[sokoloff]

I find things like that hard to perfectly square with observations like the Flynn Effect (“the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the world over the 20th century”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

[Epa095]

Why? Draw the line backwards, and in a couple of decades you are down at 0 IQ. That's clearly absurd, you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950.

[dzonga]

the 'IQ' people conveniently ignore how the IQ test is such a poor measure for intelligence & resourcefulness

[leviathant]

I learned a long time ago that people who talk about IQ don't usually have anything intelligent to say.

[dijit]

I also tend to find people who score well on those tests don't put much stock into them.

[cluckindan]

And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence.

If everyone suddenly gets twice as smart as before, nobody’s IQ changes.

[anamexis]

For any given IQ test, the norming sample is taken once. So if everyone gets twice as smart as before, everyone's IQ, as measured by any existing IQ test, would go up.

[jibal]

This is wrong and confused in every possible way.

Look up the Flynn effect ... it refers to an actual change in performance.

That the scores on a given IQ test are occasionally renormalized so that the mean is 100 has no bearing on whether "IQ is a statistical distribution", whether intelligence or whatever the heck IQ measures can be measured absolutely, or on the validity and meaning of the previous statements by Epa095, sokoloff, and irdc and why they are or are not true.

If everyone suddenly gets twice as smart as before, all of their IQs will shoot up until the scoring of every IQ test is renormalized to a mean of 100.

[roysting]

I find it interesting that you are basically saying the same thing, even if the reply you are confused by simply made some assumptions you were not able to make and was a bit less precise.

It’s interesting how people will say things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way” even though it’s not, making it and them in turn the ones “wrong and confused in every possible way”.

Maybe if we are a bit more generous with others we won’t be compelled to be so pretentious and denigrating by saying things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way”, about something someone said and believes.

[retsibsi]

Does the original reply actually make sense in context? I can't see how.

It's a response to someone saying "you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950", and it says "And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence."

This seems like a non sequitur to me. Am I missing something? (Bear in mind that the 'line' under discussion is an increase in unstandardised scores.)

[mapt]

On a given set of 1000 questions, over time the trend has been to answer slightly more of them correct every year, progressively raising unstandardized scores, over the set of all IQ testees, since IQ testing was formalized in the 1950s.

Extrapolation is the most questionable statistical tool, and while extrapolation ad absurdum is a way to show a formal predicate logic argument to be incorrect or underspecified, it is an almost fully general attack against real datasets, which basically always have some trend line that ultimately passes sensible thresholds like zero bounds. Showing this, however you form the trend line, is not saying a whole lot.

Extrapolation prior to 1950 is not a very useful tool to evaluate intelligence trends, and this is entirely separate from the periodic recalibration of IQ tests to keep the average at 100 (however many correct answers out of 1000 this corresponds to).

[jibal]

Nothing you wrote here is remotely correct, it contributes nothing on the topic, and it commits the exact sins it accuses me of.

[readthenotes1]

True, but irrelevant.

Or, false and irrelevant.

People's scores on yesteryear's tests rose over the distribution when the test was initially taken.

[ordu]

I wouldn't give the Flynn effect a lot of weight. The numbers are from IQ tests. No one knows what they measure, they are tuned for a population, for the most of time the Flynn effect had place IQ test scores were used for hiring, school placement, and policy decisions (so Goodheart's Law was at play, how'd you think?).

It is a curious effect, I agree, I'd like to know why it was so, but probably I will not know for sure (I'm a big fan of a scientific method, but I don't believe it is up to a task), and so I personally prefer just ignore it.

[behringer]

Are you suggesting our brains are getting better? I find it far more likely that our improved education techniques and our skyrocketing access to information as being the cause.

[thesz]

Better food.

[nephihaha]

I suspect the reverse. If you have easy access to an assistant or search engine it means that the need for recall goes down.

[BigTTYGothGF]

As King Thamus said to Theuth.

[imbnwa]

This was Socrates' own warning about writing over 2000 years ago

[nephihaha]

Socrates was partly right. I am deeply indebted to written notes on just about everything. Pre-literate societies often had excellent memories, and have to rely on them for survival not just culture bearing. The Polynesians had excellent navigation skills without writing. Desert societies can remember oases and routes etc sometimes relying on song to memorise them.

