The Zionists are whining thread

The Ancient_sl said:

It's a funny anecdote, not an argument. Lighten up.

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No shit Sherlock.

The assumption being that either of these tests are accurate reflections of intelligence. We still don't have a firm grasp on how to measure intelligence. Many high IQ people barely break even in the world. I am curious why reaction times are slower, but I don't buy that people are just generally dumber. What was the selection criteria for the previous tests and the recent tests? Hipp chronometers may be far less accurate than their current timekeeping devices.

Colliding large hardons since 2012.

At the very least we are getting gayer.

Large Hardon Collider still makes me giggle like a 12 year old every time I hear it. Great name for sci-fi porn.

I sincerely hope you both know it's Hadron.

Malakriss_sl said:

I sincerely hope you both know it's Hadron.

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Thank you Buzz Killington.

iAnus_sl said:

Colliding large hardons since 2012.

At the very least we are getting gayer.

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If I die and anyone looks at my GIS search history, my legacy is totally fucked.

Meanwhile in France....
These French villagers want to keep living in a place called - The Washington Post

This part is golden:

Marie-Elizabeth Secretand, the deputy mayor of Courtemaux, which has jurisdiction over the hamlet, does not understand why the name "Death to Jews" has caused a sudden uproar. "It's ridiculous. This name has always existed," she told the news agency Agence France-Presse. "Why change a name that goes back to the Middle Ages or even further? We should respect these old names.... No one has anything against the Jews, of course."

Tuco_sl said:

For those who think we're getting dumber, which generation of humanity do you think was the most intelligent? The 50s generation?

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The Renaissance. Most of what we are doing now is improving upon previously done work. Even the Hardon collider is just a bigger version of previously developed particle accelerators. However, The Renaissance was a movement from one of the darkest moments in recorded human history to the most expansive leaps forward in human thinkingever. The amount of original ideas produced during this time far eclipses what we are doing now. People say that the internet is the biggest step forward in the dissemination of information since the printing press. Can you guess when the printing press was invented? Humans had been producing 2D art that looked pretty much the same for thousands of years until the great breakthroughs in the works of the great masters people still go to museums to see today. During this time humans even invented the scientific method of answering questions, which completely changed how we think about everything.

Unfortunately, we are digressing in our thinking about the world. We accept was is fed to us because we have become too lazy to feed ourselves. All of these incredible tools, and most of the time we are too lazy to do a simple google search unless we are trying to win an argument. I don't agree with Wombat's assertion that it was better to go look through a stack of fucking Dewey decimal system cards to find a book about a subject. I think it was better when society looked at great artists and scientists with awe. Now our inspiration comes from people that can catch a goddamn ball and run fast.

But how much of the general population was actually responsible for the Renaissance? 1% pulled the rest of the 99% out of the Middles Ages, not the other way around. I thought we were speaking in generalities. Surely you aren't making the argument that your average peasant, circa 1576, that still believed in spontaneous generation, a flat earth, and a geocentric universe were on average smarter than your typical MTV watching teenager?

Lejina_sl said:

Say, my grand-father was a better natural runner than I am. However, due to the fact I have better nutrition and actually train on a regular basis, I can run faster and longer than he ever did. He was genetically superior at running but my much better environment allowed me to outshine him.

That's basically what out current environment allows with IQ. Even tho the dumbest of us outbreed the smartest and thus bring down the innate smarts of the population, easy access to education and information allow our dumber population to actually be effectually smarter than the people of older times.

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But that's not how IQ and evolution work. Better IQ leads to better tools leads to more efficiency leads to better IQ leads to better tools leads to...

I don't think the ancients were dumb by any means. There is a seawall in some town in italy the Romans built that no one can quite figure out how they managed to do it with the tools they must have been limited to. The Parthenon is a deceptive architectural marvel, and a feat of precision engineering. And they basically shaped the entire edifice with sand and rocks, by hand. The Greeks had simple clockwork combustion engines. Plenty of amazing things about the ancient world that provide ample evidence that at least some of them were no dummies. And it has to be that way, the process is iterative.

But I dunno. You shouldn't conflate education and intelligence as being the same thing. They serve one another. What you can say is that the populace isbetter educatedthan it was 500, 1000, 1500, 2000 years ago. From that you can say that the potential for intelligent insight and observation is greater. You don't have to add grey matter to get smrt. You know, work smart not hard.

It's really a stupid argument as there is not any, and never will be any, true metric with which to compare the intelligences of differing generations of humans. The IQ test itself is itself entirely subjective. And this is coming from someone that has an IQ "score" (wtf that means) in the top 2 or 3% but still struggled most of his adult life with finding a direction and purpose to life. It really is true that a lot of people with really high IQs have a hard time contributing to society. (Humble brag!)

The Renaissance was a direct result of the Black Death, everyone was forced to start thinking outside the box because all the old institutions were incapable of dealing with the situation. Maybe we can hope for a super virulent flu epidemic to wipe out a third of humanity so we can have another Renaissance?

