Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

darkjackcork t1_j0vh2b4 wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Will human intelligence fall? by Charming-Coconut-234

My claims are easy to check. They're only surprising to a naive interpretation of history.

1

[deleted] t1_j0vhi16 wrote

the thing is, if people are dumber now, and you are a person, this means your theory comes from a dumber person than before, and therefore should not be trusted.

1

darkjackcork t1_j0viwas wrote

Intelligence I define as the ability to solve real problems with the least effort. So then it is high dimensional and it is possible we are have strong abilities in some areas and weaker in other places.

People today are very socially savvy compared to the past but their tacit skills are far poorer. This is difficult to measure but competance at doing general articulation work is getting very low, people are losing elemental skills like cleaning, cooking at the same time more people have attended formal education. It's not clear that is a win.

1

[deleted] t1_j0vkhem wrote

ok now i get your point. but you do know that learning how to cook is just a click away on youtube, right?

they are called elemental skills because they are elementary. if one wants one can learn how to cook really fast. and one can do that because of our access to information.

it is better to teach someone how to reach information than it is to try to cram a lot of information in their brains.

1

darkjackcork t1_j0vpxzx wrote

The last paragraph may be true but not always.

David Krakauer has an excellent video explaining some of this, if I recall the GoldLab Symposium.

On the first, YouTube is an illusion. When our society advertises items like cooking shows, construction skills, it is responding to demand for those. This is fine, the skills spreading is good, but it is large error to think it follows this means the amount of knowledge is increasing. It's actually a signal of the opposite. We have lots of TV and YouTube videos concerning housing because they are becoming less accessible.

I strongly disagree elemental skills can be taught quickly. This is usually not true. If you go to a site and ask each trade how to do their thing they will give you answers in weeks and months, yet if you add them together it should take a person less than a year to be a competent builder. This is not true, something is wrong with this picture.

There is a conceit we have about some forms of knowledge, that we can easily reach them with formal descriptions. It actually takes decades to teach an apprentice the skills of a master, because real world experience must be carried out to be able to generalize. It is a serious error of epistemology that is common to the Western middle class. This only becomes obvious when you see people trying to do things. The worst part is we have measured information flow rates with different ways of teaching and the mentor apprentice system is literally 100 times faster than giving lectures to classes, this result is famous in education, it is called Bloom's 2 Sigma.

This is visible as you walk around Western cities, the old buildings have higher attention to ornate detail despite our extra power tools we have today the same detailing is too expensive to recreate.

The crux here is when we are very good at things we forget that they were hard at first. Then if the people don't transmit the information it isn't like formal knowledge where you can skate by with a description. Instead the next generation loses the skill and has to painfully relearn it. That is the paradox of 'elementary knowledge'.

You can lose information for thousands of years, that is what a Dark Age is. Things got cruder and cruder.

We have had some good overall centuries, but we can go backwards just like the Roman and Egyptian empires did. For Egypt the largest pyramids were built first, not last.

1

[deleted] t1_j0vqqep wrote

>David Krakauer has an excellent video explaining some of this, if I recall the GoldLab Symposium.

>On the first, YouTube is an illusion.

this gotta to be trolling

1

darkjackcork t1_j0vkkb7 wrote

Here is another problem. Our society says to us it is more moral than the past because small numbers of people were treated harshly. Yet it is our time that has the highest prison populations and ubiquitous consumer debt. It looks like we just smeared out a negative across a larger number of people, it is not clear the total harm caused is lower.

Every society in history jerks itself off. Look at those statues of Kings boasting about their achievements, we are the same, it is what I call chrono-centrism.

1

[deleted] t1_j0vl96f wrote

in my country we don't have the highest prison population in history. at least not per capita. we don't have serfs anymore either.

consumer debt is higher because access to credit is easier.

i can guarantee that i live better than my parents, and grand-parents, and grand-grand-parents.

you have a very idealistic vision of the past.

1

darkjackcork t1_j0vqu4z wrote

I don't think the past is better on all dimensions, only that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds and if we want to continue improving we can't stagnate - which I suspect we are outside of computing and some narrow areas like solar panels. Prices are supposed to go down and quality go up if technology is improving, you don't have to search far to find places this is not true. Peter Thiel has videos explaining this general view, controversial but widely regarded as the cleverest person in Silicon Valley.

1