The book "Coming Apart" comes to mind. It doesn't need to just be that we are all getting more clever. Our distribution could be increasing in part due to the effect of sending every small town genius to Harvard. This distribution has a hard cut off at the bottom end (can't get laid without a car or a job) but it doesn't have a hard one at the top end, so the effect is a more and more diverse humanity.
Another possible explanation is immigration, which selects for people that can do paperwork really well; at least in America.
> Luria put the following problem to the head man of one tribe in Siberia: Where there's always snow, the bears are white; there's always snow at the North Pole - what colour are the bears there? The head man replied that he had never seen bears that were any colour other than brown, but if a wise or truthful man came from the North Pole and told him that bears there were white, he might believe him. The scientific methods of hypothesising, classifying and making logical deductions were alien to him.
What? That head man of the Siberian tribe gave a darned excellent answer there.
There is nothing scientific about taking the premises for granted that bears are always white wherever there is always snow, and that there is always snow at the North Pole. Unless you empirically investigate these things for yourself, you take them on authority. Deduction isn't scientific; it's just a way of rearranging logical statements to see their truth value in a different representation.
From the premises it can be deduced "bears are white at the North Pole", but that doesn't make the premises true.
The Siberian simply didn't recognize the academic context of being asked a question about logical deduction in order to demonstrate that he understands that form; he looked at it in a broad, real-world context relevant to himself and his position in that world.
It's also worth noting that this guy is working off of a built-in reputation system, while the question is just looking for a syllogism recognizer. The questioner can go play with Coq if that's what they're looking for.
... and real science also works off a reputation system.
If everyone did nothing but check everyone else's results, there would be no progress. While we don't trust first-hand original research, we do place trust in third party validations of research.
By "real science" you do indeed mean the modern scientific method. There's nothing inherently provably correct about how we currently do science, we just know it tends to be a lot more effective than whatever the hell it was we did prior to inventing it.
Further, there are different logic system, and infering that bears at North pole are white from these premises requires certain logic system, but couldn't be infered in others.
It could be said that even people (not logicians), who answer that bears there are white, are not using a logic system including the Modus Ponens, because they would also stand that there are darker bears at the North pole, teddy bears, and that even white bears are not entirely white.
So indeed, it's hard to judge this Siberian intelligence, without further elaboration.
There's a problem of selection, and the system that sets the selection criteria is as important as the population selected. Perhaps the IQ only measures the match between the selection criteria and the population. Raising it or lowering it is caused as much by changes in the population, as changes in the selecting system.
Just reducing malnutrition has a huge effect, as does cutting exposure to lead.
And the ending idea of there being more geniuses, just that they're unrecognized--are they? We've been accumulating knowledge for a long time. Sure, in the 1500s there were people who were top of the class in physics, chemistry, and biology. I'm sure many, many people here know (or could readily learn) those as well as the great polymaths, and come up with novel new-to-the-1500s-models ideas. But physics, for one, has gone so far beyond what we understood back then.
You're impressed by people inventing calculus? Yeah, it's pretty impressive. It's also something a fairly intelligent person these days can at least _understand_ as a young teen. Do you have any idea what we've developed to model modern theoretical physics?
I studied calculus on my own in high school because there was no course in it. After learning about integration for a few days, I reinvented the idea of repeatedly doing a definite integral over several different variables of a multivariate function, and within minutes confirmed the formula for the volume of a sphere from its radius. Sometimes people just need a hint in the right direction.
Well calculus in particular (in my opinion, at least) actually makes a TON of intuitive sense. The calculations are obviously impossible for someone who hasn't been introduced to algebra, but the intuition is just as simple – at least, as you said – when given a push in the right direction.
> But if the tests were getting harder, and the average score was steady at 100, people must have been getting better at them. It would seem they were getting more intelligent.
But the average score of IQ is 100 by definition. It doesn't matter whether the test is hard or easy, since the score system is determined by the average performance of people on the test. So even if a test was nearly impossible and nobody got more than 2-3 questions right, the average result would still be 100, because the points would be computed accordingly.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 45.2 ms ] threadAnother possible explanation is immigration, which selects for people that can do paperwork really well; at least in America.
What? That head man of the Siberian tribe gave a darned excellent answer there.
There is nothing scientific about taking the premises for granted that bears are always white wherever there is always snow, and that there is always snow at the North Pole. Unless you empirically investigate these things for yourself, you take them on authority. Deduction isn't scientific; it's just a way of rearranging logical statements to see their truth value in a different representation.
From the premises it can be deduced "bears are white at the North Pole", but that doesn't make the premises true.
The Siberian simply didn't recognize the academic context of being asked a question about logical deduction in order to demonstrate that he understands that form; he looked at it in a broad, real-world context relevant to himself and his position in that world.
If everyone did nothing but check everyone else's results, there would be no progress. While we don't trust first-hand original research, we do place trust in third party validations of research.
It could be said that even people (not logicians), who answer that bears there are white, are not using a logic system including the Modus Ponens, because they would also stand that there are darker bears at the North pole, teddy bears, and that even white bears are not entirely white.
So indeed, it's hard to judge this Siberian intelligence, without further elaboration.
There's a problem of selection, and the system that sets the selection criteria is as important as the population selected. Perhaps the IQ only measures the match between the selection criteria and the population. Raising it or lowering it is caused as much by changes in the population, as changes in the selecting system.
And the ending idea of there being more geniuses, just that they're unrecognized--are they? We've been accumulating knowledge for a long time. Sure, in the 1500s there were people who were top of the class in physics, chemistry, and biology. I'm sure many, many people here know (or could readily learn) those as well as the great polymaths, and come up with novel new-to-the-1500s-models ideas. But physics, for one, has gone so far beyond what we understood back then.
You're impressed by people inventing calculus? Yeah, it's pretty impressive. It's also something a fairly intelligent person these days can at least _understand_ as a young teen. Do you have any idea what we've developed to model modern theoretical physics?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9131923
But the average score of IQ is 100 by definition. It doesn't matter whether the test is hard or easy, since the score system is determined by the average performance of people on the test. So even if a test was nearly impossible and nobody got more than 2-3 questions right, the average result would still be 100, because the points would be computed accordingly.