusions about AI EdTech would be a mistake
Kid pasting the question into ChatGPT and pasting its answer back is not the same as an AI teacher persona.
In my mind an AI teacher can be like a traditional education package (syllabus, material, questions, keeping track of progression) but way more flexible. I don't see no reason why AI teachers shouldn't give Bloom's 2 sigma effect to kids (and adults) very soon.
I think it's a double-edged sword.
I think some kids will absolutely use it that way, and it turns out to be revolutionary for them. Kids who couldn't afford a tutor now can have one.
But also, there will be kids that think they will do this, and they don't. Instead, they end up talking the AI into letting them off the hook of learning things for themselves, and society pays for the AI tutor while get nothing in return.
When I look at young people today, that's what I see. Some teenagers seem to have a college degree via self-study, while many others have completely fried their brains, while looking into the same devices for the same amount of time.
If everyone is hiring a "tutor" to just do their homework for them, that doesn't mean that all tutors are bad.
Simply put, there’s nothing better than old school pen to paper.
Unfortunately, those scores are not reliable. It is a recurring problem with the USA for the PISA studies.
The preliminary chapter explains why data has lower confidence is some places. For the USA, there were many problems, including political reluctance in some states or schools, that lead to uncontrolled biases. Notably, the ratio of unreachable children is 40 %, twice more than their upper limit for valid results.
For most students, PISA is a low-stakes assessment: they can refuse to participate in the test with no negative consequences and do not receive any feedback on their performance. There is a risk, therefore, that students do not do their best on the test; and that they behave differently from what they would do in other circumstances.
...In most countries/economies, students reported making less effort on the test in 2025 than in 2022 and in 2018: on average across 35 OECD countries, the difference corresponds to -0.5 points on the 10-point scale (compared to 2018; and -0.3 points compared to 2022) (Table I.A1.1). Meanwhile, the proportion of students who indicated that they invested very little effort in the PISA test increased from 3.5% to 5.4%.
In this section, the analysis focuses on two types of incorrect responses that can be identified on most, if not all, items: skipped responses (item responses left blank, in-between non-missing responses); and hasty responses (item responses that were not scored as correct, and on which students spent less time than the fastest, yet accurate respondents). More precisely, a “minimum threshold” of time effort required for each item was defined as the 1st percentile of the (unweighted) distribution of response times among all respondents who solved the item correctly, across all participating countries and economies.2 This means that only 1% of all full-credit respondents were able to respond to the item in less time, and 99% of full-credit respondents spent longer than this threshold. The minimum threshold of time required was increased to 10 seconds in all cases where, mostly because of correct guess answers, more than 1% of full-credit respondents had provided the correct response in less than 10 seconds. Respondents who did not obtain a full-credit score on the item, but who spent less time than this threshold, are considered to have given a hasty, speeded response (as defined, a “skipped” response may also be a “hasty” response).
Table I.A1.12 shows how the proportion of skipped and speeded responses evolved between 2018 and 2025. A clear trend emerges: on average across OECD countries, the average proportion of hasty (incorrect and fast) responses increased significantly between 2018 and 2025. The average proportion of hasty responses increased by over 4 percentage points over the period, reaching a total of about 9%. The average increase across items of hasty responses exceeded 10 percentage points in three countries/economies (Kosovo, Dominican Republic and Bulgaria, in descending order of that increase). Similar analyses for the mathematics and science test are presented in Tables I.A1.13 and I.A1.11; analyses for math, in particular, also show an increase in the proportion of hasty responses between 2022 and 2025, with the largest increases observed in Serbia, Malta and Israel.
In the PISA test, sequences of items that are left blank at the end of the test are not considered when scoring students’ answers. Similarly, in these analyses, the corresponding students and (missing) answers are excluded from the percentages of “skipped” or “hasty” respondents. Indeed, in PISA, these items are considered as if they were not administered to students, who, most likely, did not reach them. Such non-reached items are also ignored when estimating item difficulty and student performance. However, because, over time, students became more likely to skip or to provide a fast (if incorrect) response rather than to continue working on a task that they perceived as difficult, it is interesting to note that the proportion of non-reached items declined in reading, by about 2 percentage points (Table I.A1.12), on average across OECD countries.That's all that's on the entrance exam? Basic algebra and calculus?
