So how do you measure pattern recognition skills in prehistoric ancestors? Lascaux?? Or the fact that it took tens of thousands of years to go from stone choppers to sculpted spearheads??
Yawn, cmon guys, this is what I’m talking about. Reasoning skills please.
What’s unreasonable here? You claim our prehistoric ancestors had better pattern recognition skills than we do today. I’m asking what evidence you present to demonstrate it, giving one humorous example and one real example of issues where better pattern recognition ought to be more evident if your hypothesis is true.
My main point is that if you claim that our prehistoric ancestors have better pattern recognition skills, then you need evidence for that, and you haven’t presented any, nor even suggested what the evidence should look like.
And it’s not that they have the same level of pattern recognition as today, you need to establish that it is better pattern recognition, which is a tougher standard. According to your claim, they need to show better pattern recognition “in all contexts, as we’ve discussed before,” which means they need to have better pattern recognition in today’s world as well as their prehistoric one.
Its called reasoning with evidence. You should look into it, rather than simply lament that people don’t agree with you.
I put PA’s symptoms into WebMD (cause diagnosis is so easy, even a caveman can do it)
http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/narcissistic-personality-disorder
(not that I don’t think you’re brilliant PA, but flip side of every strength is a weakness)
comprehension on the MCAT critical analysis and reasoning section ain’t no joke
I think purealpha has a fair point here. Is high intelligence a really favorable trait? I don’t think so. Yeah it helps you make more money than the average guy, but it won’t necessarily help you produce more children and increase the size of your genetic footprint. If intelligence isn’t being strongly selected, I don’t see how we’re getting smarter, dumber may well be right. Rather, given how people who are really religious and poor seem to have more kids, that’s what our population is selecting for.
Maybe we can start aborting children of dumbos.
PA is good at reciting a few factoids that fit his worldview. He doesn’t show any critical reasoning ability himself, at least in what I’ve read, in terms of bringing any original contribution to the table. I speak mostly from his investments section contributions, I don’t know his full record here. But his investment section contributions are the perfect example of where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And yet he continually puts down more experienced people on the basis that we just don’t get his superior intellect.
We reason using the evidence that is available, not what is not available. We never have all the data, and yet we have to make decisions anyhow (management 101 class). A non-decision is a decision. So, we lay out all the knowns, connect the dots, ask what is most probable, and make the decision.
All the dots line up nicely in this case, so we just Occam’s razor that shit, probably homo genus intelligence increased from 3M YA till 10K years ago, then started to decrease. We don’t make up elaborate explanations or wish for data that does not exist.
The logical decision is to treat big risks for which there is evidence (like decreasing intelligence or global warming) as if they were are happening. Because to wait until the risk is “proven” is to risk passing the point of no return. A species that takes their chances on this, eventually loses. And extinction happens only once.
This is a pretty simple problem, there is a correct answer. That people can’t get to the correct answer, even with assistance, is what I’m talking about. Think it thru guys!
Except for one little thing – that doesn’t make any sense at all. 
My posts are all about bringing new information to the table, anti-factoid, pro-critial thinking, and most importantly results (beating markets).
If you want to say that reduced intelligence is a hypothesis about what might be happening based on a couple of loosely connected ideas haphazardly thrown together, then you are ok. If you want to claim, as you seem to, that it actually is happening, then you need evidence.
i would tear at a lot more of what you say here, but I am on an iPhone and can’t be bothered to type it all out with my thumbs. Perhaps later I will do it on a keyboard.
You already explained why that is not possible…
In 2012-2013 I did a 1000hr macro-historic analysis on the homo genus. Requires synthesizing thousands of individual observations which are meaningless on their own, across millions of years of history. Can’t be communicated. Requires hundreds of hours of work minimum, and loads of diligence, to even get up to speed on the topic. This gets into another Idiocracy problem – specialists. Since Americans believe everyone is a trying to pull a trick on them and can not be trusted, they can’t believe anything, yet neither can they research everything. How can they know if the specialist did the calcs right? There is no answer to that problem. It’s irrelevant though, since even with zero data points, the correct answer is to assume a decline in intelligence is happening.
…says the guy who likes to invoke Occam’s Razor. The simplest solution is that there is no change in intelligence.
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As for specialists: specialists can produce evidence to backing up their statments in their field of specialization. That’s what gives their specialization validity. When they can’t produce evidence, they say “this is my guess as to what’s going on, i.e. a hypothesis.”
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The problem with your thought process is that you assert something “Our ‘genetic IQ’ is declining over time: upper Pleistocene people are more genetically intelligent,” but refuse to define what that actually means. If you can’t do that, you don’t even have an argument, you just have bluster.
