2 ms·
> There are some illuminating (but terryfing) experiments in the book, where they show you can literally sabotage a low income persons score on an IQ test by me
by api 6y ago
> There are some illuminating (but terryfing) experiments in the book, where they show you can literally sabotage a low income persons score on an IQ test by mentioning a hypothetical car repair of 2000 dollars before they take it.
Modern humans have existed for something like 100,000 years give or take a few tens of thousands, and yet we only started building anything particularly innovative in the last ~10,000 or so. So we spent 90% of our species' history doing very little in the way of cognitively challenging innovation.
I wonder if this might not be the reason. Some have observed that hunter-gatherers often had better nutrition and were healthier than at least early civilized humans, but maybe they also lived under a perpetual cloud of fear about the next famine, raid, or plague. Maybe that basically shut down their capacity for higher cognition. Maybe they didn't have any time to sit down and think and do so free of concern about the future.
- prox 6y agoAnother factor seems to be becoming sedentary as a species and gaining more sugars favoured the energy needs of the brain. That in turn allowed for people to focus on land ownership and dominance over others to secure this income.
- monodeldiablo 6y agoI think you're defining innovation too narrowly. There are lots of social, political, and behavioral innovations in hunter gatherer societies that may not necessarily manifest as technological innovations, but are no less innovative or clever. In my limited experience with these people, they are absolutely capable of higher cognition, including planning into the distant future.