> Why this is, is an interesting question but it hits on too many taboo topics.

What are those "taboo topics?" Can you state this plainly rather than obliquely?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

See how in your own link one of the authors says indeed how the decline in results is because we have gone too woke:

  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.

I get the feeling you want to blame "woke" ideologies for this decline. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

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.

IQ is literally designed to always average at 100. And tests are calibrated to always give that result.

So, not so much taboo as "a bullshit".

> IQ scores in most of the Western world began reversing sometime from the 90s to early 00s. [1] That link is for the US but similar stuff has also been observed in most of every Western/OECD nation.

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.

Those top scorer countries just soooooo happen to have world lowest birthrate. Maybe it has to do with extraordinary pressure to succeed at all cost since one is baby?

I see news and forums claiming the problem is screens/smartphones and social media.

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

While the examples above just draws trolls pushing an immigration angle, consider these other countries:

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...

As they say, demographics is destiny.

Sure you can torture your children with ever harsher "education", almost none of which matters in non-research positions. Then don't be surprised when they run out.

> So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers.

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

> So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers.

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.

Sloppy conclusion about edtech startups.

If everyone is hiring a "tutor" to just do their homework for them, that doesn't mean that all tutors are bad.

The "AI use ... To help me learn" graph is really interesting! It may be interpreted as showing moderate selective AI use being beneficial and, perhaps, even mitigating the effect of socioeconomic status, that is democratising the learning of science. However, it may also indicated that groups with low AI use/access are left behind, or at least that over-reliance on AI in learning is detrimental.

The breakdown for AI usage is four categories though, not three. While the first three are negatively correlated with increased usage, the one for using AI "to help me learn" is much more flat when it comes to usage frequency.

>- 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.

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.

What percentage of the population is expected to get university education today vs the sixties?

What's the difference in how many people apply?

> 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?

Interesting. On page 34 of the report there's this:

> 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.

> in Spain kids don't take these tests seriously

Is there evidence for this attitude not generalizing?

Last I heard it started in the 90s. Although a lot of horrifying graphs do have their inflection point the year the iPhone came out.

If you're referring to the few-point difference between 2012 and 2018 in the first chart here: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum... I think that's more likely to be statistical noise. Keep in mind that PISA was originally normed to a mean of 500 and standard deviation 100. Even the more obvious drop after 2018 (I blame the pandemic) down to a mean of 466 on the reading test in 2025 isn't all that huge in absolute terms, though definitely statistically significant with the large sample they have.

A factor, certainly, but culture, including the culture around education, are arguably bigger factors (which social media is also a vector for modifying; medium is the message and all that).

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.

It seems to me, without digging further into the data, that England sucked, but Wales and Scotland (along with rest of the OEDC) sucked harder. Meaning, they fell in grades, but rose in the ranking, since the decline was less steep.

However, perhaps Gove’s reforms in placing emphasis on STEM-subjects and reading finally start to have an effect.

Take over Scotland and Wales?

> The U.S. scores are interesting.

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.

I found this nugget on page 315. It seems to say the OECD acknowledges students are just blowing off this test.

     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.

Parents used to offload parenting to streets, fields and forests for decades. I don't think the offloading is the cause. But switching the offloading provider to SOCIAL MEDIA (of which Youtube is one) might've been.

The modern trend is parents spending a lot more time and involvement with their kids then used to be the norm. The norm was that kid were outside unsupervised doing whatever. The expectation on parents went up rather then down.

That's quite funny, but the new recruits at my work place are super smart and full of piss and vinegar. Much more motivated than some of the older workers. The problem is that they will work lots of unpaid overtime, and they have no idea about work boundaries and being exploited by employers.

Maybe, but the nurse taking care of you at old people home won’t be able to read your prescrition or count you the correct amount of medicine. You might as well throw those meds in the sink, since the prescription will be written by some transformer model anyway.

on the other hand, they'll be taking care of us when we're old :(

> is doing math at the level of the best mathematics

Terence Tao a few days ago [1]:

> When we point the AIs at really difficult problems where none of the standard techniques apply, they are still very, very bad, I mean they're just randomly guessing.

Please don't reply saying they'll be proving the Collatz conjecture next week. It adds nothing.

[1] https://youtu.be/svl_1upFpQo (worth watching on the role of LLMs in maths)

The decline started in early to mid 2010's, this has little to do with AI.

> Makes sense. The kids can see that education isn't really going to be a sellable skill when AI ends up coming into full force.

If true, this is a disastrously foolish thing to believe. Education is only going to become more important as supervising increasingly advanced AI agents becomes more difficult. We need people who understand all different domains of human endeavor at the deepest level possible.

I mean, what's the alternative? AI does everything for me and I play Fortnite all day? Might as well plug yourself into the Matrix.

Dunno man, the articles ai writes are empty cardboard crap, and the code it produces is hot garbage. “Cleaner upper of AI messes” might be a good future skill to have.

Yes, kids are the demographics known for long term thinking and rational decision making.

Where do you think they are putting their energy?

I hope people recognize this account doom posts what amounts to misanthropic propaganda at a very high rate. There’s never any question how the comment is going to be framed. It’s always, “give up little humans, your robot overlords are here.”