/sci/ - Science & Math

>>7359298
no we are not

We are not getting smarter, we just have much more knowledge on various topics.
Neolithic folks were as smart as you and me.

>>7359303
so how are we able to learn more in few years then people 2000 years ago would learn in all their lives?

>>7359298
turn the TV on.
or if you're in the US, drive around "urban" areas.

what do you think?

Yes.

>>7359312
we are not we just have access to knowledge and more comfortable lives that aid our learning, cavemen were trying not to get eaten rather than learn to read

>>7359312
First of all, they knew a lot about their local geography, botanic, metallurgy and crafts. So they didn't waste their time, my man.
Right now easier access to enormous amounts of knowledge and accumulated efforts through scripture and other methods makes it easier to learn. Also universities and pedagogic methods have gone a long way.

We are not smarter than them. We just have it easier.

>>7359311
>we just have much more knowledge on various topics
So people were learning less than today because they had nothing more to learn? That implies it was common for people to have all the current knowledge.
Also if there was less knowledge, and people were as bright as today, wouldn't it take like few years of studying to be, say, a great mathematician?

>>7359323
I'm not talking about cavemen.
As for the access, that's why there weren't lots of scientists in the middle ages, but there were people having all the access they wanted

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI

>>7359348
cavemen is just the extreme end
romans were having orgies
knights were to busy killing muslims

who needs math

>>7359311
Is there a difference between intelligence and knowledge?

We have better information delivery systems, more time to think, and less need for laborious specialized thought. The internet means that most people have access to an insane library compared to 100 years ago, along with connections with experts. Learning materials are also a ratchet going towards progress, as they can only ever get better because good old books don't disappear anymore. More time to think means we aren't basing our existence on subsistence. Connected to our move towards leisure, we no longer need to know excessive amounts of arcane knowledge to live- hunter gatherers must have had a lot of knowledge built up and there were surely geniuses among them, but their knowledge would be in large part situational instead of universal. Up until the industrial rev everyone is either a toiling peasant who has no time, or an artisan who devotes their brain to learning and inventing their craft, hence why it is very rare to see low class scholars. Literacy rates 200 years ago were about 50% in Western Europe, so transferring knowledge to a population would be very slow.

I've always thought that problem solving ability was constructed rather than inherent. If you give a have a child do logic puzzles every day, are they not likely to become "smarter" than if they spent the same time watching television? The act of trying to think through tricky things probably leads to improvement in a developing mind. So education might make us smarter simply by challenging us more.

>>7359374
Probably not possible to come up with a philosophically rigorous distinction, but one is simple and the other is complex. If I ask you to draw on your knowledge you have to do less work and more remembering than if I ask you to draw on your intelligence.

>>7359374

Yes, if knowledge is justified true belief then one possible definition of intelligence could be defined as an agent's ability to produce justifications to beliefs.

Did you prove their results?

>>7359374
Of course there is. Knowledge is just how many pages can you fit in your brain, how many connections between pages you can make.
Someone with a lot of knowledge can be someone with huge insight in history, for example, but that doesn't make him more intelligent.
>>7359340
>So people were learning less than today because they had nothing more to learn?
No, they focused on other stuff; history, mythology, music or crafts.
> wouldn't it take like few years of studying to be, say, a great mathematician?
Yes and no. It would take you less time, but you are starting from the absolute basis of geometry. One of the firsts to link Math and the real world (and antique engineering) was Arquimedes with his lever and wrote down most of the mechanics with huge accuracy. Would you do that starting from scratch? you have to be very smart.

>>7359348
>>7359357
>cavemen

Stop with this meme. Neolithic people didn't live in caves. The only people who lived in caves are the Jews during WWII.

>>7359388
This. Logical thinking is not intuitive. Logical rules are empirical/invented and learned. Logical thinking is learned and is developed through practice.
It's all about upbringing. Some people absorb things better than others, sure, but the majority of intelligence has to do with practice. In my opinion.

The ancients were pretty damn smart considering how few people could pursue science, and considering how few people they had compared to what we have now.

>>7359298
Approximately speaking, knowledge is how much you know, intelligence is how fast you are at working to know stuff, and wisdom is not working to know stuff aimlessly - not wasting your efforts frivolously.

>>7359424
So.. I would guess that we're more knowledgeable than them on academic things, being that we on average spend much more time on schooling and homework. We might be more intelligent because of better healthcare and nutrition.
If we took someone from then and raised them now would be the key investigation, and I think they'd probably be about the same if we did that.