When pressed, you say “it’s pattern recognition, in all areas of life.” Now that’s an improvement. At least we now have some clue as to what you’re trying to argue. So now the question is how to establish whether the average upper Pleistocene people actually had better pattern recognition than people today.
And then you say “Obviously we have no way to measure it, because there is no way to observe pattern recognition in people who have been dead for 10s of thousands of years and left little or no historical record” At which point one says “So how do you know it’s happening.” And your response is: “…even with zero data points, the correct answer is to assume a decline in intelligence is happening.”
So I think I know where the “Comprehension Problems” are coming from. You just don’t communicate very well. That would certainly be the simplest explanation for why so many people don’t understand what you are talking about. Occam’s Razor wins again.
Proving your point is easy when you start by assuming your conclusion.
If you asked Alphie something like, “Why are fire trucks red?”, he’d probably respond with something akin to…
Because there are eight wheels and four people on them, and eight plus four equals twelve, and there are twelve inches in a foot, and a foot is a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was also a ship that sailed the seas, and in the seas are fish, and fish have fins, and the Finns fought the Russians, and Russians are red, and that’s why fire trucks are red.
#PoorLogicAlphie
#bchadAtHisBest
a few observations i’ve seen in society today. in middle, upper middle and upper class communities, ONLY the richer famlies are having 3+ kids as kids are expensive. while the poor can have large broods, in my client base and large friend group, it is only the richest and smartest who have 3+ kids. this evolution in sociology runs counter of the argument that we are getting dumber genetically because only poor people have kids. this evolution is a more recent development and if you extrapolate the higher and rising cost of kids and their effects on family planning, we may be entering a phase in which the rich, and more likely to be intelligent, are having more kids than the poor, relative to the past. so while society MAY have been getting dumber over time, it is very likely that society WILL get smarter over time.
in the West, up to about 60 years ago, maybe longer, having kids was an economic benefit to one’s family. since having kids today is a net economic drag, we will see a shift in who has kids. as the world catches up to the West economically, having kids will eventually be a net economic drag everywhere. when this happens, we will see a major shift in what demographic groups are having kids globally. let me be clear, i’m not saying the poor will stop having kids. simply that the percentage of kids born to richer and more intelligent families will likely increase over time when that global inflection point is met.
so pa, if you take a break from making guesses about what may have happened in the past and instead take the mental leap required to make grand calls based on a shift in the current environment, you may actually be able to conclude something interesting.
also, i don’t know if genetic diversity counts for anything but we now have widespread mating between races which could have an effect.
finally, i think a lot of the intellectual weakness we see today is not only related to social media and media in general but also the amount of leisure time we have today relative to the past. leisure is basically a 20th century invention.
i find it unlikely that this deterioration in comprehension on this forum can, or even should be explained using genetic IQ as a metric. It’s simply too soon to tell.
PA, when was the last time you were on this forum? Since your last visit, what has changed in society (outside of evolutionary changes in the brain)? The arguments related to the abundance of information and the lack of ability to form a critical opinion oneself is probably your best bet for understanding this decline in comprehension.
what you see on the forum is a growing number of the ‘instant messanger’ generation. The conversation or topic changes so frequently that 1) it’s difficult to construct a well researched and well thought out argument before the topic changes and 2) a small percentage of people actually read a lengthy post vs just looking for some witty one-liner. The same can be applied to a verbal conversation that you would have. How often do you actually do a deep dive on a topic and have a logical progression of thoughts?
The decline in comprehension / logical understanding / ability to form an opinion are going to be the drivers of cognitive decline. I don’t think it will be the other way around.
Since you have not studied the available knowns, you can not say that is best fit. Besides, “no change” is not even an available option, since nature is always in a state of change. Intelligence is certainly changing over time, and only question is how.
The masses can not follow specialists since they are non-specialists. How do you think Einstein’s “the faster you move, the slower time moves” went over with the masses?
Pattern recognition. See my observations on AnalystForum memory. I don’t “create arguments”, but one of my observations related to comprehension is that Americans are obsessed with this pursuit. They are more interested in arguing and “winning”, than actually understanding anything. As the thread goes, it only illustrates my point.
Inference, reasoning from knowns to unknowns (obviously it can not be directly measured). There are many data points we can reason from, and using all of them, Occam’s Razor tells us “we are getting dumber” is probably the answer. But this comes back to the fact that nobody here has reviewed those data points, nor has the time and dilligence to do so, and so they can’t know.
Correct, and that is how checkmate happened many posts ago. You still can’t see this, or you are just avoiding it because you know everyone else can’t see it?
It’s not my job to explain things to the masses, it’s my job to be right.
^if no one hears what you are saying, are you saying anything?
You seem to think that “change” is synonymous with “trend”. It isn’t.
You seem to be failing at each.
