How smart were we back in the olden days?
You're probably familiar with the Flynn Effect, which suggests that people gained about 3 points of IQ per decade over a period of 50 years during the 20th century. That's about 15 points total. This suggests that before World War II we were all roaming around with average IQs of about 85—which doesn't really seem plausible, does it? That's a fairly dimwitted average.
But I was reminded of this watching Jeopardy last night, which had a question about Hercules and Atlas. You remember the story. Atlas has been condemned to hold up the earth for all eternity when Hercules drops by to ask for a favor: He'll hold up the earth for a while if Atlas will steal some golden apples for him. Atlas does, but then tells Hercules he's going to take off and let him handle the job of holding up the earth. Hercules, sly dog that he is, agrees, but asks Atlas to hold up the world for a moment so he can put some padding on his shoulders. Atlas stupidly agrees, and Hercules heads off with the golden apples.
Here's the thing: this is presented as a clever trick, but in fact it's not something that would fool a five year old. How dumb were the ancient Greeks to make up a story that was so obviously juvenile?
Then there's that whole Trojan horse thing. I mean, how dumb do you have to be to think that would work? And how gullible do you have to be to fall for it? Odysseus got quite a reputation for shrewdness for coming up with it.
The first time this question of historical doltishness occurred to me was a couple of decades ago, when I was reading The Three Musketeers. I don't remember the details, but I do remember that it featured some really dumb behavior that wasn't presented as especially dumb. What kind of people were these? I thought.
I have nothing to say to wrap this up. I just wonder. Obviously there were lots of smart people in days of yore. But on average, were people badly dimwitted compared to today?
I don't know. But I remember also reading once that since water wasn't especially healthy back before public sanitation, it was common to drink only beer or watered wine (the alcohol killed the germs). So everyone was sort of mildly tipsy all the time, which might also explain things. Maybe the Flynn effect is just because we don't drink as much as we used to right before taking intelligence tests?
I'm not much of a scholar of the classics, but I suspect when "super obvious" moves like Hercules's ruse were employed in ancient storytelling, it's an exercise in driving home some message or another that was important, and was the whole reason for the story in the first place.
In other words, err on the side of simplicity and comprehensibility.
Also, as recently as the 19th century, books were extremely expensive, so even literate people in many cases hadn't been exposed to very much of anything compared to our modern world, where all of human knowledge and experience is a few clicks away. So authors at the time shaped their storytelling accordingly. Clearly there are no innate cognitive differences between people 175 years ago and today.
it was common to drink only beer or watered wine (the alcohol killed the germs).
In the young republic (that is, the early US), alcohol consumption by all accounts was utterly staggering. Huge swaths of the population were basically under the influence all their waking hours. Grain in America was cheap.
My grandson really liked the Disney Johnny Appleseed cartoon so I thought I’d look up the real person. Apparently they type of apples he planted were good for making hard cider and this made him popular.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/real-johnny-appleseed-brought-applesand-booze-american-frontier-180953263/
“Huge swaths of the population were basically under the influence all their waking hours.”
I think it's slightly more accurate to say that the entire population of the world was suspicious of water, and in the 1790s, certain colonies had thrown all the tea in the harbor.
If you read Michael Pollen's book The Botany of Desire you see that the only - ONLY - way to get "eating" apples is to take a cutting from a tree that produces "eating" apples and then plant or graft the cutting. The chances that an apple tree planted from a seed will produce a apple that you'd want to eat "as is" is close to zero.
Zuyder (*) though, not beer.
(*) Cider if you're not from Zummerzet.
The high alcohol consumption was also why women opted to pursue prohibition before seeking the right to vote.
It really was that bad.
As a young woman, I worked at Plimoth Plantation, and we were taught everyone drank small beer (2nd brewing of the mash, low-alcohol beer) instead of water because it sanitized the water. And I suspect something of this attitude lasted until prohibition.
The continental congress had kegs constantly arriving.
17th-18th century New England consumed 4 gallons of rum per year, per person. That included children, so adults were drinking more. Note: that's not 4 gallons of alcohol per year, it's four gallons of rum. They were drinking other stuff, too.
The naive fool seems to be an almost necessary driver of many of our most common narratives. Not just in myth and literature, but in current TV and film, I find myself frequently saying "Nobody could be that dumb!"