Arakkis_sl said:

The Renaissance. Most of what we are doing now is improving upon previously done work. Even the Hardon collider is just a bigger version of previously developed particle accelerators. However, The Renaissance was a movement from one of the darkest moments in recorded human history to the most expansive leaps forward in human thinkingever. The amount of original ideas produced during this time far eclipses what we are doing now. People say that the internet is the biggest step forward in the dissemination of information since the printing press. Can you guess when the printing press was invented? Humans had been producing 2D art that looked pretty much the same for thousands of years until the great breakthroughs in the works of the great masters people still go to museums to see today. During this time humans even invented the scientific method of answering questions, which completely changed how we think about everything.

Unfortunately, we are digressing in our thinking about the world. We accept was is fed to us because we have become too lazy to feed ourselves. All of these incredible tools, and most of the time we are too lazy to do a simple google search unless we are trying to win an argument. I don't agree with Wombat's assertion that it was better to go look through a stack of fucking Dewey decimal system cards to find a book about a subject. I think it was better when society looked at great artists and scientists with awe. Now our inspiration comes from people that can catch a goddamn ball and run fast.

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The problem is, the "dark ages" are really misunderstood--it's also a very European view of history. All through the middle east, amazing advances in math and literacy were being made. In Asia, the Chinese were using rockets already. The main issue with the "dark ages" was pretty much the economy sucked, and that was due to how the world dealt with slavery after the collapse of Rome. You had a huge amount of surplus labor, followed by a destruction of infrastructure that prevented very long scale trade. It was a depression of epic proportions. But technology still marched on, steel, steel working, carpentry all improved. The problem was, there was tons of cheap labor and very few ways to communicate or trade outside of your locality--this lead to a drop in innovation (Kind of hard to pay someone less than subsistence; and new ideas don't spread without trade or communication). As someone else said, the black death all the sudden forced people to innovate once more. They looked to the outside world, and found tons of ideas were being used everywhere.

So it wasn't really like there were a ton of inventions at first; all you were seeing was the "lag" Europe was experiencing due to the depression was lifted, and a huge back log of ideas were then refined and made better. (And then, after 150 years of these amazing "discoveries", Europe began spitting out it's own advances.) After those, things like labor demand for subsistence went way down and you had a small (Still costly but not needed on the farm) population surplus who could be exploited and so a large middle class of exploiters rose; and more and more advances happened to lower the cost of exploitation. This "more free time"+"problems"=advances kind of synchs with what we know of the world; many advances were made in Greece and Rome probably due to an upper class who had free time due to slave labor, and had problems the slaves couldn't fix; like transporting water from the mountains (This ALSO retarded many advances too though, for example, we KNOW Rome knew how to use water mills to mill grain or stamp Iron--but it was simply cheaper to use slaves, so huge breakthroughs in industry were ignored.) In the middle ages you had a very precise mixture of mostly paid labor, and people with "more" freedom to explore ideas. Since being "paid" meant the upper class lost money, innovation was driven to pay less (Where as this didn't really happen with slaves).

Also, there is another theory about the Renaissance---Caffeine. Tea had existed in Asia and the Arabian world probably from 1k AD on---and, funnily enough, the "Enlightenment" of the ancient world continued on there. The middle east and China saw amazing advances in technology, trade and a host of other factors. At the START of the Renaissance, both Tea and Coffee (Around 1500's) were brought to Europe. Now, before this time, the most widely imbibed drink was wine--which is a depressant. However, just 100 years after it's introduction, Tea/coffee became the most widely consumed drink in Western Europe. So the populations replaced a depressant with a stimulant--on large scales.

In short, the reason why the Renaissance might have seemed like such a huge jump forward? Was because it was the dawn of the crack head. And the constant stimulation increased our productivity by several orders. Which would illustrate that it had nothing to do with those people being smarter--rather it was just the introduction of an environmental factor(s) which catapulted society back from the dark ages--an odd mix of stimulants and death from the plague.

Edit: Also great artists and scientists were not really looked at in awe. The few who were literal "super geniuses", like Newton or Davicinci, got some acclaim. But for the most part, Scientists and Artists were treated much as they are today, they desperately looked for patrons or a university who would pay them, or they starved. Anda lotof them starved. In fact, scientists of today are treated enormously better because they have a third option--corporate greed. Industries are far better equipped topayfor innovation today. Back then outside of a patron, or a college, there was no "industry" which would hire scientistsjustfor research, that's a purely new phenomenon. But yeah, we don't revere them enough--instead we revere athletes, but again, that wasn'tdifferentback then--just instead of athletes, it was the church who took that top "reverence" spot. (But as Durkhiem said, the church and athletes are just two sides of the same coin.) But make no mistake, outside of Academia, there was very little awe for scientists and even artists.