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We really are the same people. No measurable difference in IQ (as well as that can be "measured"). Only knowledge (some gained for us; some lost, too) and conte

We really are the same people. No measurable difference in IQ (as well as that can be "measured"). Only knowledge (some gained for us; some lost, too) and context are different. The tablet is a cool reminder of this.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> We really are the same people. No measurable difference in IQ (as well as that can be "measured"). There is definitely IQ variation in the same society on a short timescale and between societies and the same time, during the time when we have been able to measure it; given what we know about the wide variety of environmental influences on IQ, it stands to reason that Egypt 3,200 years ago would have significantly different IQ average and distribution than a society from today, even if the genetic factors were exactly the same as in some modern society being compared. Sure, we can't directly measure that for a past society, but that doesn't mean it is roughly the same.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  If people lived and thought and partied and slept, had friends, raised family, and weren’t too miserable, I’m not sure how variations in IQ distribution really matter much? Maybe the metric captures something arbitrary about modernity — and a community’s conformance to it — and not much meaningful about the people in other times and places.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > If people lived and thought and partied and slept, had friends, raised family, and weren’t too miserable, I’m not sure how variations in IQ distribution really matter much? I was addressing a claim about the absence of differences in IQ, not a claim about whether differences in IQ are or are not important in the first place.
    - swatcoder 4y ago
      Fair!
robbedpeter 4y ago
This is incorrect - iq has risen steadily with improvements in nutrition, public health, and medical science. It's mostly plateaued over the last 50 years, but it's evident that pre-industrial / pre-rnlightenment humans had a much harder life, including things that suppressed potential at an almost global scale. We may see additional gains if there are globally adopted pedagogical improvements in both childhood education and standard parenting. Our genetics are the same, but our quality of life is radically better, and that allows us greater potential.
- staunch 4y ago
  That's probably closer to the truth but doesn't seem like the whole story. Modern environments are very different but it seems a stretch to claim they're always (or even often) better. We're usually comparing modern populations to industrialized populations that lived nothing like ancient populations. It seems plausible that some ancient populations might've had sufficient nutrition (particularly Egypt at various times) and lower pollutants (less lead, for example), and maybe come out net ahead in terms of average general intelligence. Would be fun to know if anyone has come close to answering these questions, but it seems like a challenging problem.
- dylan-m 4y ago
  > This is incorrect - iq has risen steadily In particular, we recently invented this peculiar notion that one can boil intelligence down to a number :b
  - vt85 4y ago
  - imoverclocked 4y ago
    ... and somewhat more recently, we are able to apply Goodhart's law.
  - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
    I am pretty sure people used to call others stupid or intelligent even in Ancient Egypt. Quantifying that measure is not really such a huge leap.
munk-a 4y ago
IQ is a pretty arbitrary measurement, but I think a modern yankee in egypt would indeed have problem solving skills beyond their peers. Our education, formal and social, is quite a rapid process in the modern world and we basically give kids a free ride until around 18 so that they can focus on education rather than being forced to do menial labour. I think that as physical beings we're pretty similar to our ancient selves (though maybe a bit worse off with all the PFAS and similar pollutants in our systems and the lack of immunity tuned to the environment) but our problem solving skills are tuned to a much more complex level of problem. Whether that level of problem solving is materially useful is a whole different topic.