>>7359298
>In such a short time it can't be evolution.
It is evolution. Humans are evolving faster and faster in more ways than one now. There is no difference between a dog evolving and a computer running a genetic algorithm evolving part of its own program. The human brain itself evolves and adapts and it does so by its own neurons destroying themselves and rebuilding themselves.

>>7359447
Remember public education is a relatively new thing. For most of human history, the vast majority of people on learned what their parents taught them, what was necessary for a trade through apprenticeship. Only the aristocrats and wealthy merchant class could afford what we would consider a standard well rounded education (reading, writing, history, mathematics). Until the advent of a real working middle class, post industrial revolution, public education was unnecessary. And on top of that, human knowledge builds on itself. Things we take as givens today, were not widely know as much as 150 years ago because education wasn't wide spread.

>>7359531
So you're telling me to remember what I just said?
Why?

No, in fact people are getting dumber.

>>7359669
Nothing could have made this more apparent than your post. Congratulations.

>>7359298
It's stigmergic amplification. Our environment is more and more loaded with human-readable information.

>>7359298
Smarter? No
More knowledgeable? Possibly

True, the average person learns a bunch of facts in middle school that they will likely never use again but they do not learn how to think logically and critically.

It is only because of the small percent of logical thinkers that our society continues to chug along.

>>7359298
Yes, humans on average are getting smarter. It's just normal societal progress.

People ITT are so stupid. Cavemen really? Ancients really? They weren't smart, they got all their brains from ancient astronauts. We are undeniably smarter than them because we don't need extraterrestrial beings to teach us. I thought this was /sci/ for smart people but I guess it's just sigh from the smart people. Posers.

Certainly and statistically, yes. There's a higher human population so there's a larger amount of intelligent human beings than there were 200 years ago.

And yes I'm aware my answer is super fucking lazy but you know I'm correct.

>>7359350
This.

>>7359312
because they didnt fucking know the shit we're teaching now back then you retarded fuck

more specialization. 14 year olds may learn watered down versions of things that were cutting edge research topics 100 years ago (like the Bohr model, for example)

But that is in no way indicative of the idea that a middle schooler was as bright as an undergrad/graduate student 100 years ago, no.

It's one thing to be able to read a map, it's another to survey the land to make the map in the first place.

They also can't really do much with that knowledge since everything is so specialized nowadays and all the low-hanging fruit is gone.

People are definitely getting smarter, though. Look into the Flynn effect and ignore the /pol/tard fags who are ignorantly whining about "muh degeneracy"

>>7359685
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000470
No need to insult

>>7361479
Have you just now met the internet?
>The Victorian era was marked by an explosion of innovation and genius, per capita rates of which appear to have declined subsequently. The presence of dysgenic fertility for IQ amongst Western nations, starting in the 19th century, suggests that these trends might be related to declining IQ. This is because high-IQ people are more productive and more creative. We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were cleverer than modern populations, using high-quality instruments, namely measures of simple visual reaction time in a meta-analytic study. Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence (g) and are considered elementary measures of cognition. In this study we used the data on the secular slowing of simple reaction time described in a meta-analysis of 14 age-matched studies from Western countries conducted between 1889 and 2004 to estimate the decline in g that may have resulted from the presence of dysgenic fertility. Using psychometric meta-analysis we computed the true correlation between simple reaction time and g, yielding a decline of − 1.16 IQ points per decade or − 13.35 IQ points since Victorian times. These findings strongly indicate that with respect to g the Victorians were substantially cleverer than modern Western populations

kek. Abstract looks so credible. Wait,it's Science Direct. I think I can open the full text.

The answer to OP's question is that we are getting better at educating people. Advanced concepts like differentiation that 500 years ago were the domain of the world's greatest minds are being tought to highschool students. General relativity was understood by a handful of people less than a century ago and today is taught to first year university students.

I know it's fiction but in Star Trek they teach differentiation to children younger than 10 and I really don't think that's so far fetched in a few hundred years.

>>7359312

If you compare yourself to geniuses to the past you'll actually probably start thinking that you're ptrtty retarded. I mean sure everybody knows Pythagoras theorems nowadays because we learn them in school, but have you ever thought about how this guy figured all that shit out by himself? I bet most people nowadays wouldn't be able to do that.

>>7359303
>>7359311
>>7359669
Due to better nutrition, we are in fact smarter. People, particularly in the developed world are obtaining a greater proportion of their genetic potential for intelligence. Couple that with the fact that our lives are more conducive to learning, due to the fact that we are not spending all our waking hours toiling in fields and we are most definitely on average smarter and better educated.

smarter? No.

