

Were we smarter 100 years ago? - emontero1
http://www.thepublicdomain.org/2009/07/17/were-we-smarter-100-years-ago/

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grellas
It is a modern conceit that intellectual progress has made modern generations
smarter than those that preceded them.

A hundred years ago, far fewer people got advanced educations but those that
did were thoroughly well-versed in the liberal arts (as classically defined),
meaning that they had been grounded in Latin, rhetoric, and similar subjects
that trained them to be highly articulate in their forms of expression (as is
easily seen from a glance at these hearing transcripts).

Those who went on to become lawyers, politicians, etc. were indeed elitists
but the best among them were highly talented, very bright, and quite capable
of making many of our modern politicians look pathetic by comparison in their
forms of expression.

The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is widely regarded as a
classic high point in the venerable lineage of that work - whose aim, it is
worth recalling, was to gather all the world's knowledge in an advanced and
erudite state.

They may have used pen and paper back then, or sometimes typewriters - and
their knowledge base was far smaller than what we have today - but we have
nothing over them in terms of innate intellectual capacity.

~~~
asdlfj2sd33
Exactly. When you compare youtube comments to anything written 100 years ago
you must be tempted to think we've gotten A LOT stupider.

But what you have to realize is, that 100 years ago most people couldn't even
read or write. But today they are making youtube comments - progress!

~~~
quellhorst
The Internet used to be mostly filled with intellectuals and I thought people
here were much smarter than the general population I encountered. Today the
net is a cesspool.

~~~
sketerpot
That's an awfully broad statement, don't you think? The Internet used to be an
area with a higher-than-normal density of intellectuals, and now you can only
say that about some parts of the Internet. But please don't lump it all
together as if there was some sort of equivalence between (say) Hacker News
and 4chan and Christian Youth Forums and YouTube and the Energy from Thorium
forum.

If the net is a cesspool, then so is the entire world.

~~~
quellhorst
Sure, but those bright stars like hacker news eventually burn out too.
Hopefully it doesn't happen too quickly.

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synnik
100 years ago, education was rarer, but very strong. The records we have from
those days are from the best and brightest.

Today, education is more broadly available. We can read the words of the
brightest of our time, and the dimmest. They are all online for our reading
pleasure.

So are we smarter? Are they smarter 100 years ago? Odds are, no to both
questions. But we certainly have a visibility into the full spectrum of
today's people. We don't have that view of olden folk. Our perspective will be
skewed.

~~~
gaius
Yes it's like Victorian buildings, bridges, etc. Those Victorians sure knew
how to build to last!

But wait, we only see their buildings that _did_ last. Everything that's not a
Victorian structure is evidence of something of theirs that didn't...

------
frossie
Summary: Accounts of the legislative hearings over the 1909 Copyright Act
(which dealt with the newfangled invention of mechanically reproduced music)
cover many of the same issues that are relevant today, but with all parties
engaging in a much higher level of debate than is currently evident.

Guess they did better before we let the TV cameras in :-)

~~~
mechanical_fish
Angling for the perfect five-second sound bite makes _all_ debate more inane,
but the debate about copyright is a _particularly_ awful case: most of those
TV cameras are owned by major media companies that have an axe to grind.

It's not a coincidence that the media industries have a degree of political
influence that's out of proportion to their size. If you're a politician, it's
good to avoid irritating major media corporations, and it's even better to
have them on your side.

This is why Larry Lessig eventually gave up on trying to make his arguments
more eloquent and went into the corruption-fighting business. Eloquence is
great, but it doesn't do much good when the fix is in.

------
dctoedt
In computer terms: the CPU(s) and RAM of humans -- the wetware, if you will --
are presumably much the same, on average, as they were 100 years ago.

But it seems indisputable that we know how to deal effectively with more of
life's threats and opportunities than we did back then.

(Again in computer terms, our libraries of event-detection and -handling
routines are much more sophisticated than those of a century ago.)

As a simple example, just think of how much more more the average person knows
about, say, healthy eating and the downside of smoking -- this isn't to say,
of course, that there isn't still a lot of work to do in disseminating that
knowledge.

So yeah, there seems little question that we are indeed 'smarter' (in the
sense used above) than we were 100 years ago.

------
known
"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone

------
randallsquared
The Flynn effect suggests not. :)

~~~
bokonist
The Flynn effect mostly appears in only certain puzzle tests. There is no
Flynn effect in vocab and numeracy, despite far longer hours spent at school.
This indicates to me that we have gotten better at certain abstract puzzles,
perhaps because the rising prominence of IQ tests made people study those
puzzles more. The Flynn effect only proves that those kind of puzzle tests are
very flawed at measuring innate aptitude.

~~~
randallsquared
I think that your objection is, rather, an indictment of schools and the
surrounding bureaucracy.

Anyway, _do_ people study such puzzles? For such a consistent, widespread
rise, you'd expect it to be pretty obvious that they do, but I'm not sure.

~~~
stavrianos
Well, didn't you play with brain teasers and abstract shape puzzles and such
as a child? Or edutainment software? Studying doesn't have to mean nose-to-
the-grindstone.

~~~
randallsquared
I'm in my mid-30s. If there was anything we'd recognize as "edutainment"
software in the 70s and early 80s, we couldn't afford it. Anyway, I have an
average-software-engineer IQ, more or less, on tests in the 80s, and I can't
remember ever doing much brain teaser or abstract shape puzzles -- those
weren't interesting to me. I spent every waking hour I could reading past age
seven or eight.

