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Has humanity reached ‘peak intelligence’?
- sombremesa 6y agoHere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tomjakubowski 6y agothe New Betteridge's Law: any article posted to Hacker News whose headline is phrased as a yes/no question will eventually get a comment like this.
- mseepgood 6y agoand rightly so
- sombremesa 6y agoSorry, forgot that comment quality on HN needs to be just slightly worse than Youtube comments.
- karmakaze 6y agoAlso any headline given as X in the last Y, for large X, means X in the last Y+1, e.g. 7 of the last 9 means 7 of the last 10 or it would have read 8 of the last 10.
- slibhb 6y ago> Since the intelligence test was invented more than 100 years ago, our IQ scores have been steadily increasing. Even the average person today would have been considered a genius compared to someone born in 1919 – a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. Hard to see this as anything but an indictment of IQ tests. People have not gotten smarter so whatever these tests are measuring and however well they predict success, they're not measuring intelligence.
- OscarCunningham 6y agoWhy do you think people haven't gotten smarter?
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoBrain requires a lot of energy to work, so better nutrition will certainly not hurt. However, I believe that if there is some improvement to intelligence due to better nutrition, its effect is negligible compared to improvements due to education, better teaching techniques and near-universal literacy.
- KMag 6y agoI hope other non-educational improvements in child rearing have also had a significant effect. In particular, the widespread acceptance of the idea it's not okay to strike children has hopefully greatly reduced the number of children trying to learn with varying degrees of PTSD.
- wisty 6y agoInstead, parents feel bad about telling their children what to do, and without rules and structure anxiety and depression seem pretty high.
- mvanaltvorst 6y agoPeople have gotten taller and healthier because of better nutrition, there is no reason to believe people haven't gotten smarter as well.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoSome important factors in recent times are the awareness of iodine deficiency and the adverse effects of lead exposure.
- avmich 6y ago
- guscost 6y agoNo, but I do believe in such a thing.
- _rpd 6y agoIt’s a fairly easy call on the existence of a finite upper bound, even if we can eventually start distributing a person’s intelligence to components outside their skull.
- rektide 6y agoTo me there's a big question of what social processes we have that push towards intelligence, and which push towards more base systems. The modern, mass-accessible internet is ~10 years old. Maybe a little older, maybe a little less. A huge amount of the drive has been to onboard everyone, to get new users, at any cost. Via design that makes sure everything is easy & accessible. Even more so, new incipient media & hypermedia has emerged to capture eyeballs. It's been a race to the bottom for the attention economy. On the one hand we do have a broad competition to fascinate people, to show them interesting things, and huge troves of videos to engage in, but my feeling remains that we've created a fairly superficial net in which to capture attention. This will not hold forever. At some point, society & humanity will start to emerge some desire, some sense, to escape the baser levels, & to find more sophisticated, positively reinforcing forces will emerge. Particularly with so many abusers & manipulators & bad actors, the desire to have better considered information, of a higher refinement, is something that I look forward to people seeking. On another level: I do fret that globalization has destroyed the need for polymaths, for the well considered competent doers of the world. I fret that specialization & concentrated industry shield humankind from itself, that we have hidden much of the world about us behind a shroud. Computers, sadly, are one of the worst offenders here, although I think changing that is one of the most possible & most useful ways to re-instill a locus of control, to put people back in touch with the mechanisms of the world. Little of this bears close resemblence to the discussion on IQ, but to me, IQ follows behind the questions of what society engages in, what it's focus is. I believe the older industrializing world had a physicality & reality to it, an emerging-ness, that emphasized the importance of intelligence, reasoning and science: the push for Enlightenment was still real to that older world, and that drove the pursuit of intellect.
- cat199 6y ago> It's been a race to the bottom for the attention economy. Sadly, with the added knock-on effect of making more in-depth sorts of entertainment / mass culture less profitable, further degrading public discourse.. Being entertained by an endless scroll of memes or political cartoons is alot different than reading full news articles or entertainment pieces, but unfortunately there is enough of the former content to 'fill the void' that the second kind has difficulty 'competing'
- _rpd 6y agoHere’s the 2018 paper that underlies articles like this ... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289617302787#s0030 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... It mentions gains in the US and losses in Western Europe. Could it just be economically motivated ‘brain drain’?
- nickysielicki 6y agoSee also: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6674 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6674 Abstract: > Population intelligence quotients increased throughout the 20th century—a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect—although recent years have seen a slowdown or reversal of this trend in several countries. To distinguish between the large set of proposed explanations, we categorize hypothesized causal factors by whether they accommodate the existence of within-family Flynn effects. Using administrative register data and cognitive ability scores from military conscription data covering three decades of Norwegian birth cohorts (1962–1991), we show that the observed Flynn effect, its turning point, and subsequent decline can all be fully recovered from within-family variation. The analysis controls for all factors shared by siblings and finds no evidence for prominent causal hypotheses of the decline implicating genes and environmental factors that vary between, but not within, families.