However we became increasingly good at making complicated things accessible either by finding intuitive models or formalism. This was only possible, because stuff that was bleeding edge research once was reevaluated and rewritten a thousand times by different people until it was sufficiently compact and intuitive to teach in middle school.

The problem however is that being able to learn and apply stuff is not inherently linked to understanding it. I.e. every high school kid can differentiate polynomials, because they get taught the formalism, but are hopelessly lost once you give them something that doesn't fit into this scheme of problems.

tl;dr: In school you get taught how to apply stuff, however understanding is a different matter.

>>7359298
I remember reading a study a little while ago that suggests we are actually getting less intelligent, don't remember the sauce though so that may speak for itself

Institutions like academics and public schooling have helped us come a long way - i'm expected to know certain things by certain ages. There are even minor social pressures which seem to select for this - people are often made fun of for not "knowing" something, despite knowing something is just memorization of a fact or being introduced to the concept before that point.

Anyways, i'd take the argument that we are smarter, but it depends entirely on the definition of "smarter." We don't really have a reliable way to gauge someones intellect, and even if we did, we couldn't compare our current intellect to our intellects of the past, as they don't have that method and record. But we do have the benefit of time - we are born after a lot of advances in science, philosophy, math, economics, etc... There are just some things that we know just by existing in society. I'd even agree with the argument that society commands some intellect just to survive - how to use a car, how to behave around a deep fryer, how not to kill yourself while jumping a car, how to diagnose your computer problems.

>>7359420
>Logical thinking is not intuitive
Maybe for you.

>>7361676

Yeah I've thought about this before, due to humans' ability for communication through language, great minds are able to write down their discoveries and everybody after can take the previous knowledge for granted and not derive it themselves but use it to discover more...etc.

I think many people could derive many of those things themselves but knowledge would not progress at the rate at which it is now. Everybody would have to begin from square one every time. Also, think about the possibility that some genius chimpanzee was born somewhere in Africa, had discovered many many mathematical theorems and physical laws itself, but died not having been able to communicate anything to any other chimps because chimps lack the ability for language, that is what gives us our collective intelligence, the ability for language, then other humans can benefit from one human of great intelligence.

>>7361747
No, for anyone.
The rules of logic are not natural. They're empirically chosen and then formalized.
How to use the rules is perfected through practice. No one is born knowing them.

>>7361666
Nope, guess I can't open this one as I seem to have lost the list with SD on it. Paper sounds shady as fuck, though.

>>7359298
Yes

>>7361747
fuck off edgey inborn genius. i bet you're "just too lazy!" to do anything with that intellect

>>7359298
The internet allows for such new manipulation of thoughts that it can probably make the smarter a lot smarter, or maybe mentally insane if they are more fearful than they are smart.

>>7359314
> Teehe, this should make for a nice trigger :P He should be shitting his pants just about now.

>>7361676
The poor motherfucker even had to move out of society and create a fucking cult to gain recognition for his works. I guess that is part of "normal societal progress".

>>7361976
At least it's better than Galileo guy who was forced to claim his most important work in life was a fucking joke.

>>7362024
>>7361976

So what have we learned from this? Don't do new awesome stuff. It's not worth it. You will gain nothing and only get pushed around by others whom you steal away focus from.

>>7361802
Well if you take a look at history, all the smart-asses like Galileo, Copernicus, that smart but stubborn greek guy with the circles who was killed by a roman soldier...

They were all definitely super smart, but too stubborn for their own good, the "lazy" or low-profiled ones actually come off as the "smart" guys in comparison.

>>7361682
>Due to better nutrition

Can you, or someone else, elaborate on that?

>>7359298

1. More prolific dissemination of knowledge

2. Better education models

These do not however mean that someone is 'smarter' simply for being in that environment but it does help foster and facilitate a greater potential to manifest.

Why don't you think in inverse and place you average contemporary person back in time to whatever 'dumber' era and see how 'smart' they are against a 'smart' person from then. The only way they'd even possibly succeed is by having the foreknowledge from their upbringing rather than any innate notion of actually being 'smarter'.

>>7359298
Flynn effect

>>7362055

>greek guy with the circles

>>7362642
This. You can't say you're smarter than a guy 2000 years ago because you simply have access to way more knowledge than he ever did. Guys like Archimedes and Pythagoras would probably be smarter than Stephen Hawking if they were around today. Just look at all the fundamental shit they figured out with nothing but a stick and sand surrounded by people who believed in magic. Imagine what they could do if they had access to Harvard library.