[echelon]

Firstly, this is completely orthogonal. But it's also improper reasoning.

If Neanderthal had bigger brains (they did) or had different cognitive abilities, there's a chance they were baseline smarter than homo sapiens at the time.

Being perhaps a little smarter doesn't mean you win the evolutionary game. There are so many factors at play.

[card_zero]

Hmm, more smarter? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size#Cranial_capacity

Not the lady Neanderthals:

> average Neanderthal cranial capacity for females was 1300 cm3 and 1600 cm3 for males. [Modern humans, 1473 cm3.]

Nor the dude Neanderthals, since they were using the swollen brainparts for vision and coordination:

> Neanderthals had larger eyes and bodies relative to their height [...] when these areas were adjusted to match anatomically modern human proportions it was found Neanderthals had brains 15-22% smaller than in anatomically-modern humans.

Edit since I don't even agree with the concept: even if the extra capacity was differently distributed such that they had more ... powerful? ... executive functions, what's smartness? More imagination, OK, more self-restraint, more planning. More navel-gazing, more doubt, more ennui.

Or it could be more communication, often proposed as what gave sapiens the edge. Chattering bipeds. It's an association between the brain doing something and the species proliferating, that's what we're calling smart, but doing what? It could just mean our ancestors were compulsively busy. Same thing as smart, perhaps.

[otherme123]

We will never get that the cranial volume is not the same as inteligence/brain function, or whatever you might call it. Reminder that Einstein brain was smaller than average, and female brain are smaller than male. Phrenology will haunt us forever, in one form or another.

Most likely, some Neanderthals were asimilated into modern humans, most were exterminated in tribal clashes. Reminder also that our almighty specie was almost wiped out from history around 800,000 years ago (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487), being the most intelligent organism ever existed.

[geysersam]

I don't think that matches archeological findings. From what I understand the reason neanderthals are understood to have been less intelligent than sapiens is because neanderthal tools found are cruder than sapien tools from around the same periods and areas.

[dismalaf]

> Being perhaps a little smarter doesn't mean you win the evolutionary game. There are so many factors at play.

Considering most human groups have a % of Neanderthal DNA, they didn't exactly lose... Based on the % of Neanderthal vs. Sapien DNA, it seems Neanderthals were simply outnumbered.

[hrimfaxi]

What does it mean to lose evolutionarily if not be outnumbered?

[dismalaf]

Are numbers everything? Are sardines more evolved than whales?

Anyhow, the traditional view is that Neanderthals were brutes who were actually out-competed and killed off by Sapiens. The more realistic view considering the evidence is that Neanderthals were much closer to Sapiens, equally or even more sophisticated, but less numerous, and thus their contribution to our DNA is smaller than Sapiens.

But do keep in mind the Neanderthals live on because Europeans and Asians are all part Neanderthal.

[peyton]

I think especially given TFA and our inferred history with them that they were terrifying apex predators who occasionally raped human women.

I don’t much believe the friendly smiling museum depictions that have lately become fashionable. Their eyes alone would have made them something you didn’t want to run into at night.

[dismalaf]

> TFA and our inferred history with them that they were terrifying apex predators

All humans are. Neanderthals, Sapiens, modern humans, we are all apex predators.

> occasionally raped human women

The article doesn't suggest that. While it's plausible, there's also evidence of Sapien/Neanderthal cooperation and mingling: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260412071005.h...

And lets not forget that all hominins fight amongst themselves, rape each other, etc... The assumption that Neanderthals were particularly brutish is just that, an assumption.

[opan]

Are there any good illustrations showing how much bigger their eyes were compared to modern humans? Is it really significant? I'm having trouble finding anything that makes it clear.

[nobodyandproud]

I kind of agree. Though the old, brutish yet stupid was also likely wrong and more for self-comfort as a species.

Tangent and thought experiment: If we could re-engineer a viable population of neanderthals, should we?

If we further gave them the full gamut of modern knowledge and tools, and even a nation-state suitable for them what would be the outcome?

[tsunamifury]

Ants won over humans? Worms?

[hrimfaxi]

When you are in direct competition? I should have said outcompeted, which in this case I think outnumbered is a fair proxy.

[dyauspitr]

But all their tools are rudimentary, their rituals infrequent compared to sapiens.

[wazoox]

The minuscule sample of tools we have are more primitive, but we don't have any examples of their wooden tools, nor any trace of most of their activities, languages, rites, etc. They could have invented animal husbandry and wool spinning and build awesome wooden cities and we have no way to know because everything would have disappeared without a trace, crushed by glaciers of later ages. We know almost nothing of them.

[ZeroGravitas]

The Flynn effect has its own little nurture vs nature debate within it.

Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted?

Or was it people being trained from birth for a world where doing abstract brain teaser tests was important.

Notably both cause problems for the typical racist's use of IQs. If you can improve the scores with such interventions it makes a lot of their genocidal policy recommendations seem less scientifically sound, so they put a lot of effort into denying that IQ scores can be improved by interventions. Even though they have been, for decades.

[sokoloff]

It seems obvious that IQ test scores can be improved with interventions and further that actual [as opposed to measured] general intelligence can be affected by environmental factors that shape whether the brain develops under good, neutral, or damaging conditions (nutrition, sleep, language usage, stress, etc.).

With all the energy that's been spent on the topic, I'm slightly surprised that this isn't entirely settled by now and any opposing view being relegated to fringe/flat-earth territory.

[wizzwizz4]

I don't see why it's surprising: IQ is one of the few tools that modern scientific racists have in their toolbox. One wouldn't expect them to let such trifling concerns as "evidence" and "testable models with successful predictions" take that away from them.

[djaro]

There is such a thing as general intelligence which differs between different people. Arguing that IQ isn't real because IQ tests are imperfect, is like arguing in the year 1500 that temperature isn't real because all thermometers are imperfect.

Our lack of ability to precisely measure something does not mean the underlying thing is not real. There is such a thing as general intelligence which correlates strongly with almost every type of performance and life outcomes.

[wizzwizz4]

IQ tests are useful for measuring features of populations, but they're a very noisy measure of an individual's "general intelligence" (if such a thing even exists), with several confounders: whether you've trained to pass IQ tests, TDTPSATDIBCA [1], how well-rested you are, how stressed you are, how hungry you are, whether environmental conditions are distracting you… Many of these are also a factor in group averages, although in the context of measuring children's educational attainment, this is a feature rather than a bug: in that setting, IQ tests are a good measure (to the extent that educational attainment is something we want to be optimising for, which is another question entirely).

However, in this thread, we were discussing "the typical racist's use of IQs". Nobody was "arguing that IQ isn't real": you brought that up, unprompted. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

[1]: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stan...

[Qem]

> Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted?

The ban on leaded petrol probably also helped.

[sokoloff]

The timeline doesn't match.

The Flynn Effect covers from around 1930s to 1980s and the phase out of leaded gasoline happened during the very end of that timeline, meaning adolescent IQ measurements during the time the Flynn Effect covers would have all been raised in an environment where leaded fuel was either dominant or at least common.

[cwnyth]

Precisely why is this hard to square away?

[sokoloff]

If the measured cognitive abilities of a typical 2000-era Homo sapiens are statistically significantly different from 1900-era Homo sapiens, to me that casts some doubt as to how likely similar a 125K years ago and since out-competed species was.

Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off?

(This is obviously an unpopular line of inquiry/source of confusion based on the voting.)

[BigTTYGothGF]

> Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off?

It kind of was, and one of the people you can thank for that is Norman Borlaug.

[bonzini]

For one literacy right now is ~100% and has never been anywhere close to that until 50-60 years ago.

[ijk]

Literacy.

Percentage of children to survive to adulthood.

Global food surplus.

The was a big phase shift over the course of the 20th century...

[pixl97]

>Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off?

I mean if you look at the rate of technology change and population growth, ya probably.

What we cannot compare is if the older species could assimilate all the information that we had to in that period. The vast wealth of knowledge of the human super-species wasn't avaliable then.

[MrBuddyCasino]

The Flynn effect isn’t real.

https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-demise-of-the-flynn-effect