Yes. You're going into the dark room where something scary is undoubtedly luring, and you know it, so do you flip on the light switch that's just beside the door? Never!! Apparently.
Nobody ? I'd agree, then I consider the rationales for Trump 2024?
QUESTION- How does one post comment (directly) to KD's post. All I seem to see is options to reply to "someone else's comment".
btw- can't seem to contact the webmaster
tia
Scroll down to the bottom of the page; should be a blank comment box when you are logged in.
Thanks !
Take a look at "HELL NO The Sensible Horror Film" on Youtube, Vimeo and elsewhere.
Because our myths and common narratives are about human beings, who may be smarter this century, but are still characterized by foolishness and naiveate.
As a counterargument, read the average Civil War soldier's letter sent home, and then compare that to the average Facebook post today. Or at the other end of the spectrum, compare Presidential speeches from centuries ago compared to today, which were presumably directed at the masses.
We seem basically illiterate today by comparison.
P.S. Read H.G. Wells 'Time Machine', which makes a pretty strong argument that technology removes the evolutionary pressure for intelligence.
"Read H.G. Wells 'Time Machine', which makes a pretty strong argument that technology removes the evolutionary pressure for intelligence."
I don't think it does. The Morlocks seem pretty clever--it's just the Eloi who are childlike.
I agree. The Morlochs got a bad rap.
I could go for some Eloi and a nice Chianti this afternoon.
Those letters are already selected as the ones worth keeping.
The Civil War soldiers' letters that have been preserved to the present day are almost certainly not representative. It seems likely that the more literate the letter, the more likely it is to have been thought worthy of saving. Also, many if not a majority of Civil War soldiers did not send letters home because they were illiterate.
As for presidential speeches, modern speeches are configured to be reduced to thirty second or less sound bites. That makes it impossible to match the pomposity of pre-radio speeches.
The drinking a lot of beer thing instead of water is myth, I'm pretty sure.
I read and watch a lot things I don't think are particularly plausible. The point isn't the journalistic verisimilitude but a rehearsal space of your psychic architecture.
Read any Victorian novel and pay attention when wine comes up (often fortified, meaning high alcohol content). Two men finishing a bottle of wine over a meal is a common situation. It would put both of them above the legal driving limit. And afterwards they would exclude the ladies and drink some more.
Anti-bacterial activity of alcohol drops sharply when diluted below 50%,
https://www.cdc.gov/infectioncontrol/guidelines/disinfection/disinfection-methods/chemical.html
On Medieval water,
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1svj1q/how_did_people_esp_european_townsmen_get_fresh/?context=3
I would guess the idea that alcohol might be 'medicinal' is a myth of Prohibition.
Alcohol was seen as medicinal almost as soon as distillation was invented. Alcoholic spirits often had names like aqua vitae, and were routinely used for cures. Charles II of Navarre (Charles the Bad) was wrapped in sheets soaked with spirits -- probably brandy -- in the hopes that the magic elixir would cure paralysis. Unfortunately, his servants were attending him by candlelight that evening, a candle slipped, and the king went up in flames. That was in 14th century France, so long before Prohibition.
"Anti-bacterial activity of alcohol drops sharply when diluted below 50%,"
When it is used as a Disinfectant to sterlialize surfaces and tools, not the effect on the liquid it is inside.
You really regard reddit as a reliable source on such issues?
Reddit can be really reliable if you pay attention.
The problem with medieval water sources wasn't human waste, it was animal waste and related microorganisms like cryptosporidium and giardia. Yes, artesian wells could solve that problem. No, there were not a lot of artesian wells in medieval cities. People really DID drink a lot of beer, partly because it was safer than the water you might get in a workshop, and partly because it was a good source of carbohydrates -- basically liquid bread.
Beer isn't safe because the alcohol in beer kills germs, it's safe because the process of brewing beer kills germs.
IIRC from reading "How the Scots Invented the Modern World" some years ago, gentlemen in the 18th century took their meals at their club, where the drink of choice was French wine. They were known as three bottle men or four bottle men. That being their wine consumption for dinner and an evening,
"In Western society, beer and wine were a main staple of daily life until the 19th century."
--from Katzung's basic and clinical pharmacology (quite a nice textbook, I think)
In case somebody else wants to see the source:
https://accesspharmacy.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?bookid=2988§ionid=250597568
In the past there was less schooling, if at all, and people were not exposed to the world via internet, TV, movies and books as they are today. So they learn less about human behaviour (and everything else) and understood it much less.
In general, humans are born knowing nothing, and they know only things that they learn afterwards. So whether somebody is "dumb" or not is determine by what they have learned, which is itself is determined by their ability to learn (mostly genetically determined) and how helpful is the environment they live in for learning. The environment is becoming more helpful for learning in time, so people apparently become more intelliegnt.
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I've spent some significant time in a rural, isolated society with an average ~4th-6th grade level of education.
The one thing that everyone did understand was human behavior. They could read each other and outsiders in a frighteningly efficient way. It was almost as if the brain power that could have gone to things like calculus was instead devoted to understanding other humans.
Their biggest drawback was a lack of exposure to different ways of doing things. It wasn't that they couldn't understand new things-- it was just that they had never seen them before.
couple things about this:
1. stories like this were passed down orally and recited as poems. they have to be simple so they can be memorized.
2. the point is not Hercules’ cleverness. the point is that Atlas is extremely foolish. this is his main characteristic, it’s in more than one story. he gets himself turned into stone at one point.
As others have pointed out, a lot of these stories were didactic. The whole point was that someone did something stupid and that the listener should learn from that. Then, as now, not every listener learned anything.
Shades of why we have warning labels on everything. A Californian like Drum should remember this.
We see the same phenomena with musclehead gymbros today.
Memorized stories definitely did not have to be simple. Bards and jongleurs memorized song cycles that could take hours to recite. Hawaiian chants could run hundreds of even thousands of lines, and the same for oral histories recited by griots. That's why people trained for years at those jobs. Just as musicians can remember sequences of thousands of notes and chess players can recall the order of moves in a game, and the positions of dozens or even hundreds of games, so can other humans remember elaborate stories in great detail.
It's not just Hercules and Atlas. Odysseus runs into a whole bunch of knuckleheads.
Then again, in 2020 about 74 million morons voted for Orange Jesus. On Quora there are loads of idiots spouting creationism and flat earth nonsense.
Home schooling is killing us.
And all sorts of people experimented with dewormers, household cleaners, and even "bio-organic dirt" in response to COVID... while shunning vaccines.
Actually, I can't believe Kevin missed the obvious culprit.
Back in the Greek/Roman era people were really into cooking with and drinking out of LEAD vessels. So yeah, all of the stories in that period were stupid.
Bingo! Plus 15 for you, ser!
Actually, most historians dismiss this idea. That is because the Roman aqueduct system was a constant flow system, so the lead contamination would have been minimal compared to the 19th and 20th century pipe systems with valve closures.
The aqueduct isn't where the lead and wine were interacting, though.
+1
Largely mythical. Romans knew lead makes you crazy.
One would expect Kevin to be sensitive to this.
In the distant future, Qwargl, a student of 21st century art, is writing their dissertation about Game of Thrones.
"In the 21st century," they conclude, "people must have been stupid. I mean, how could Daenerys have just forgotten about the Iron Fleet??"
lol! And I never even watched Game of Thrones.
So Kevin, how do you distinguish between naive and "dumb?" Or "innocent" for that matter.
I have worked with the public for decades, via the government and in retail. I also currently see the results of IQ tests regularly. People who are well off and well educated tend not to have a lot of experience with the "general public" like this. So they are not aware how, even today, people are very much not very smart. This is not a judgment I am making. It's just true. What I am saying is that scoffing at an IQ of 85 tells me you too don't deal with the general public as much as some of us do. A big part of my job is trying to regularly translate basic policy to people with such an IQ. Because it's very common. Smart people are insulated from it most of the time because they have smart friends and smart co-workers. I find it *completely believable people found the old stories clever. And if not so well-known now could still find them clever.
Do tell. I'm all ears.
I’m currently working in a grocery store. It is in a working class neighborhood. I would estimate that close to 50% of the native born English speaking ppl who come into the store are functionally illiterate. They might be able to sit there and hack out meaning from words if given enough time, but they absolutely cannot do it in a quick manner with zero preparation. Signs and credit card prompts etc may as well not exist at all.
It’s really wild to know the general public is stupid AND YET I still underestimated just how incredibly stupid they actually are.
