Are people smarter now than ever before?
- Thread starter It is a mystery
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Vandelay
Life is absurd. Lean into it.
Easy is relative though. You have whole teams of people doing things to create inventions now. For example as smart as elon musk is, he didn't build the model S, nor did he invent it, nor could he probably build one himself.
The average person back in the renaissance or enlightenment age had to do and learn way more on their own. I'd say the difference now, is we need to be intelligent about ten times as many things. But the breadth of our intelligence doesn't need to be wide. Hence why I think people of old needed and are smarter.
Now if we are talking about intelligence capability, it's probably been static for the last 2-3000 years. Intelligence comes with societal stability and caloric intake.
KNOWLEDGE DOES NOT MEAN SMART. IF GOOGLE DIED TOMORROW, HOW DUCKED WOULD WE BE AS A PEOPLE?
same thing for back then. most inventions didn't come out of thin air they were improvements on older simpler inventions by other people and relied on things others came up with. imagine if the hindu-arabic number system didn't make it to europe probably non of the mathematical and scientific breakthroughs from then would of taken place.
And today the breadth of our intelligence needs to be wider since most of what we need to solve are cross disciplinary. Take for instance space travel or mining asteroids. pulling that off would require improvements in rocket/aerospace tech which depends on math and physics, material science, robotics, medicine and even mental health care to understand and treat the effect of space on our bodies and mind and the list can go on and on. of course you'll have experts in each field but to put those things together they'll have to understand what each other are doing.
Kilgore Trout
Banned
im willing to bet under 10% of this forum can do differential equations.
so. what is that suppose to mean. since when "doing differential equations" the measure of intelligence.
Swagnicious
All Star
The internet don't mean shyt if you ain't using it to gain the actual knowledge that it provides. And let's be real......most people aren't doing that
Mr. Feeny already put us onto this
Mr. Feeny already put us onto this
YES... Anyone saying differently is a bitter old head. Many people especially in the western world are more literate than before. Meanwhile back then half the population was illiterate!
Redwood
Superstar
Both yes and no. I feel like their is going to be an increase of smart dumb motherfukkers.
Gucci-Flip-Flops
Rookie
If innovations are built on something previous that means people are obviously smarter now. Also to answer OP, I think the population as a whole are collectively smarter than before
In a manner of speaking, yes. More people are literate and have completed basic education than at any other point in history. We have good scientific explanations for most phenomena we encounter on earth. No longer do we need to attribute thunder and lightning to an angry lightning god, or a tidal wave to Poseidon's trident.
At the elite level of intelligence I'm not so sure at all. Consider for instance how irrelevant modern philosophy is. People still study Plato because dude was on point and almost all of the problems he identified with society in ancient Athens are still here today all around the world, and it's been 2400 years! I don't see anybody from today being studied in 4400
At the elite level of intelligence I'm not so sure at all. Consider for instance how irrelevant modern philosophy is. People still study Plato because dude was on point and almost all of the problems he identified with society in ancient Athens are still here today all around the world, and it's been 2400 years! I don't see anybody from today being studied in 4400
You're comparing different groups of people, and there are a lot of issues with the two.
Leonardo da Vinci is an unparalleled genius, comparing him with anybody, really is sort of silly, especially nowadays, since technology, science, art, and education have advanced so much.
It'd be more like Leonardo da Vinci or Alan Turing
Isaac Newton or Srinivasan Ramanujan
Mozart or Yuja Wang, the circumstances are vastly different.
Don't forget, it was far easier to be a "jack-of-all-trades" centuries ago when the body of knowledge was much smaller, and "breakthroughs" were far easier to reach.
Ramanujan got a lot of his shyt from these dreams he said he had, where Hindu gods would come at him with scrolls of mathematics and teach him what was up. This is why nobody understands how he got to his insights and theories, they just know that it works.
The rational explanation would be that homie had that knowledge in him subconsciously somehow, and because he was a religious man it was expressed to him in his dreams in a religious way.
Stop it slime