I averaged around 18mo to either a promotion or a move in my 20s, mostly off the back of working harder (to get the promotions/comp increases) and working smarter (to work out when they aren't coming and jumping somewhere else).
If this makes sense for someone has a lot more to do with their ambition/desire and ability to work the system than anything else. It also helps a ton if you are also legitimately very good at what you do. Then it's pretty easy because you are just demanding you are paid commensurate with impact.
Simply doing overtime and having hustle doesn't cut it though, you actually need to be able to leverage it into career progress or it's just wasted life.
Essentially you are basing your claims on research the conductor of you don’t trust. So you trust the data to be certain, but not the conclusions the researchers make of that data, why? Because they warn of jumping to exactly the kind of conclusions you are making. What is the ideological view this data contradicts and presumably the researcher has? But you are certain that the researcher has some ideology and you know what it is?
Besides, that survey was a personality test and labelled as one, so the partakets might simply not have been interested in concentrating on the IQ part:
Another factor could be due to a decline in motivation, Dworak said. Because the SAPA Project is advertised as a personality survey, individuals seeking out the test may be more engaged with sections related to measuring temperament and less engaged with sections that are seemingly unrelated to personality.Furthermore, reverse Flynn Effects have been demonstrated unambiguously in most of every Western/OECD nation where measuring such has been attempted. So the US also suffering such is 100% expected. There is simply no logical, scientific, mathematical, or even rational support for her argument. What's left after you remove everything reasonable? Ideology.
----
Basically I think this is a perfect example of the problem. The most logical explanation here, by an overwhelmingly wide margin, is that people are becoming less intelligent, so far as IQ can measure. That's a huge concern and something that should be tackled immediately. Instead what are we doing? Ideologically motivated denialism. If China had similar results and saw their IQs were decreasing, they're not going to just go 'nah, we're just getting worse at taking tests - or something.' They'd be taking this very seriously, and that sort of focus on reality is why they are now starting to take over just about everything while Western outcomes continue plummeting.
Elementary school is 8-5, longish day but not too bad on homework.
Middle school (grades 6-9) there's been a recent drive to have less homework so they stay till only 7:00 (!) doing it at school and only a little take home done between dinner and bed.
High school is your life revolves around homework, everyone realizes it's counterproductive to learning but they're all stuck in this trap grinding for the big exams that will shape the rest of your life. Key word neijuan.
Actual Chinese (and other asian countries) can chime in where I'm mistaken.
If the scores aren't increasing as a result of it, then why are we doing it? We're clearly not asking for legitimate input from the people who are actually impacted by these policies (students).
Also, everything "enables" bullying. Bullying is not a problem that's caused by things. It won't go away when you take the things away.
Re-read my initial comment.
> It won't go away when you take the things away.
You don't know what safeguarding and harm minimisation means, do you?
They're weasel words people use when their proposal doesn't actually work.
"It's totally making things better, you just can't see it in any objective stats."
Neither of those can be measured nor are they the reason we have schools in the first place. But they sound nice.
There is also something else to be said about Mental Health, coming from one of the countries with the lowest rates of someone taking their own lives, and its not just due to underreporting.
Peru probably isn't the best place to live, but the food, weather, people, and general culture which almost normalizes suffering in an almost Buddhist way (Sufre Peruano sufre! lit. Suffer Peruvian, Suffer!) might have something to do with a more robust mental health situation?
Is there a credible source for “mental health” being an extinguishable quantity? This sounds an awful lot like the battery hypothesis of longevity.
Handling a mental health crisis or living through hardship in a stoic manner means nothing about your overall performance. People in the past used to take year-long sabbaticals due to sicknesses of all sorts which can definitely be classified as PTSD today. People handled hardship through alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and a level of physical violence that nobody who's experienced it would like it to return.