To anybody who wrote a comment addressing this post as "real," rather than just Kevin chuckling as he wrote:
There was a fellow called "Aesop" who wrote a lot of little tales about people and animals. You may have heard of him. His tales were not meant to be taken literally; they were allegories. They were called "fables." In fact, it's not clear that Aesop was not one of the fables, since no good hard evidence of his existence is known to exist.
Nevertheless, we teach our children some important wisdom as we tell them those fables. And you can be pretty sure Kevin doesn't believe all those animals did all those things, and talked to each other as they were doing them.
The post can be "real" in terms of trying to make a serious point about human intelligence, without claiming that Atlas and Hercules were real people to whom this really happened. The point is that it was considered plausible human behavior.
Re: the Trojen Horse.
When I read a fairly modern translation of The Odyssey, I was struck by the passage where Odysseus (Ulysses to some of y'all) was finally talked into telling where all he'd been since leaving Troy. It started out "Odysseus, Father of Lies" and then all the stuff about cyclops, lotus eaters, Circe, and yes, the big wooden horse, came out.
So the whole thing is highly in question. He most likely spent the previous 10 years working his way from one woman's bedroom (excluding the actual goddess Circe's) to another.
He was a trickster character. Every culture has at least one: Loki, Anansi, Kokopelli, Brer' Rabbit, Groucho Marx. The stories are fun, but often one is dealing with what they call an unreliable narrator.
What hasn’t changes is that half the people are below average in intelligence.
To quibble, half the people are below the median.
Yes, George Carlin messed up the meaning.
The average arbitrary IQ number has increased as people have fit more and more information into their brains. It isn't that we're more intelligent, it's that people in the past knew less stuff. Extending the logic of this increasing IQ backwards means the Industrial Revolution never happened because everyone was just wandering around banging rocks together trying to find gold or something.
It could also be that people are more exposed to the skills in IQ tests. Shakespeare would have failed a spelling test.
Standardized spelling in English only became a thing after Shakespeare was dead. Moreover, we don’t have Shakespeare’s handwriting, just what typesetters quickly assembled upside down and backwards. We know different typesetters worked on different pages because they each had characteristic spellings of some words. Many people then spelled phonetically. Some still do.
Agreed. The Stanford-Binet is as much an achievement test as it is a measurement of innate problem solving ability. There ARE "real" intelligence tests like that, but they are much too expensive for widespread use because they're administered one at a time by a trained professional.
So the Stanford-Binet or a competitor is administered to a known set of folks who are also given the professionally administered and largely wordless tests and the results correlated. But that just papers over severe environmental and social biases that People of Color and economically excluded groups face.
IQ tests aren't really knowledge tests. They test for speed of mental processing. They also test for memory abilities and spatial perception.
Consider that the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI) test is an intelligence test designed for children ages 2 years 6 months to 7 years 7 months. So you can know very little and still take an IQ test.
However, I'm sure that learning and other mental stimulations in the modern world have raised IQs somehow. But as far as I know experts can't figure out how. For example, there is still no accepted explanation for what causes the Flynn effect.
Iodine
Again, WordPress needs a thumbs up function.
About the Three Musketeers: It is a fun book, not a serious novel a la War and Peace. It does not claim that any of the musketeers are smart (it is the dumb people who pick a fight at every occasion), maybe a case could be made that d'Artagnan was, let's say sentient.
The whole book is designed as a fun read, calculated to sell a lot of copies. And, boy, was it successful on that score!
I logged in to make this very comment. The first two-thirds of the book are pure comedy, and obviously intended that way. The final act is quite dark, though, and the humor evaporates. Maybe it's time for Kevin to pick it up again.
Let's leave the old myths out of it. I'd say Atlas was in fact stupid, which is why the Gods gave him the job he had (we still do that to strong stupid people, don't we?).
Sisyphus didn't stop rolling his bolder uphill not because he was stupid but because he liked rolling the bolder. Liking it was his punishment. Still easier to bear than having your liver eaten by an eagle for ever and ever.
And in Troy by the time the horse came into play the Trojans had fought a defensive war for ten years, always on the brink of losing and they had in fact lost most of their greatest heroes. This must impact anybody's judgement.
But never mind: Cleverness is not the point of these stories.