- kansface 4y ago
  I don’t know the historical record for ancient Egypt, but I imagine we are way bigger and way smarter on average because of childhood nutrition and lack of parasites - see also, North Korea.
  - munk-a 4y ago
    Smarter feels like a bad word to use - I specifically dialed into problem solving because I think that's one place we can accurately differentiate but "smarts" is an incredibly broad concept. We're better at certain things because of specialization and long education but worse at other things because we're obviously not training our motor skills to do different things from birth - it's like folks who can skin mangos in a single cut, it can be learned but most of us aren't going to learn it. Ancient Egypt did have public schools and a semi-meritocratic scribe class so formal education was a thing which makes it easier to compare in contrast to areas that revolved entirely around apprenticeship like the more nomadic contemporaries would be. Also, we do have a much more balanced diet growing up but if we did travel back to ancient Egypt there might be dietary issues trying to maintain our extra mass - the lack of access to diverse fruits and vegetables might wreck havoc on our bodies... you can look to extreme contemporary diets for any evidence of that you'd like to see.
lutorm 4y ago
Indeed. I find Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" to be a particularly vivid proof of this. (Although I don't know what it's like to be Emperor of Rome, a lot of his concerns seem entirely commonplace today.) Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. Stellar everyday advice still today.
- qiskit 4y ago
  > a lot of his concerns seem entirely commonplace today Because a lot of his concerns dealt with the human condition. That will never change. Other things that were commonplace in roman times - graffiti and dick jokes... https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-lewd-graffiti-of-ancient-rome-fc5804eb34e5 https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-lewd-graffiti-of... Nihil novum sub sole.
dotancohen 4y ago
> The tablet is a cool reminder of this. I'm sure that some folks happen to be browsing HN on a tablet.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Well, IQ tests given in the 1930's and 40's(?) had the results re-scaled today, and the average IQ was 70. Note, that we're all trained today in taking IQ tests. E.g. one question asked "There are no Elephants in Germany. Munich is in Germany. How many Elephants are in Munich?" with possible answers of 0, 1, 2, 12. Back then a layman might think "Munich is a big city; I bet there's one or two in the zoo there!" and answer 1 or 2. Because they didn't understand it was a logic question and there is an expectation when taking IQ tests that common sense is not being tested.
- naijaboiler 4y ago
  IQ tests measure something, but it sure isn't intelligence it is measuring
  - NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
    The IQ test can only measure things dumber than it.
avgcorrection 4y ago
Alien: Hey. HNer: Hey. Alien: Our mutual research shows that we have roughly the same IQ. HNer: My brother!
cryptonector 4y ago
Well, lead poisoning levels have varied by region and time, and IQ definitely does vary with lead poisoning levels.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> We really are the same people. No measurable difference in IQ (as well as that can be "measured"). There is definitely IQ variation in the same society on a short timescale and between societies and the same time, during the time when we have been able to measure it; given what we know about the wide variety of environmental influences on IQ, it stands to reason that Egypt 3,200 years ago would have significantly different IQ average and distribution than a society from today, even if the genetic factors were exactly the same as in some modern society being compared. Sure, we can't directly measure that for a past society, but that doesn't mean it is roughly the same.

