Comprehension Problem

Hats off …

**wow**

PA will enjoy this

https://www.facebook.com/anonews.co/videos/1260739457270944/

OP’s concern that human are dumbing down genetically is a valid concern, but not necessarily the root of the original concern of this post. I think we can all agree that the current point in the history of man could hold the most complexity/ individual. The combination of personal freedoms and access to information means there is no longer general algorithm for human society. The problem is we have failed to keep up with reponsibility to educate people to exist in this time. Apparently critical and independent thinking (which comprehension is a component of) is not being endowed on the population at a proficient level.

Inasmuch as IQ is defined as (intellectual age / chronological age), if everyone gets stupider, IQs _ could _ remain the same: you’d simply be comparing someone’s (diminished) intelligence to the average (similarly diminished) intelligence.

Ignore em purealpha, their brains are addled by grain fats, high fructose corn syrup and carbs.

If humans are dumbing down genetically, when would one say that the average human was the smartest in history or prehistory, and on what basis and with what evidence do you justify that. I don’t buy “skull size” as a useful metric. Brain size is perhaps a necessary condition for things we think of as intelligence but it is certainly not a sufficient Hodor condition.

^^I suppose when I said that humans dumbing down genetically is a valid concern… I meant over the very very long run. If what PA is observing is accurate, the cause is most likely cultural at this point. It is possible that it is becoming more acceptable to converse with one another in the flippant way which causes us to just talk over one another and not bother to put the effort into comprehending anything. If there really is a lowering of standards in the amount of reasoning and critical thinking we expect from one another, then I could see how that could eventually lead to natural selection NOT favoring those that would best carry on the human intellect.

There’s communication and articulation and then there’s reading and comprehension. A good balance between these makes for an excellent conversation.

We have talked about these topics before…

Population increase. Since the population was only around 30K in the upper paleolithic, you would only have one genius on the planet , with nobody else to talk. Imagine being that poor bastard! Even if you did invent something, the idiots couldn’t sustain the invention. Now you have 250,000 geniuses. More of them, plus synergies. Average intelligence can decrease, and yet technology can accelerate…err until a certain point when people are so stupid that even the smarties are idiots. :wink:

Archaeologists tell us the end of the upper Paleolithic is the peak for homo sapiens, it’s all been down hill from there!

Lots of reasons why, but the two most obvious – 1) the Neolithic period begins an “anti-Darwinian” age (less capable individuals not only don’t die, but reproduce more than capable individuals), and 2) humans alter their diet away from what got them biggie-sized brains in the first place. These two things only get worse with the industrial revolution. There’s really no reason why we wouldn’t expect people to get dumber.

Cranial capacity, gene studies, attempts to back out Flynn effect and see changes in true genetic IQ, everything hints we are getting dumber, nothing supports getting smarter. And it all comes back to basic reasoning skills; if an animal’s competitive advantage is intelligence, that smart animal should always treat any potential threat to that advantage seriously, yet with homo sapiens “meh it’s probably nothing!”. LOL

“Our Fragile Intellect” http://bmi205.stanford.edu/_media/crabtree-2.pdf

Hmm, how do you know that a change in diet was responsible for a decrease in intelligence and not the work required to eat that diet? In the old days Ogg hunted wild animal. Today, Ogg can order food delivered. Think of how domesticated animals are dumber than their wild counterparts.

One thing I do believe is, people are being domesticated by our elites by eliminating people who have characteristics that make them unsuitable for society. Think killing criminals, rebels etc.

It could also be that our smartest are smarter than Paleolithic man because we have more efficient social engineering to couple intelligent people - universities.

I just farted.

Right, it’s complex and so can’t be discussed in this Twitter age. :wink: But yeah, this fits into one of the two drivers I listed.

That’s Flynn Effect. But people can get genetically dumber while appearing smarter, up until a certain point. Flynn Effect eventually runs out of juice, and the genetic decline becomes apparent, except that by that point reasoning skills are so bad that the masses are not able to comprehend the problem…hehehe.

Just because we talked about this earlier does not mean you were right earlier. #LogicFail

(At some point later, I’ll take a peek at your appeal to authority.)

Well, it’s not a “logic fail” because I didn’t say that, I said we talked about it earlier, period. #LogicFail

My other observation – memory. It seems like nobody remembers things, I remember conversations on here from 2005.

You requested appeals to authority.

Things can be statistically significant without being substantively meaningful, and in academe, that’s how one can publish something when you can’t find the result you were originally looking for.

The problem I have with this like of reasoning is that I don’t even know what a “higher genetic IQ” would even mean in practice? Does it just mean that Ogg and his buddies would have gotten 2250 on an SAT if we were able to clone him from bone fragments found in the permafrost, while the rest of us can only average 2200? And is that a meaningful difference or just a statistical one?

Does it just mean that Ogg can bring down a mastodon more cleverly than we could? And what does that even mean and how could we prove it, given that Mastadons are extinct and Ogg was not able to record any episodes of “Survivor Pleistocene: the reality show,” not to mention not getting signed on for a second season.

Does it mean that Ogg can make arguments without specifying his assumptions and then simply say people are “dumb Americans” if they disagree with him, even though a number of the people he’s called Americans have stated that they aren’t??

Does it mean that Ogg can solve the prisoner’s dilemma and avoid polluting the environment with toxins when he and his buddies reach 7.5 billion??

I’m not sure if his was KMd’s main point earlier but I think she was on to something. We have nearly always perceived ourselves in some kind of cultural decline, in part because as adults, we look at the next generation doing more or less the same dumb things we did when we were younger and we blame it on the dumbing down of a generation, rather than the fact that we were all young and most of us did dumb things when we were young because we learn over time and if we hadn’t learned we wouldn’t perceive them as dumb. Some of the earliest things we can read in ancient cuneiform are parents lamenting how their children are lazy and dumb and irritable and woe unto the future.

But the other thing that is interesting is that the Internet has brought in a world where everyone, smart or not, can post an opinion on some topic. When it took much more work to post and disseminate stuff by clay tablet, stone mason, illuminated manuscript, or even a printing press, the fact that it was expensive meant that some kind of quality control needed to be executed before disseminating. So the noise of today’s discussion is compared with the writings of our historically best thinkers and come up wanting - does that mean they were smarter then on average? No. It’s a sampling artifact.

Palantir has a good point too that even if we are only 95% as genetically intelligent as our Pleistocene ancestors were, but we have developed way better systems to educate and inform than they had, we are still better off using 50% of our possible intelligence (enabled by broader schooling) than they were using 30% of their albeit slightly higher genetic intelligence.

And even if it is true that those ancestors would outperform by a bit on intelligence tests today, the fact that it has declined by say 5% over 10,000 years does not mean it is trending to 0%. Nor does it mean the trend has to continue. Nor does it mean that the kids born today are going to be less capable than Ogg’s little Ogglets in any way that matters meaningfully to either us or to Ogg.

data fail.

You said this in a context that read as if “Geez guys, I’ve already explained this to you, why do you make me go through it again.”

And the answer is at cranial capacity is to you the way CO2 is to Ghibli.

can you imagine society today if that one genius died before reproducing. oy vey

^Somebody go b@ng grigory Perlman.

Higher pattern recognition skills, applicable to all things we do. We’ve talked about this before. :wink: