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Ah yes, the famous 'every past generation was ignorant and every future generation is lazy' I honestly struggle to understand the writings of common authors of

Ah yes, the famous 'every past generation was ignorant and every future generation is lazy' I honestly struggle to understand the writings of common authors of the past and think this is where people confuse intelligence with knowledge. We have more knowledge now, but are we truly more intelligent than people 400 years ago? 1000 years ago?

rm445 4y ago
The implication, though it's still quite conspiracy-minded, is that we're just as credulous today about things that fit within our worldview, the current paradigm. And utterly blind to what those things are, they just seem to be how the world works. Yet future generations will boggle at the the things we believed. I'm not sure that's necessarily fully true - most likely we're more rational than medieval peasants were, while they were probably more pragmatic than typically believed. But it is thought-provoking.
jlawson 4y ago
We may be more intelligent. It depends on whether you're willing to believe that certain phases of society has a eugenic effect on intelligence. For example, in the medieval era, the upper classes has more surviving children than the lower classes. Without any economic growth (because the economy was tied to land, not capital or innovation, and thus the size of the economy was basically fixed), this creates a constant flow of downward social mobility, where the ten children of a wealthy couple must compete with each other to be among the two who get to inherit their parents' slot in society. If you think that intelligence could improve someone's chance of rising to the top of such a society, and staying there, then yes, you'd logically think that people in the past were dumber. Evolution is slow when creating new features. But evolution is very fast when it's just changing the proportions of existing features. It's not hard to see how the above trend would cause a 2 point IQ gain per century, which would mean 10 points in 500 years. There's a big difference between 90 and 100 IQ.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  About the ten children: let's assume half were boys and half girls. That leaves three boys fighting it out to inherit. The girls get married off. One son goes into the army. One goes into the clergy. I'm not sure about the third, if there even were five boys. Two or three is probably more common.
sofixa 4y ago
> We have more knowledge now, but are we truly more intelligent than people 400 years ago? 1000 years ago? Absolutely. Nutrition is very important for development, and people today eat more diversely and better, on average than a 1000 years ago. Not to mention that nowadays pretty much everyone (in a developed and many developing) countries gets an education starting a young age, which surely helps too.

rm445 4y ago

The implication, though it's still quite conspiracy-minded, is that we're just as credulous today about things that fit within our worldview, the current paradigm. And utterly blind to what those things are, they just seem to be how the world works. Yet future generations will boggle at the the things we believed. I'm not sure that's necessarily fully true - most likely we're more rational than medieval peasants were, while they were probably more pragmatic than typically believed. But it is thought-provoking.

jlawson 4y ago

We may be more intelligent. It depends on whether you're willing to believe that certain phases of society has a eugenic effect on intelligence. For example, in the medieval era, the upper classes has more surviving children than the lower classes. Without any economic growth (because the economy was tied to land, not capital or innovation, and thus the size of the economy was basically fixed), this creates a constant flow of downward social mobility, where the ten children of a wealthy couple must compete with each other to be among the two who get to inherit their parents' slot in society. If you think that intelligence could improve someone's chance of rising to the top of such a society, and staying there, then yes, you'd logically think that people in the past were dumber. Evolution is slow when creating new features. But evolution is very fast when it's just changing the proportions of existing features. It's not hard to see how the above trend would cause a 2 point IQ gain per century, which would mean 10 points in 500 years. There's a big difference between 90 and 100 IQ.

AlbertCory 4y ago
About the ten children: let's assume half were boys and half girls. That leaves three boys fighting it out to inherit. The girls get married off. One son goes into the army. One goes into the clergy. I'm not sure about the third, if there even were five boys. Two or three is probably more common.

sofixa 4y ago

> We have more knowledge now, but are we truly more intelligent than people 400 years ago? 1000 years ago? Absolutely. Nutrition is very important for development, and people today eat more diversely and better, on average than a 1000 years ago. Not to mention that nowadays pretty much everyone (in a developed and many developing) countries gets an education starting a young age, which surely helps too.