[chandler]

> ...but why did they do it like this?

...because people are smart. People have _always_ been smart, it's one of the defining attributes of humanity.

It strikes me oddly (not specifically your comment, but the general color accompanying these kinds of articles)--there's a kind of ground assumption that by looking into the past, one sees nothing but a gradually descending IQ.

[jamesrcole]

> people are smart. People have _always_ been smart

I don't disagree, but I think there's more to it than just that.

Our raw mental capabilities may have always been the same, but how smart we are also depends on our learning. Learning gives us extra leverage. If you have two smart people and one of them was trapped by themselves all their life on a desert island and the other learnt a lot about (say) maths and science, then the latter person could in practical terms have greater intellectual capabilities.

Over the centuries we've made great gains in mathematical tools, scientific knowledge, in democratizing education and in disseminating knowledge. And this means over the centuries we've (as a species) obtained more leverage that we can apply to our raw mental capabilities, giving us (overall) greater intellectual capabilities.

[chandler]

> Our raw mental capabilities may have always been the same, but how smart we are also depends on our learning.

FWIW, I tend to equate "smart" with "cleverness," as a separate measure distinct from "experience," for the same reason you describe--so what I usually go by is something along the lines of:

Cleverness is a measure of "what can you do with what you have," whereas experience is a measure of "what do you have?"

> Over the centuries we've made great gains in mathematical tools, scientific knowledge, in democratizing education and in disseminating knowledge. And this means over the centuries we've (as a species) obtained more leverage that we can apply to our raw mental capabilities, giving us (overall) greater intellectual capabilities.

I don't think we've gained greater intellectual capabilities--our intellectual capabilities are the same, we just operate in a completely different mental environment than our priors did.

Moreover, having a different view of the world allows for different connections to be made, and different potentials to be expressed (irrespective of one's individual level of cleverness).

So, for example, by placing a priority on stories & views that encourage greater investigation of the physical world, we get to where we are today. And we can teach the next generation slightly different stories that optimize for different kinds of usefulness.

To bring it to the HN contingent--if I learn a new programming language, I've gained experience in different ideas and operate in a different mental landscape. But I'm not smarter afterwards, and I wasn't dumber before.

[pilsetnieks]

> looking into the past, one sees nothing but a gradually descending IQ

Actually, it quite literally might be so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Though it's questionable as to how IQ is related to actual intelligence over time.

[19eightyfour]

Agree with that too. Maybe IQ is out of date? Also, the huge effect that all these new technologies must be having is surely not going to be factored into that.

[userbinator]

I think the parent was referring to the fact that the numbering does not resemble any modern definition of binary --- there are 64 ways to arrange 6 2-stated things, but the I Ching numbering doesn't have any clear 32-16-8-4-2-1 (or other set of) weights to each "bit".

[19eightyfour]

I agree. People are also arrogant. We like to look back and think "how quaint" and we are better than them. It's humbling to think that we actually weren't. But it's probably not very adaptive to think that way. Since, believing we are better now, by falsely diminishing the whatever metric of the past, probably helps us keep going forward to create the bright future.

Hopefully without repeating the mistakes of the past tho!

Even that phrase "mistakes of the past" is telling, right? I mean it's not like, IMHO, you hear a similar amount of talk about, "the brilliance of the past", except it a sort of quaint, dismissive way: "oh, look, plumbing in ancient Rome, weren't they sort-of clever!"

[jamesrcole]

I think that it's fair to say that, in the past, people were (overall) a lot more ignorant about the character of the world and the universe, and that this led them to (overall) believe a lot more incorrect things.

This is not to beat our chests in a "we're better" kind of fashion, but just to acknowledge that we have the benefits of the knowledge that people who came before us built.

[1001101]

As time goes on, you have more giants standing on the shoulders of other giants, and so on. Our feeble wetware is going to look pretty inferior to the digital cognitive systems of the next millennium, so we would do well to stay humble :)