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Comment by pineaux | Hacker News Reader

I have always found this idea of not being smarter somewhat baffling. Education makes people smarter does it not? At least that is one of the claims it makes. Do you mean that a baby hunter gatherer from 25000 years ago would be on average just as capable of learning stuff when integrated into society compared to someone born nowadays? For human beings 25.000 years is something like 1000 generations. There will be subtle vgenetic variations and evolutions on that scale of generations. But the real gains in "smartness" will be on a societal level. Remember: humans without society are not very different from "dumber" animals like apes and dogs. You can see this very well with the cases of heavy neglect. Feral children are very animal-like and quite incapable of learning very effective...

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i think the premise is if we plucked the average baby from 25,000 years and transported them magically into the present day, into a loving and nurturing environment, they would be just as “smart” as you and i.

there's intelligence and there's wisdom. I may know how, eg Docker works and an ancient Greek man may not, but I can't remember a 12 digit number I've only seen once, or multiply two three digit numbers in my head without difficulty.

I mean, how docker works (which is mostly a human construct with its own peculiarities) is not what I would use as an example - this is more like a board game that has its own rules and you just learnt them. Ancient people had their own "games" with rulesets. It's not a "fundamental truth".

Societal smartness might be something like an average student knowing that we are made from cells, some germ theory over bodily fluid inbalances causing diseases, etc, very crude understanding of more elements of physics (electronics). Though unfortunately intellectualism is on a fall, and people come out dumber and dumber from schools all over the world.

what if we actually get dumber? There are multiple cases of people in the past that are way smarter than the current thought leaders and inventors. There are a higher % of smart people nowadays but are they smarter than Leonardo Da Vinci?

> Neuroplasticity is the brain’s remarkable ability to adapt its structure and function by rewiring neural connections in response to learning, experience, or injury.

The invention and innovation of language, agriculture, writing, and mathematics has driven the change in neuroplasticity remodeling, but the overall structure of the brain hasn't changed.

Often in modern societal structures there has been pruning of intellectuals, i.e. the intelligent members of a society are removed from the gene pool, sent to Siberia. However, that doesn't stop the progeneration of humans capable of immense intelligence with training and development, it only removes the culture being passed down.

And, I say, with strong emphasis, not only has the brain of humans been similar for 25,000 years, the potential for sharpening our abilities in abstract reasoning, memory, symbolic thought, and executive control is *equal* across all sexes and races in humans today. Defending that statement is a hill I'm willing to die on.

"Mindset" by Carol Dweck is a good read.

You are just looking at the wrong people to compare.

Leonardo Da Vinci would be a PhD student working on some obscure sub-sub-sub field of something and only 6 other people on the world understanding how marvelously genius he is. The reason they don't get to such a status is that human knowledge is like a circle. A single person can work on the circumference of this circle, but they are limited by what they can learn of this circle. As society improved, we have expanded the radius of the circle greatly, and now an expert can only be an expert in a tiny tiny blob on the circumference, while Leonardo could "see" a good chunk of the whole circle.

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"Thought leader and inventor" are VC terms of no substance and are 100% not who I would consider smart people on average. Luck is a much more common attribute among them.

Well, you might not have got my point. Those "smart" PhD students would be considered quite dumb in other ages, because working on the circumference of the circle doesn't make one smart but it might get you a big salary in a VC project

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