swatcoder 4y ago
If people lived and thought and partied and slept, had friends, raised family, and weren’t too miserable, I’m not sure how variations in IQ distribution really matter much? Maybe the metric captures something arbitrary about modernity — and a community’s conformance to it — and not much meaningful about the people in other times and places.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > If people lived and thought and partied and slept, had friends, raised family, and weren’t too miserable, I’m not sure how variations in IQ distribution really matter much? I was addressing a claim about the absence of differences in IQ, not a claim about whether differences in IQ are or are not important in the first place.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    Fair!

robbedpeter 4y ago

This is incorrect - iq has risen steadily with improvements in nutrition, public health, and medical science. It's mostly plateaued over the last 50 years, but it's evident that pre-industrial / pre-rnlightenment humans had a much harder life, including things that suppressed potential at an almost global scale. We may see additional gains if there are globally adopted pedagogical improvements in both childhood education and standard parenting. Our genetics are the same, but our quality of life is radically better, and that allows us greater potential.

staunch 4y ago
That's probably closer to the truth but doesn't seem like the whole story. Modern environments are very different but it seems a stretch to claim they're always (or even often) better. We're usually comparing modern populations to industrialized populations that lived nothing like ancient populations. It seems plausible that some ancient populations might've had sufficient nutrition (particularly Egypt at various times) and lower pollutants (less lead, for example), and maybe come out net ahead in terms of average general intelligence. Would be fun to know if anyone has come close to answering these questions, but it seems like a challenging problem.
dylan-m 4y ago
> This is incorrect - iq has risen steadily In particular, we recently invented this peculiar notion that one can boil intelligence down to a number :b
- vt85 4y ago
- imoverclocked 4y ago
  ... and somewhat more recently, we are able to apply Goodhart's law.
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  I am pretty sure people used to call others stupid or intelligent even in Ancient Egypt. Quantifying that measure is not really such a huge leap.

munk-a 4y ago

IQ is a pretty arbitrary measurement, but I think a modern yankee in egypt would indeed have problem solving skills beyond their peers. Our education, formal and social, is quite a rapid process in the modern world and we basically give kids a free ride until around 18 so that they can focus on education rather than being forced to do menial labour. I think that as physical beings we're pretty similar to our ancient selves (though maybe a bit worse off with all the PFAS and similar pollutants in our systems and the lack of immunity tuned to the environment) but our problem solving skills are tuned to a much more complex level of problem. Whether that level of problem solving is materially useful is a whole different topic.

kansface 4y ago
I don’t know the historical record for ancient Egypt, but I imagine we are way bigger and way smarter on average because of childhood nutrition and lack of parasites - see also, North Korea.
- munk-a 4y ago
  Smarter feels like a bad word to use - I specifically dialed into problem solving because I think that's one place we can accurately differentiate but "smarts" is an incredibly broad concept. We're better at certain things because of specialization and long education but worse at other things because we're obviously not training our motor skills to do different things from birth - it's like folks who can skin mangos in a single cut, it can be learned but most of us aren't going to learn it. Ancient Egypt did have public schools and a semi-meritocratic scribe class so formal education was a thing which makes it easier to compare in contrast to areas that revolved entirely around apprenticeship like the more nomadic contemporaries would be. Also, we do have a much more balanced diet growing up but if we did travel back to ancient Egypt there might be dietary issues trying to maintain our extra mass - the lack of access to diverse fruits and vegetables might wreck havoc on our bodies... you can look to extreme contemporary diets for any evidence of that you'd like to see.

lutorm 4y ago

Indeed. I find Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" to be a particularly vivid proof of this. (Although I don't know what it's like to be Emperor of Rome, a lot of his concerns seem entirely commonplace today.) Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. Stellar everyday advice still today.

qiskit 4y ago
> a lot of his concerns seem entirely commonplace today Because a lot of his concerns dealt with the human condition. That will never change. Other things that were commonplace in roman times - graffiti and dick jokes... https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-lewd-graffiti-of-ancient-rome-fc5804eb34e5 https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-lewd-graffiti-of... Nihil novum sub sole.

dotancohen 4y ago

> The tablet is a cool reminder of this. I'm sure that some folks happen to be browsing HN on a tablet.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Well, IQ tests given in the 1930's and 40's(?) had the results re-scaled today, and the average IQ was 70. Note, that we're all trained today in taking IQ tests. E.g. one question asked "There are no Elephants in Germany. Munich is in Germany. How many Elephants are in Munich?" with possible answers of 0, 1, 2, 12. Back then a layman might think "Munich is a big city; I bet there's one or two in the zoo there!" and answer 1 or 2. Because they didn't understand it was a logic question and there is an expectation when taking IQ tests that common sense is not being tested.

naijaboiler 4y ago
IQ tests measure something, but it sure isn't intelligence it is measuring
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
  The IQ test can only measure things dumber than it.

avgcorrection 4y ago

Alien: Hey. HNer: Hey. Alien: Our mutual research shows that we have roughly the same IQ. HNer: My brother!

cryptonector 4y ago

Well, lead poisoning levels have varied by region and time, and IQ definitely does vary with lead poisoning levels.