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Intelligence is a quality describing psychological and cognitive ability. It doesn't sit on some hidden one-dimensional quantitative scale as given in the half-

Intelligence is a quality describing psychological and cognitive ability. It doesn't sit on some hidden one-dimensional quantitative scale as given in the half-assed pseudostatistic known as IQ. That you're asserting as fact an open ended extrapolation of IQ tests onto people living in entirely different circumstances centuries ago is pretty ironic.

soared 5y ago
The Flynn effect is examined over decades not centuries. People today test better than people 40 years ago did on the same test. This can be measured in real time when the average person in an african country goes from malnourished to nourished - the average intelligence increases. IQ is not the only thing that improves. Different types of memory have improved over the same time periods. Even from a theoretical perspective it doesn’t make sense that people who complete manual farm labor their entire life would be as intelligent as someone today who is educated for almost 2 decades.
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  > Even from a theoretical perspective it doesn’t make sense that people who complete manual farm labor their entire life would be as intelligent as someone today who is educated for almost 2 decades. I assume you never had to "complete manual farm labor [your] entire life". In truth, a dumb farmer is a dead farmer. If you're a farmer and you're dumb your crop fails and you can't eat, and if you can't eat you die. I know you said (paraphrasing) "not as intelligent" rather than "dumb", but farmers today rely on science and technology developed by others to grow their crops and not lose their harvests. People in ancient times didn't have access to the same science and technology and they had to figure a lot out themselves. Staying alive, feeding your family and your community (or having your crops stolen by warlords and bandits, as it were) year after year, was a much harder test of intelligence than an IQ test, and with much higher stakes to boot. But I think modern city-dwellers understimate the amount of intelligence it took, for example, to develop all the crops and farm animals we take for granted today. Since we're talking about Pre-Columbian Americas, think for a moment of all the staples of our diet that were developed by those ancient civilisations that didn't even have writing: potatoes, corn, tomatoes, eggplants, beans, pumpkins (from which courgettes are derived), bell peppers, sweet potatoes, and then cocoa, tobacco and coffee. And that's just the staples, by my own definition of foods I couldn't cook without. And everywhere else you look in the world you find plants and animals that were developed by people who had no knowledge of genetics. They did it empirically, painstakingly, over generations. But they did it because they were just as intelligent as anyone trained as a scientist in modern times. If all those ancient farmers were not at least as intelligent as modern scientists, we wouldn't have the mad variety of food we have today. All these were not developed by people who lacked intelligence, but I think you are right to suggest that an IQ test would find those people to be less intelligent than "someone today who is educated for almost 2 decades". But that is a bug, not a feature.
- quinnjh 5y ago
  Till an emp goes off and you wish you knew how to grow food.

soared 5y ago

The Flynn effect is examined over decades not centuries. People today test better than people 40 years ago did on the same test. This can be measured in real time when the average person in an african country goes from malnourished to nourished - the average intelligence increases. IQ is not the only thing that improves. Different types of memory have improved over the same time periods. Even from a theoretical perspective it doesn’t make sense that people who complete manual farm labor their entire life would be as intelligent as someone today who is educated for almost 2 decades.

cheese_goddess 5y ago
> Even from a theoretical perspective it doesn’t make sense that people who complete manual farm labor their entire life would be as intelligent as someone today who is educated for almost 2 decades. I assume you never had to "complete manual farm labor [your] entire life". In truth, a dumb farmer is a dead farmer. If you're a farmer and you're dumb your crop fails and you can't eat, and if you can't eat you die. I know you said (paraphrasing) "not as intelligent" rather than "dumb", but farmers today rely on science and technology developed by others to grow their crops and not lose their harvests. People in ancient times didn't have access to the same science and technology and they had to figure a lot out themselves. Staying alive, feeding your family and your community (or having your crops stolen by warlords and bandits, as it were) year after year, was a much harder test of intelligence than an IQ test, and with much higher stakes to boot. But I think modern city-dwellers understimate the amount of intelligence it took, for example, to develop all the crops and farm animals we take for granted today. Since we're talking about Pre-Columbian Americas, think for a moment of all the staples of our diet that were developed by those ancient civilisations that didn't even have writing: potatoes, corn, tomatoes, eggplants, beans, pumpkins (from which courgettes are derived), bell peppers, sweet potatoes, and then cocoa, tobacco and coffee. And that's just the staples, by my own definition of foods I couldn't cook without. And everywhere else you look in the world you find plants and animals that were developed by people who had no knowledge of genetics. They did it empirically, painstakingly, over generations. But they did it because they were just as intelligent as anyone trained as a scientist in modern times. If all those ancient farmers were not at least as intelligent as modern scientists, we wouldn't have the mad variety of food we have today. All these were not developed by people who lacked intelligence, but I think you are right to suggest that an IQ test would find those people to be less intelligent than "someone today who is educated for almost 2 decades". But that is a bug, not a feature.
quinnjh 5y ago
Till an emp goes off and you wish you knew how to grow food.