You defy the data when you got some theory that is of higher confidence. The “we haven’t gotten dumber” is not a proper theory, it’s just hanging in the air without having been first arrived at from some data.
Please look around you. Does it look like we have got dumber in the last 20,000 years? I’d say this is tons of data. It may be hard to estimate in Bayesian terms, but certainly not less than +100 db of evidence against the alternative.
.Please look around you. Does it look like we have got dumber in the last 20,000 years? I’d say this is tons of data. It may be hard to estimate in Bayesian terms, but certainly not less than +100 db of evidence against the alternative.
What I see when I look around is largely the product of millenia of cumulative invention and discovery.
It’s very hard to tell. Clearly having infrastructure isn’t direct evidence of present intelligence; the rate of innovation’s probably related, but it’s also affected by communications, culture, and scale effects, and then we’ve got the Flynn effect confounding things recently. This gets even harder when we talk about culture 20,000 years ago; that’s before writing or large-scale societies, so ideas would propagate much more slowly and would be more prone to dying out under suboptimal conditions.
If we had a good idea of what might be driving the changes in brain size, we could look at present-day or at least recent cultures subject to similar forces and see what the deltas there are—although that opens up the usual cross-cultural psychometric can of worms. But we don’t have anything I’d consider compelling, and we certainly don’t have any Paleolithic tribesmen handy that we can sit down with Raven’s progressive matrices, so that leaves us with various proxies for intelligence—of which braincase size is one, at around .4 significance if I remember right.
You defy the data when you got some theory that is of higher confidence. The “we haven’t gotten dumber” is not a proper theory, it’s just hanging in the air without having been first arrived at from some data.
Please look around you. Does it look like we have got dumber in the last 20,000 years? I’d say this is tons of data. It may be hard to estimate in Bayesian terms, but certainly not less than +100 db of evidence against the alternative.
What I see when I look around is largely the product of millenia of cumulative invention and discovery.
So we got dumber, but more inventive, more creative, and more communicative?
It’s conceivable that most people need less mental resources because a lot of thinking has been outsourced to the infrastructure.
It’s certainly takes less neurological resources to walk on smooth pavement than rough ground.
Could less interpersonal violence mean less need for some mental capacities?
It’s certainly lessened the need to, for example, be able to see a punch coming and avoid it…
I wonder how much driving cars affects the brain? There does seem to be evidence that the brain’s structure changes depending on the demands that are placed on it, and driving a car is a rather unusual cognitive task compared to what people would have been doing in the Paleolithic...
Not just seeing a punch coming in the literal sense, but making strategic choices about odds and allies.
The problem for me with this and other proposed hypotheses is that similar or better ones would equally well explain the reverse effect. So I am still confused after hearing them.
Thus my original question: is the data really well established? Is it confirmed replicated findings of lots of dug out skulls all over the world, or?
It’s very hard to tell. Clearly having infrastructure isn’t direct evidence of present intelligence; the rate of innovation’s probably related, but it’s also affected by communications, culture, and scale effects, and then we’ve got the Flynn effect confounding things recently. This gets even harder when we talk about culture 20,000 years ago; that’s before writing or large-scale societies, so ideas would propagate much more slowly and would be more prone to dying out under suboptimal conditions.
If we had a good idea of what might be driving the changes in brain size, we could look at present-day or at least recent cultures subject to similar forces and see what the deltas there are—although that opens up the usual cross-cultural psychometric can of worms. But we don’t have anything I’d consider compelling, and we certainly don’t have any Paleolithic tribesmen handy that we can sit down with Raven’s progressive matrices, so that leaves us with various proxies for intelligence—of which braincase size is one, at around .4 significance if I remember right.