[thriftwy]

Looking at all the architecture around me would suggest that people all had an IQ of 170 one and half century ago, whereas our current average is 80. You can't end admiring the people who built these beautiful (but also ironic and meaningful) houses.

[Ekaros]

You could still buy and build exactly same. Probably even keeping the modern features well designed and hidden. It is just the reality that less people are ready to pay for it. And labour needed is more expensive.

[thriftwy]

People who had the determination to pay for beautiful buildings appear even more comparatively smarter than modern bean counters, than architects of old vs. the modern ones who have to yield to bean counters while observing all kinds of building codes and other busy paperworks.

So yeah, maybe it's just that the landlords had an IQ of 170 a century and half ago, whereas now they have "just" 70.

But also no. Modern architects think they're so much smarter than architects of a century ago, solely on the basis of living later, as the article describes. They think they could do the same greatness effortlessly, whereas when they actually try, they usually fall flat on their face. Turns out, it was actually quite hard even with appropriate practice, and without said practice it's often impossible to just build a nicely-looking house.

[vore]

This is just a complete baloney non-sequitur. What does architectural style have to do with the average IQ?

[simple-thoughts]

Survivorship bias. Buildings with brilliant architects and engineers are more likely to last through history and/or be preserved by their fans. So the expectation would be, when looking at the best products of the past, the average IQ of their producers would be above the average of both their time and ours.

[thriftwy]

Almost everything has survived - I'm living in a city where buildings were mostly preserved indiscriminatingly. They're just that good.

[Leo_Germond]

Also average IQ at any given time is 100, by definition. I believe this post was trying the classic "all contemporary creations are degenerate" take on architecture and art, but not doing so very eloquently.

[Dalewyn]

There is an argument to be made that people of olden times were far, far, far, far more capable at a fundamental level than people of today.

[edent]

Because they had to be.

I don't need to know how to grow crops, weave a shirt, or wire a plug - those things have been mechanised and automated.

Would someone from 200 years ago trade having to gather firewood for flicking a switch for instant heat? Absolutely!

Would you trade access to Wikipedia for having to travel to a monastery in order to look up a scrap of information? Unlikely!

[swatcoder]

Hah. There are absolutely people here on HN right now who would be happy to live in a world of quiet labor and pilgrimages and digital disconnection.

Other lifestyles needn’t be romanticized more than our own, but they also don’t need to be demonized. Keeping yourself safe and fed isn’t a big stress for most people through most of history, yet does get quite hard for some people some times even now. The difference is mostly just textural.

[vore]

We are no longer a hunter-gatherer or agrarian society -- people of olden times would fare as well in our society as we would in theirs. Maybe they could be more self-sufficient, but modern society is free from tending to our fields or bison or whatever so we can have more time to do things beyond just subsistence farming during all our waking hours.