In these times, the parents might even be aware of the consequences of what they're doing, but can't give the impression to neighbors and authorities that they neglect their kids.
I can't speak for everyone here, but I remember reading about a son of a Japanese-Colombian couple that felt anxious and lonely in Japan, but much more fulfilled and happy in Colombia. He said something about the Chaos bringing life into him, which makes him less introspective, less pensive of the future, yet also more optimistic and welcomed. I feel something similar in the States compared to Peru.
I think it could be because wealthier nations are more socially atomized, and much later in their stages of "Industrialization related anomie", and thus dissolves the "Asabiyya" or social cohesion of that culture.
Or I could just be biased, but I do think social atomization is much greater in wealthier nations.
In the context of evolution, if something causes fewer copies of a gene, that's what selected against means.
And so you'd see that easily in a single generation. It'd be akin to if tall people (or short people) began removing themselves from the gene pool in significant quantities. You'd immediately (well at least once people reached their adult height) see a significant increase or decrease in average heights.
I don't disagree as I am from Latam too and feel the same about socialization in first world countries, and social isolation is very likely a culprit of many of the modern world's ills. But let's not sugarcoat the fact that resiliency in Andean culture is a survival mechanism for the brutal working and living conditions that a lot of the population is exposed to, and that resiliency is just the visible, healthier coping mechanism but most of it is invisible and silent suffering too.
"Resiliencia" is pretty tied to accepting your faults as they are, saying "pucha que (Peruvian slur) ya fue pues". This is often followed up with something akin to "do you want to eat"?
Most certainly the latter is not implemented due to a lack of budget. Desks are still two-person as well.
Schools have always worked on a shoestring budget around here.
what that means?
In sports it's victory because the opponents didn't show up or were disqualified.
And that's before you get to the slippery definition of what "heritability" means. It does allow you to use the words "explained by genetic factors", but in a very specific way, one in which the number of hands you have isn't similarly explainable, but how much TV you watch is.
And we've already had this conversation and in spite of your obsession with bias confirming 'blogs written by very smart people' - the heritability of TV watching is zero. Actually lol looking this up, it turns out there has indeed been a study done on this [1], as part of a study on the heritability of sedentary behaviors in general. And yeah, it's zero.
You are right that the number of hands you have is not heritable, but is only because heritability is defined as the percent of variation in a trait, between populations, that can be explained by genetic factors. When basically everybody has two hands, there is no variation, so there is no heritability to measure. It'd be like discussing the heritability of hair color if everybody had black hair. It's not some sort of clever insight or retort, though I'm certain your blogs framed it as the wittiest thing ever.
The one specific claim you make here, that height has heritabilities measured at around 10%, is false. In fact, the comparisons between the steadfastly high heritabilities of simple physical phenotypical traits like height and complex behavioral characteristics is a big part of the current scientific conversation about behavioral genetics.
The report notes “The change in mean scores that can be explained merely by the changing composition of the student body, however, never exceeds a few points.”
So for Portugal for example about 10% of the drop might be attributable to immigration. But the other 90% to something else.
In the past an IQ of 85 was considered mentally retarded. This was changed in 70s to make normal intelligence 'more inclusive.' That's another way of stating that 85 is still the best threshold for mental retardation. So a reverse Flynn Effect of 3 points/decade means you're talking about going from perfectly average to mentally retarded in 5 decades.
And for many things, the effect will not be linear. If we take a test there's likely to be an exponential pattern where somebody of a certain IQ will get an answer correct e.g. 99% of the time, somebody a bit below 80%, somebody a bit below that 40%, and then somebody a bit below that will basically never get it correct beyond the point of statistical noise. Pair that with likely increased variance when looking at individual and relatively small societies, and it's fairly easy to imagine sharp swings being completely viable.
But if you go into the past and just look at well educated, well nourished individuals, regularly exercising their brain - then their cognitive ability was likely comparable, if not higher, than that of a typical modern era individual. But that sample made up a very small chunk of all people whereas today I'm comparing them to the norm.