>>7363127
If I was born in ancient times and noticed that a^2 always equalled b^2 +c^2 as the Babylonians certainly did before Pythagoras I would have just taken it for granted and left it at that. Huge leap of genius to think "we should prove it for infinite values of a b and c". To the layman there is no point, you measure out your land, do the sums, it clearly works, but guys like Pythagoras thought beyond reality and the observable universe, they wanted to see it working in the entire universe of numbers.

>>7362546
sickly people are less likely to be smart. One surefire way to be sickly is to have poor nutrition.

>>7362055
>greek guy with the circles

>>7363140
Archimedes invented calculus.

>>7362055
>greek guy with the circles

>>7359298
Most certainly to me the opposite appears to be the fact.

take nothing more than my afternoon commute around Boston,MA.. right along the so called tech Corridor of Lexington, Waltham over the recent years the duration of my traversal of this interstate highway has increased in time spent on the road .

I observe most operators driving as close to the vehicle in front of them as they can when simply allowing three car lengths of open space would render the flow permeable permitting cars to change lanes when necessary and not slow or stop if they need to move over to exit..

So simple yet none of these presumably "intelligent" people can even see there is a problem or a very simple solution...

Hopeless

>>7359374
Imagine euclid was born today. He wouldnt be doing babby geometry he would be a fields medalist

>>7363435
if Euclid was born today he wouldn't be the Euclid we know historically. this is a bad historicist argument.

>>7361769
>>7361802
Logic is very intuitive. Most people are able to make at least simple logical deductions before going to school. Formalization is required only so there is no confusion. You don't have to take a course on mathematical logic to understand equivalence.

>>7363720
there's a difference between easy and intuitive and being born with the knowledge. logic can be pretty damn difficult if you were raised by religious morons or worse.

>>7362024

Galileo's persecution has always been severly overexaggerated. There was some vocal high ranking minority that wanted him to take back his thesis but he actually got protection and backing from other parts of the church. In total Galileo lead a pretty easy life and was in prison for like a day because there wasn't really much they could do about him but ask him to take back what he said.

>>7359298
>Are humans getting smarter?
Ask me how I know you haven't spoken to an average human this year.

>>7363127
>This. You can't say you're smarter than a guy 2000 years ago because you simply have access to way more knowledge than he ever did.
You can't say the opposite of this statement either if you're going to look at it that way.

Something, something, the Flynn effect.

Better nutrition? Widespread use of abstract symbolic manipulation at a young age? Morphogenetic fields?

>>7361682
Better nutrition than people 100 years ago I'll give you that, but better than 10,000 years ago? I doubt it.

We have the potential for better nutrition now but most people eat like garbage.

Aren't we getting dumber? Since the invention of agriculture and advanced medicine let the idiots survive and pass on their shitty genes. Also idiots breed like rabbits.

>>7363915
genetics doesn't play much part in how smart people are. it mostly becomes a factor when something has gone wrong in building the initial hardware

>>7363051
>>7363342
>>7363353

To be fair there were a lot of greek guys who were into circles

>>7360787
>Look into the Flynn effect
Read some modern studies. The Flynn effect plateaued decades ago and Western countries have been on a steady IQ decline for a while now.

Basically what seems to have happened is better nutrition allowed more people to reach their potential, but the average potential itself has been decreasing for a while due to the dysgenic nature of our societies.

Now that we've all but maxed out on the nutrition gains (i.e. most people more or less reach their potential), the continued decline in potential is the dominant visible trend.

The other theory is that the IQ decline in the last few decades is mostly due to importing lower IQ minorities but das racis.

>>7363963
>IQ
why do people do this to themselves?

>>7363963
>>7359298
Here's an article from Intelligence about this:

http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/lynn2008.pdf

>In Britain a decline in IQ among 11–12 year olds of 12 IQ points over the years 1975–2003, representing a decline of 4.3 IQ points a decade, has been reported by Shayer (2007). The evidence of these four studies suggests that the Flynn Effect has ceased in the economically developed nations. There is, however, a problem with these four studies that these countries have significant numbers of non-European immigrants whose mean IQs are lower than the indigenous populations and these will reduce the mean IQs of recent samples. The contribution of this to the "negative Flynn Effect" needs to be quantified.

