We really are the same people. No measurable difference in IQ (as well as that can be "measured"). Only knowledge (some gained for us; some lost, too) and context are different. The tablet is a cool reminder of this.
Well, IQ tests given in the 1930's and 40's(?) had the results re-scaled today, and the average IQ was 70.
Note, that we're all trained today in taking IQ tests. E.g. one question asked "There are no Elephants in Germany. Munich is in Germany. How many Elephants are in Munich?" with possible answers of 0, 1, 2, 12.
Back then a layman might think "Munich is a big city; I bet there's one or two in the zoo there!" and answer 1 or 2. Because they didn't understand it was a logic question and there is an expectation when taking IQ tests that common sense is not being tested.
Indeed. I find Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" to be a particularly vivid proof of this. (Although I don't know what it's like to be Emperor of Rome, a lot of his concerns seem entirely commonplace today.)
Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.
IQ is a pretty arbitrary measurement, but I think a modern yankee in egypt would indeed have problem solving skills beyond their peers. Our education, formal and social, is quite a rapid process in the modern world and we basically give kids a free ride until around 18 so that they can focus on education rather than being forced to do menial labour.
I think that as physical beings we're pretty similar to our ancient selves (though maybe a bit worse off with all the PFAS and similar pollutants in our systems and the lack of immunity tuned to the environment) but our problem solving skills are tuned to a much more complex level of problem.
Whether that level of problem solving is materially useful is a whole different topic.
I don’t know the historical record for ancient Egypt, but I imagine we are way bigger and way smarter on average because of childhood nutrition and lack of parasites - see also, North Korea.
Smarter feels like a bad word to use - I specifically dialed into problem solving because I think that's one place we can accurately differentiate but "smarts" is an incredibly broad concept. We're better at certain things because of specialization and long education but worse at other things because we're obviously not training our motor skills to do different things from birth - it's like folks who can skin mangos in a single cut, it can be learned but most of us aren't going to learn it.
Ancient Egypt did have public schools and a semi-meritocratic scribe class so formal education was a thing which makes it easier to compare in contrast to areas that revolved entirely around apprenticeship like the more nomadic contemporaries would be.
Also, we do have a much more balanced diet growing up but if we did travel back to ancient Egypt there might be dietary issues trying to maintain our extra mass - the lack of access to diverse fruits and vegetables might wreck havoc on our bodies... you can look to extreme contemporary diets for any evidence of that you'd like to see.
> We really are the same people. No measurable difference in IQ (as well as that can be "measured").
There is definitely IQ variation in the same society on a short timescale and between societies and the same time, during the time when we have been able to measure it; given what we know about the wide variety of environmental influences on IQ, it stands to reason that Egypt 3,200 years ago would have significantly different IQ average and distribution than a society from today, even if the genetic factors were exactly the same as in some modern society being compared. Sure, we can't directly measure that for a past society, but that doesn't mean it is roughly the same.
If people lived and thought and partied and slept, had friends, raised family, and weren’t too miserable, I’m not sure how variations in IQ distribution really matter much?
Maybe the metric captures something arbitrary about modernity — and a community’s conformance to it — and not much meaningful about the people in other times and places.
> If people lived and thought and partied and slept, had friends, raised family, and weren’t too miserable, I’m not sure how variations in IQ distribution really matter much?
I was addressing a claim about the absence of differences in IQ, not a claim about whether differences in IQ are or are not important in the first place.
This is incorrect - iq has risen steadily with improvements in nutrition, public health, and medical science. It's mostly plateaued over the last 50 years, but it's evident that pre-industrial / pre-rnlightenment humans had a much harder life, including things that suppressed potential at an almost global scale.
We may see additional gains if there are globally adopted pedagogical improvements in both childhood education and standard parenting.
Our genetics are the same, but our quality of life is radically better, and that allows us greater potential.
We know we can quantify intelligence as in IQ because it is what we call aptitude in several tasks (e.g. pattern recognition, short-term recall), and we've found that they are correlated, and aptitude in those tasks is measurable (e.g. ability to recognize pattern and time taken, ability to recall and time taken). If intelligence as in IQ wasn't as transferable as it is we would be calling them different things. For example, intelligence as in IQ and being knowledgeable are different aspects of the popular notion of being intelligent or smart.
