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by bsder
1905 days ago
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Expertise/intelligence/whatever you call it is the ability to handle more complex tasks because you can place the less complex tasks as background tasks. This follows whether it is due to better education, better training, better tools, or better nutrition. Are programmers "smarter" than they were 50 years ago? They can certainly create much more complex programs that do MUCH more than we could 50 years ago. Are chess players "smarter" than they were 100 years ago? ELO ratings sure suggest they are. Would those people of 100 years ago been able to do the tasks we can now given our current society? Maybe. But that indicates that "intelligence" is also a function of "current environment". And, if the current environment is better, then the humans are "smarter", too. |
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No it isn't. I have seen otherwise quite smart people completely fail to do the most basic tasks especially when it comes to repair.
You can work it out (I for example can do many home DIY projects now). But just because you can do a complex task in one domain it does not mean you can do a relative simple task in another domain. You can see this in this industry. The number of C# programmers that cannot do simple CSS.
The fact the you can't give it a proper name means that you cannot quantify it properly.
> This follows whether it is due to better education, better training, better tools, or better nutrition.
No it doesn't. Better training for doing X just means you will be better at doing X. It does not say anything about how well you may perform in other taks.
> Are programmers "smarter" than they were 50 years ago? They can certainly create much more complex programs that do MUCH more than we could 50 years ago.
More complex doesn't mean it is better. In fact if you are a good engineer you will know that unnecessarily complexity is a sign of a poor design. So this does not follow what-so-ever.
Also most of the literature written 50 years or more ago from the pioneers of the field are constantly being re-discovered.
So no.
> Are chess players "smarter" than they were 100 years ago? ELO ratings sure suggest they are.
No. No. No. Just because a number goes up, doesn't mean that everyone is getting better. It could be because weaker players may not bother at all with such matches where they are rated, while better players are more likely to participate in any ranked or scoring system. So you cannot draw that conclusion.
> Would those people of 100 years ago been able to do the tasks we can now given our current society? Maybe. But that indicates that "intelligence" is also a function of "current environment". And, if the current environment is better, then the humans are "smarter", to
No I am sorry that conclusion is incorrect. There are many here that would struggle doing some very basic things in other fields especially if it involved their hands (carpentry, joining, brick laying) because they have no expertise in it and those fields have been around a very long time. So you cannot come to that conclusion at all.