Thread: End Game - Depopulation

Originally Posted by Xei

It impunes their intelligence because there was no rational reason (i.e. evidence) that it either worked, or that there was a problem in the first place, and the result of the operation is a bloody big hole in your head and quite possibly death through blood loss or infection.

I'll have to do more research on this. I believe that the reason they would have had to believe that it worked was the cessation of pain though and that said pain would be their reason for knowing that there was a problem in the first place.

Originally Posted by Xei

The majority of people in developed countries are definitely more intelligent than they were historically. Genetically it is disputable, but the intelligence which we learn, and the intelligent approaches we have learned as a society (for example skepticism) have clearly improved over time historically.

That's just cultural bias. They were adapted to our environment, we are adapted to ours. I see no reason to consider scepticism to be an aspect of intelligence. It is something that is learned and hence not an adequate or even relevant measure of intelligence. The ability to learn scepticism however would be a measure of intelligence

Originally Posted by Xei

I.Q. tests also show a constant rise since their implementation (to the present day). Some say that's due to more visual environments, but whatever the reason, the increase is extremely apparent.

I was once asked who discovered North America on an IQ test. I don't see the relevance of IQ to intelligence. Again, It measures what our culture deems to be intelligence. How many members of our culture could reliably navigate the pacific in a wooden canoe by stars without a sextant? We haven't changed much genetically in about 60,0000 years. You could take a human baby from 30,000 years ago and raise them in a modern culture and they would be every bit as intelligent by our standards.

Well, I was reading something similar to this in Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman and he talks about how scepticism has been ingrained in modern people; think of my point like this:

You pluck somebody from modern society, and somebody from the ancient Aztecs, and put them in a tent with a witch-doctor, who tells them that their intestines will fall out unless they eat some mud, close their eyes, and dance around for a bit.

Would you not label the person more likely to follow the witch-doctor's advice (i.e. the Aztec) as less intelligent than the other?

I'd already said that we are genetically the same; the point is that intelligence doesn't have a heritability value of 1. Modern society teaches us intelligence.

(How this discussion arose I can't remember but let's roll with it ).

I wouldn't consider either to be more intelligent. I would consider the person from a modern culture to be better educated concerning the workings of disease and the human body. All due respect to Feynman, he was a genius, but I believe that he was betraying some natural cultural bias there.

I think that we agree and are just arguing about the definition of intelligence. I often seem to get into arguments about definitions If we were to take a newborn from the aztecs and from a modern culture and place each in the other culture, then in tweny years, there would be no indication that either had come from the other culture aside from perhaps skin color. They would, by my as-of-yet unformulated definition, have equal intelligence in that they both would have absorbed their culture with equal efficacy.

Yeah, basically you're talking about the genetic component of intelligence... but I think very few people would say that that is the only component. Whatever factor you're measuring, any study will tell you that environmental variation is just as important.