True, the village idiot had iconic status and the donkey was legendary. I always wondered (thoughtfully) what the anti-IQ crowd was all about, was it that IQ tests are imperfect or was it that IQ as a fundamental concept is flawed.
So, the grandparent post is hopefully not betraying my actual thoughts on the matter too much, but I am indeed in the anti-IQ crowd. My thoughts on the matter:
- IQ scores are not a standard measure. There are several different internationally recognized IQ tests, but people who talk about their IQ scores tend to pick the one they do best on and declare that "their IQ."
- IQ scores measure performance on standardized tests. However, they are frequently misinterpreted as a measure of intelligence in general.
- As a result, certain people are motivated to practice for an IQ test, which seems counterproductive.
- Depending on the particular IQ test in question, one's performance on an IQ test stems from their present state of mind, and this is unavoidable. IQ tests, by design, are not concerned with this detail (although, historically, they did account for some crude concept of "metal age" compared to physical age. Which is itself problematic: what is this supposed to measure, again?).
- It is worth noting that IQ scores were originally propped up by the eugenics movement. For example, the most widely used test in the United States was based on the work of Lewis Terman, who at some point wrote "high-grade or border-line deficiency... is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come." Based on that information, there is a likely answer for the question I asked a moment ago.
- Obvious conjecture, but, IQ scores are not really useful in today's society? I have a few years still to go, but so far in my life, I have not once seen an IQ score trumpeted somewhere and thought "that is a useful measure for the discussion at hand." Not in a resume. Not in a debate. Not in a biography. Not in an advertisement. Not in a legal defence.
- So what motivation could we have? People in general gravitate toward answers that make it easier to distinguish the Self from the Other. For example, it took millennia for us to collectively agree the Earth orbits around the Sun. And long before IQ was an idea, René Descartes was a pioneer in trying to explain consciousness through science. To make this work, he was desperate to prove that humans are unique in having free will and intelligence. That animals are machines, over which we have free reign; that humans are special. Because we must be special. So, one of his ideas was that humans have an animal spirit, but we have the ability to control it. That we must control it. But, it is important to note, not all humans do.
- Tests, in general, are a problematic measure of intelligence. A better measure of intelligence will always be performance in regular day to day activity, analyzed by someone with no bias and an understanding of the context. Obviously this can't be standardized, which is unfortunate, but it does not follow that the next-best thing is actually a meaningful measure. Sometimes we humans must simply accept our limitations.
Hey, thanks for the detailed response, your last point is a very insightful one (not to me, though). What I have a problem with, is that generally the anti-IQ crowd (not you, since you do understand the nuances) tend to take the stand that IQ tests are imperfect or even wrong hence they also extend that to concluding that intelligence itself as a concept is flawed, basically the blank slate concept.
Now the last point that you mentioned is a very important. Most average people who make decisions (eg employers) are average themselves so that they fall back on what they know best ( sometime it's IQ tests, in the software world it's leetcode) and what they know best is not necessarily the best. So why blame the normies? (And I'm not denying that a lot of harm comes off it.) What is the alternative for a normie? As a general concept similar methods of gauging people (by normies) on other aspects (like trust) is also flawed, but that is the best they can manage.
All that complaints look similar to the idea that veganism is bad because vegans are annoying or that quantum mechanics is nonsense because some people believe in quantum healing.
I can name one field that justifies all IQ research that was and will be done: education. It has immense value there and can help guide policy on the issues of education and all related concerns such as discrimination.
That's probably closer to the truth but doesn't seem like the whole story. Modern environments are very different but it seems a stretch to claim they're always (or even often) better.
We're usually comparing modern populations to industrialized populations that lived nothing like ancient populations.
It seems plausible that some ancient populations might've had sufficient nutrition (particularly Egypt at various times) and lower pollutants (less lead, for example), and maybe come out net ahead in terms of average general intelligence.
Would be fun to know if anyone has come close to answering these questions, but it seems like a challenging problem.
It might've actually dipped for everyone born during the decades leaded fuel was used. But that's on a base/general level - education would outweigh that.