>Nevertheless, it seems probable that in the economically developed nations the phenotypic intelligence will first stabilize, as it apparently has in Norway and Australia, and then decline, as it apparently has in Denmark and Britain. In the economically developing nations phenotypic intelligence will likely increase for some years if environmental conditions improve. This will reduce the intelligence gap between the economically developed and the economically developing nations, but it must be expected that in due course the impact of environmental improvements in the economically developing nations will cease. When this happens, and if dysgenic fertility continues, it can be predicted that both genotypic and phenotypic intelligence will decline throughout the world.

>The decline of the world's intelligence and the prospect of a continuation of this decline must surely be a cause for concern. Intelligence is an important determinant of scientific and cultural achievement, earnings, health and many aspects of the quality of life. All of these are likely to deteriorate as the world's intelligence declines.

>>7363972
>We should consider whether there are any plausible alternative scenarios to the projected decline of the world's intelligence. The problem lies in the presence of dysgenic fertility worldwide and in whether this could be reversed or is likely to reverse itself spontaneously. The problem of arresting and if possible reversing dysgenic fertility within countries was extensively discussed by eugenicists in the first half of the twentieth century. Accounts of these ideas have been given by Kevles (1985) and Lynn (1996, 2001).

>The eugenicists considered a twofold strategy to deal with the problem, which they designated positive and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics consisted of policies designed to persuade the more intelligent to have greater numbers of children. The principal method proposed was the provision of financial incentives, as advocated by Cattell (1937), but it proved impossible in the western democracies to introduce any practical measures of this kind. Negative eugenics consisted of the dissemination of knowledge of birth control and the sterilisation of the mentally retarded, which was first introduced in Indiana in 1907 and subsequently in most of the American states and throughout most of Europe. These programs had some success but did not arrest dysgenic fertility (Lynn & van Court, 2004).

>>7363974
>In the second half of the twentieth century, public opinion turned against eugenics and from the 1960s onwards eugenics became virtually universally condemned. Throughout western nations the eugenics societies for the promotion of eugenics dissolved themselves. It seems unlikely that any attempts to introduce eugenic programs in the western democracies will be made in the foreseeable future. The lesson to be drawn from the history of the eugenics movement is that it would be immensely difficult and probably impossible to halt or reverse dysgenic fertility by the methods of classical eugenics. The eugenicists tried to find ways of reversing dysgenic fertility in individual countries and failed. It would be even more difficult to reverse dysgenic fertility in the whole world. To achieve this ways would have to be found to increase fertility in the high IQ nations and reduce fertility in the low IQ nations. We do not see any probability of success in achieving either of these objectives.

Sounds bleak although most psychology is science so soft you could spread it on toast so I'd take it with more than one grain of salt.

>>7361676
It could have been a guess?

>>7363974
>dysgenic fertility
Could this be because feminism is more accepted among those with above average intellect/more education?

I hear feminism correlates with reduced fertility so this could explain it.

>>7363972
>>7363974
>>7363976
The chinese are busy identifying genes tied to intelligence, and have not just the political will but drive to implement prenatal screening for them.

Hopefully, when Europe wake up in the face of the chinese ubermench, they will place mechanical brain augmentation and general cyborgisation under the healthcare system.

>>7359374
Knowledge is what you know, and intelligence is how you use it.

>>7364038
I can't speak for other fields but in genomics BGI do the sloppiest fucking work ever, they'd be a laughingstock if it wasn't so annoying (after BGI shits out yet another utterly useless reference genome you won't be able to get funding to do the same work properly, so the species is ruined for everyone).

If they are in charge of creating the Ubermensch I wouldn't worry about it.

>>7359298
Remove environmental pressure from the creature and the creature no longer continues to adapt.

>>7363518
Exactly, he would be doing higher level math

The real answer is we don't know. Since there is no real way to test the aptitude of a population thousands of years ago and compare it to a population now all we can do is speculate.

Which makes the majority of responses in this thread worthless since it's just guess work.

The only things we can be sure of is that average nutritional intake of a person in a first world nation today is better than the average nutritional intake of a person in a first world nation a thousand years ago (in third world countries it varies greatly). And that the average person's neurological wiring today due to better access to literacy/numeracy is different than the average person's neurological wiring a thousand years ago.

But even considering this, it's likely possible that people thousands of years ago had similar or higher intelligence (maybe similar or excess grey/white matter is a better way to phrase it) than we do now in the past because of more dependency on memory and spatial coordination processing.

It's also entirely possible that the development of human intelligence is uneven across the map and time periods. Some populations are getting smarter others are getting dumber. It might just be an ebb and flow type of scenario where economics, war, disease, nutrition, education and infrastructure makes all the difference in intelligence.