[cjs_ac]

This essay attributes rather too much to literacy. The end of feudalism, for example, started with the Black Death, and the journey to modern democracies involved centuries of concessions by kings to the emerging middle classes. Sure, mass literacy was key to enabling universal suffrage, but the end of absolute monarchy started long before that.

The present decline in literacy is probably the consequence in a temporary prestige given to other forms of media. We are very much heading into a great crisis, but the old social order where knowledge is valued by the elites will re-emerge once the crisis is resolved. The Second World War emerged from the chaos of the 1920s and 1930s, and the reason why so many people who lived through the war said they enjoyed it was the common purpose that swept away the prior disorder. This is why the 1950s were so socially conservative and repressive.

We live in interesting times, but the world will again be boring.

[syntaxing]

I took a mandatory college requirement in environmental studies. The class argues that a lot of the big changes we remember in human history came from environmental changes. The medieval started the growth and end of feudalism, the little ice age started the enlightenment period and industrial revolution.

[logicchains]

>The class argues that a lot of the big changes we remember in human history came from environmental changes.

Of course it's going to argue that, it's an environmental studies class. But those environmental changes were global, while changes like the enlightenment and the industrial revolution only happened in a small number of countries that had the political and economic systems to support them.

[jkaplowitz]

Both statements could be right, no? The environmental changes could have been necessary (or greatly probability-increasing) for the human history changes but not by themselves sufficient to trigger those without the right societal context. Most changes like the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution have multiple causes or prerequisites.

[dash2]

… And one of the others might have been literacy?

[coliveira]

> political and economic systems to support them

This is circular reasoning. How developed political and economic systems could arise before educational and economic development? They both rose at the same time.

[IgorPartola]

More than that, it seems pretty clear that big events in history are moved by a relative minority of usually privileged individuals who then harness the will of the masses. Major achievements were accomplished while most people in the world did not know how to read and had never traveled more than 20 miles from where they were born. That isn’t to say these achievements were aimed at the most good for the most people. Genghis Khan’s conquest of Asia and Eastern Europe was not to bring peace and prosperity to the conquered. But literacy played little role in that huge endeavor. In 1928, when Alexander Fleming first identified penicillin in his lab, the worldwide adult literacy rate was around 20%.

The only thing we seem to be forgetting is that the intellectual capability of a group of people is measured by the intellectual capability of the smartest person there, not the average of all the people.

[bee_rider]

That seems like the ‘great man’ model of history (unless I’ve misread you). It is one of the models that was used to interpret history, but it isn’t “pretty clear” that it is true at all, there are plenty of competing models.

[IgorPartola]

I don’t subscribe to one specific model but the thing is that you very rarely if ever see a group of average people achieving something great without a few outliers mixed in. In some situations the greatness of some was exactly enabled by others simply not getting in the way.

You might bring up something like Bell Labs as a counter example but my point would be that it was a large group of exceptional people and you got synergies out of putting them together but compared to the society in which they existed they were each individually outliers too.

[bee_rider]

I think to really inspect this idea we’d have to nail down what are outliers and great achievement. It is hard to judge people by anything other than their achievements (plenty of highly credentialed and well-testing people don’t accomplish much in life, right?). But, if we say an outlier is somebody who’s accomplished great things, then the idea that they show up in groups they accomplish great things becomes a bit circular.

[walleeee]

> the intellectual capability of a group of people is measured by the intellectual capability of the smartest person there, not the average of all the people.

Nonsense. The capacities of an organized group of people are very different from the capacities of any individual in it or the averaged capacities of its members. Even an absolute dictatorship where the dictator is resident genius.

Your claim is only correct if it's a dictator with an army of automatons. The claim you want to refute is just as wrong, unless the people follow a strict algorithmic decision procedure, which even the stodgiest bureaucracy only loosely approximates.

Agents and groups have fundamentally different dynamics. An anthill does things no ant can conceive of. Many human organizations filled with smart, well-intentioned people do incredibly stupid things. Etc.

[IgorPartola]

I am not discounting the importance of the group being able to recognize the smartest person or people. But of the hundreds of thousands of Athenians we only recognize several dozens to maybe a couple hundred individuals as having moved the needle.

You can also think of it as “the maximum intellectual capability of the group is limited by the intellectual capability of its smartest members”.

[walleeee]

Ignoring the difficulty of defining such a needle in a general sense, I still think the point is disproved by the fact that groups can do things no individual member can conceive of, let alone do, alone.

If it's true of ants, who we likely agree have not so large a cognitive lightcone as us, surely it is of us. The only way I see for it not to be true of us is to posit a hard cap on intelligence which we are closer to.

There are also forms of intelligence which resist formalization and do not equate to cleverness. For instance, wisdom.

[IgorPartola]

I am specifically talking about intellectual capability. No one person can build an aircraft by themselves. But also if you take 10,000 people of IQ of exactly 100 (which is always defined as a median IQ for a population), you will not get a carrier either. You also wouldn’t get calculus or general relativity or genetic engineering.

[walleeee]

I'm not sure what to make of the point about 1 or 10,000 people. 1 person can definitely build a primitive aircraft with time, money and perseverance. No 10,000 random people, whether IQ 100 or 1000, will build an airliner, but Airbus will, more or less reliably regardless of the exact IQ of any particular employee. The ability to build one is distributed over hundreds of thousands of people and millions of machines at Airbus, and millions of people and billions of machines in the industrial civilization behind the whole endeavor.

If your point is just that different people have different capacities, then sure, that's true enough. But even so, it's an extremely coarse summary of an enormously complex and detailed landscape.

[inglor_cz]

"The only thing we seem to be forgetting is that the intellectual capability of a group of people is measured by the intellectual capability of the smartest person there, not the average of all the people."

Looking at various intellectual and artistic hotspots in history, be it Bell Labs or ancient Athens or Florence in the Renaissance or even Silicon Valley today, what seems to matter is the ability to find the smartest people, put them together and let them stimulate one another.

And plenty of such people come from the peripheries. How many Ramanujans lived and died at Fleming's time while not being discovered?

[hash872]

>the journey to modern democracies involved centuries of concessions by kings to the emerging middle classes

Eh, sort of disagree. The journey to modern democracy started with centuries of concessions by kings, first to other nobles (Magna Carta, etc.) Then, to other local power brokers like large landowners, business elites, etc. None of these parties wanted one single figure to have absolute power over their affairs & finances, mostly because they tended to make terrible decisions (random wars, taxation, and so on). Early proto-parliamentary systems in the UK, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Japan in the 19th century etc. were just a council of local, powerful elites who wanted to check the power of the king. The 'middle class' part came absolutely last

[cjs_ac]

I live in the UK, so for me, 'middle class' means those large landowners and business elites who aren't part of the nobility.

The US is very generous with its use of the labels of privilege.