[WalterBright]

> People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today.

I seriously doubt that. My experience in college was not to learn facts and formulae, but to learn how to learn. I.e. training the mind.

It's similar to athletes. The worst Olympic athlete today would blow away the best from a century ago. That's not because people are inherently stronger today, but because we know how to train much better.

[Eisenstein]

But again, that is access to knowledge. How good would your college education have been if there was no library or textbooks?

If you took the athletes today without their support team and sent them back in time two years before an Olympics event to compete on their own, I don't think it would be as big of a blowout as you suggest.

[WalterBright]

Interesting that you mention textbooks. Most of my STEM classes in college did not have a textbook, or recommended a book that was kinda irrelevant to the direction the classes took.

BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.

[kelseyfrog]

Kind of makes you wonder if there are other epistemological generators even more powerful than science waiting to be discovered.

[Eisenstein]

> Most of my STEM classes in college did not have a textbook, or recommended a book that was kinda irrelevant to the direction the classes took.

So you went through classes with no written material? You listened to lecture, took notes, and then did assignments and passed tests with no documents to study?

> BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.

The scientific method is a set of protocols that are followed in order to formalize evidence and prediction. Putting it into a set of words is important, but not required. Humans managed to sail across oceans and build wonders just fine without it.

[nradov]

Humans made gradual progress before the scientific method but it was slow and kind of random. If you look at the historical pace of innovation it tremendously accelerated after the scientific method became widespread.

[Eisenstein]

> Humans made gradual progress before the scientific method

When was 'before the scientific method' exactly?

> it was slow and kind of random.

I would argue it wasn't random at all -- it was directed towards human needs and desires as appropriate to the times. There was never a period where humans stopped using their intelligence and problem solving skills to improve their lives in whatever ways were available.

> If you look at the historical pace of innovation it tremendously accelerated after the scientific method became widespread.

When did it become widespread? Where did it spread to? Did those places all show a similar increase in innovation in the years after?

[WalterBright]

Google says:

"While elements of the scientific method existed in ancient times, the modern scientific method is generally attributed to Sir Francis Bacon who outlined it in his 1620 treatise "Novum Organum," placing the invention of the scientific method during the early 17th century during the Scientific Revolution;"

which sounds about right.

It was much more prevalent in free market countries. Authoritarian economies tend to be too rigid to experiment and develop new things.

[WalterBright]

> So you went through classes with no written material? You listened to lecture, took notes, and then did assignments and passed tests with no documents to study?

That's right.

I learned to never miss a lecture, and take copious notes. I also never missed a retch session. And still sometimes I needed help from a patient classmate.

The fun thing about the notes was when reviewing them, I'd recall the verbal part of the lecture. This helped a great deal.

Sadly, the passage of decades has silenced that voice, and I have a hard time understanding the notes today. I've wished many times I'd have had the foresight to bring a cassette recorder to lecture and record them. Too bad all those lectures are lost to time. But nobody recorded lectures in those days, and it never occurred to me.

[sethherr]

It would be a huge blowout. We didn’t know how to train or eat and athletes smoked and drank substantially more. Meanwhile, the gear evolutions make significant difference.

But take distance running - prior to 1954, nobody had done a sub 4 minute mile. After that was known to be possible multiple people sub 4 minute miled in the following decade. If you sent a top runner back a hundred years they would be able to run a sub 4 minute mile, even with 1920s equipment - and the world record in 1923 was 4:10

[kaffekaka]

As far as I know the progression into sub 4 minute miles was quite linear and not some kind of sudden breach once everybody understood it was at all possible.

The story of a sudden breach is perhaps more attractive though.

[sethherr]

From wikipedia's 4 minute mile article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-minute_mile

> The four-minute barrier was first broken on 6 May 1954 at Oxford University's Iffley Road Track, by British athlete Roger Bannister

> On 21 June 1954, at an international meet at Turku, Finland, Australia's John Landy became the second man, after Bannister, to achieve a sub-four-minute mile.

In 1955 Laszlo Tabori was the third person to break the 4 minute barrier. Then, in 1956, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race.

This matches what I described, multiple people attained it once it was understood to be possible. It was linear up to the 4 minute mark, but the point is that records that used to be impossible are now humdrum once achieved.

[kaffekaka]

I read this one: https://www.scienceofrunning.com/2017/05/the-roger-bannister...

With for example: "What this shows us is that the issue wasn’t massively psychological. If it was, we would have seen athletes running 1,500m races much faster than their corresponding mile time. Instead, we see that the progression matches up nicely. People were stuck on 4 minutes at the same time they were stuck on 3:43. Do we really think that runners were stuck on a mythical 3:43.0 barrier?"

In case you don't want to read it, it says that other distances had similar "breakthroughs" but they were not associated with a mental barrier like "4 minute mile". Rather, the article argues, the development may have been related to WW2.

Edit: it just so happened that for mile running, the stagnation after WW2 occured just around the four minute mark. You need to look at other distances and perhaps even other sports to see the pattern.

Indeed, my country Sweden won the olympic football/soccer in 1948 - a result widely regarded as being due to other countries have sent all their young men to the war while Sweden stayed neutral/did not fight the germans.

[yread]

> even with 1920s equipment

Are you sure about that? Can you post a result where someone ran with leather shoes on asphalt?

[hilux]

Zola Budd, a woman, ran a barefoot mile in 4:17.57, which is about 10 seconds slower than the current women's WR.

The men's mile WR is about 24 seconds faster than the women's. Presumably plenty of barefoot African dudes could run a mile a lot faster than Budd did.

With the exception of the new "energy return" shoes, there's no evidence that shoes help runners run faster - probably the opposite.

[Vegenoid]

I think that it depends on what you mean by “people”. My hypothesis is that the average person today is better at learning than in the past, for the reasons you stated, but that there have been people as good at learning as the best today for quite a while. It seems hard to refute this when considering some of the great minds of the past, and the incredible discoveries they were able to make with far less tools and collaborators with which to make them.

I also don’t think that brainpower/learning ability correspond as directly to training regimen as physical ability. We also don’t have as clear of an idea for what the “best” ways to increase learning ability are as for fitness. And of course our methods to quantify intelligence are much less objective than for fitness - partly because we separate fitness ability into different domains in a way that we tend not to for intelligence.

[nradov]

In swimming, high school girls today routinely go faster than the best male Olympic athletes from 1924. In most sports, technique and equipment has improved along with training.