I've got some incredibly lazy sunday afternoon non expert thinking. 200 years ago, just about everything was custom, bespoke. A carpenter would look for a piec

I've got some incredibly lazy sunday afternoon non expert thinking. 200 years ago, just about everything was custom, bespoke. A carpenter would look for a piece of wood that was best for solving the problem at hand, that bit of warp was perfect for making a barrel stave. Work now, of all kinds, is more about minimum thresholds. classify objects or problems, and use standard approaches. Just about any piece of wood is fine, because we have power tools and standardized fasteners. We've shifted from local optimization to identifying minimum requirements. A shift away from arbitrary wood blocks, to high-tolerance, highly consistent lego blocks. Anyway, i think the flynn effect is mostly about reshaping the world to value a little bit more abstraction over local optimization, and we teach people how to operate in the consistent world rather than the bespoke world. Anyway, our great grandparents weren't dumb. Their minds were focused around a time when everything was precious, scarce and unique. They had to focus on what makes X special, and how can i use that unusual feature the best way possible? Now, we have lots of stuff that's plentiful and consistent. How do we systemize around that? I mean, to a very large extent, a keyboard is a keyboard. we can have passionate arguments about mechanical keys vs rubber dome, but there's like a handful options, and at the end of the day any of them will let you type and be reasonably productive. But our great grandparents, they likely considered what's special about every object they interacted with. That's not to say i don't think about, say, dishes. But if i break a dish, i'll just go buy another one. Our great grandparents probably thought a lot more deeply, and worried more about everyday objects, just because they were so much more expensive. They needed that local optimization. For, like, everything.