- chadlavi 6y agoI certainly hope not!
- mrkramer 6y agoHell no.
- haihaibye 6y agoThe Flynn effect is within a single population. Intelligence varies between populations, and the ratio changes, eg European IQ probably dropped from 1930-1945 due to genocide of a high IQ population. Some places are growing much faster than others, eg Europe had twice the population of Africa in 1950 and soon it will have half. So both groups got smarter, but the global average dropped. Going forward things don't look good, the highest IQ countries like Singapore and South Korea have ~1 TFR so are on track to halve in size each generation (against a growing world)
- amelius 6y agoNo. But perhaps humanity has reached "peak dopamine".
- ww520 6y agoProbably not. Human has been known to augment intelligence with tool usage throughout history. Better tools will come along and the human+tool fusion will move forward in the intelligence department.
- guscost 6y agoI believe there is still a finite limit on any intelligent system, regardless of whether it is completely biological, or cybernetic.
- avodonosov 6y agoFWIW, the brain size reduced notecably in the last tens thousand years. Search internet for more info. The first link I found: > Based on measurements of skulls, the average brain volume of Homo sapiens has reportedly decreased by roughly 10 percent in the past 40,000 years. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-human-brain-has-been-getting-smaller-since-the-stone-age https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-human-brai...
- xtiansimon 6y agoFWIW-W, Susan Blackmore in her 1999 book, the Meme Machine, notes there appears to be an equilibrium for brain size. Neanderthal had a bigger brain size than modern humans. The larger brain requires more calories, and increases mortality for the mother. Blackmore, Susan. The Meme Machine, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press 1999
- 8bitsrule 6y agoAfter the last 4 years, who would even ask that?
- timoth3y 6y agoI question the underlying assumption that the average person is more intelligent today than 100 years ago or even 20,000 years ago. Yes, the Flynn Effect is real. IQ scores have risen internationally over the past 100 years, but that's more likely due to greater access to education and education systems that teach the kind of test-taking skills that IQ tests measure. IN the US, the average GPA have been increasing for both HS and colleges, but that's almost certainly not evidence of an increase in general intelligence. It takes for more intelligence to create today's technology and society than that of 100 or 20,000 years ago, but it requires far less intelligence for an individual to survive in today's society than it did to survive 20,000 years ago. For example, 20,000 years ago if you wanted to eat you needed to be able to distinguish between dozens of subtly different berries and mushrooms with no books or reference works. Make the wrong choice and you die. Today you just push a few buttons on your smartphone. Edit: Better nutrition has definitely had an effect on the average number, so I guess I'm really talking about a hypothetical well-fed human not exposed to toxic chemicals at any point in time.
- IkmoIkmo 6y ago> it requires far less intelligence for an individual to survive in today's society than it did to survive 20,000 years ago. Survive, perhaps yes. But to simply process the world around you? How much mental stimuli did you have sitting in the forest and doing menial labour much of the day, collecting and discerning berries which you were likely taught to eat by your parents/community anyway. Versus the mental stimuli of a 24/7 worldwide news cycle. We may feel much of our media is superficial, and indeed compared to reading a great book it is. But at the same time I've researched the local real estate market and did some calculations. I got updated on a complex political scandal in my country (Netherlands) which affects multiple institutions and puts our governance system in question and relates to the last 10 years of political history. I've listed much of the evening to Punjabi music. I browsed an online market with thousands of articles with designs I'd never seen before to look for a friends' birthday gift. I read about the discovery of Neptune by way of mathematical deduction even before it was actually observed. I watched a Tik Tok dance. I watched an hour of two elite competitors in a 4X strategy game (Supcom) tournament. I read about a blind person's eye being repaired, but needing years of training to be able to process and understand the new stimuli. And I spent a few hours playing a space exploration/rpg/colonybuilding game, managing a fleet and a number of colonies. In all of this I posit I did vastly more mental calculation than the guy in the forest. And it's just an ordinary Sunday, a day of leisure instead of my job which is a constant mental challenge, even if somewhat soulless at times. Hell, even spending time in a large supermarket making permutations of tens of thousands of meals. The average supermarket has 20-40 thousand items. Processing prices versus weight/size/marketing info, is likely a bigger daily mental hurdle than picking grain and grinding it into flower and baking bread and eating that.