I always thought the same way about the two women who both claimed that a baby was theirs. In Solomon's wisdom, he proposed that the baby be cut in half. One of the two women accepted the compromise, which has got to be the dumbest choice in history. Obviously this choice would kill the child. And it was presented to be an example of the great wisdom of Solomon!!
Remember early on in the COVID pandemic, when the federal government gave money to states and localities so that the latter wouldn't have to lay off workers just because tax revenues were plummeting as a result of the pandemic? Some people on the political right were very upset over this because the money wouldn't only keep their local government functioning--it would also reduce the amount of pain that the pandemic inflicted on people living in predominantly Democratic regions. They wanted Democrats to suffer, even if they hurt themselves in the process.
Or perhaps you've heard the story of the man who finds a genie. The genie says that he will give the man whatever he wants, but that whatever the man asks for, the genie will give the man's neighbor twice as much. If the man asks for a million dollars, he will get one million and his neighbor will get two million. The man thinks this over, and directs the genie, “make me blind in one eye.”
The woman who accepts the compromise proposed by Solomon isn't stupid; she's malicious.
Speaking of Jeopardy!, when are they going to have some fresh faces on? Seems like they've gone a full season with returning contestants. The show is trying hard to skew younger in the post-Alex era. Are they having trouble finding new talent to put on the air?
I'm at the age when some categories are now completely outside my wheelhouse. A few too many of the TV show/recent pop music/celebrity kind for me to do as well as I used to.
Anyway, the past three Final Jeopardy rounds were easy, imo. I'm kind of shocked they stumped most of the players.
1980s MOVIE CHARACTERS
Oliver Stone, screenwriter of this 1983 movie, named its main character to honor the Super Bowl-winning QB from 1982
[stumped all 3]
CLASSIC LITERATURE
An intended sequel to this 1869 work centered on the Decembrists, a group of veterans who largely served in the Napoleonic Wars
[stumped 2 of 3]
LEADING LADIES: NEXT IN LINE
Janet Gaynor,
Judy Garland,
Barbra Streisand,
her
[stumped 2 of 3]
I thought Jeopardy was ruined when they stopped the old system of allowing only five wins. They decided to make it all about continuing characters with cult followings. Ken Jennings was the first star of that era, and now he's the host.
This also encouraged a predatory style of playing (hunting the daily doubles early so your opponents couldn't get them later) which made the game less interesting, imo.
I agree on the pop music and contemporary culture categories, which I also aged out of a long time ago. But in other categories it's been seeming to me like the writers have their heads in the 1930s through 1980s or maybe 90s and come up with general-knowledge type questions based in things just a little before the whippersnappers' time. Not long ago there was one about Cabbage Patch kids, for example, as if everybody should know them, but that fad was a long time ago now. Lots of questions about semi-obscure aspects of the Cold War, things like that. The contestants under, say, 50 don't usually do so well on that stuff.
With these second-chance appearances maybe they're looking to have the audience feel like the contestants are familiar, or something? Or maybe they have to rebuild the audience after the fiasco around Trebek's succession and the deadening experience of Mayim Bialik? Lost momentum overall? I don't know, but I've been ready for a return to traditional format for a long time now that they've settled on Jennings. Who I think is very good, btw, and brings a lot to how the questions are written, evident when he wasn't hosting.
Maybe if we're talking about the mean, in terms of better moulding young minds to an IQ-based orientation, because brilliance has always been with us, Plato and Aristotle, Bacon and Newton, Jefferson and Madison, Paine and Frederick Douglas, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, William James and Dewey, Otto Rank and Arendt, the list goes on and on and one is left to wonder if the mean has risen while the peak has lowered.
If you don't want to compare apples to oranges, you have to compare characters from tales of old with modern characters, not real people. And I suggest that someone who rolls a wooden horse into town is more interesting than someone who tells a psychiatrist stuff on a couch.
Since everyone is also a lot taller than in the past, I'd say stunting is less common than it used to be. Childhoods today seldom count periods of food deprivation. But if Gaza is the future, where the UN warns of permanent damage to the physical and cognitive potential of the young generation, we'll start losing inches and IQ points again down the line.
Gaza is largely an outlier; it's when climate change gets more widespread and crop failures happen with more regularity that this effect will more likely show up. Interestingly, these will be some of the same characteristics that divided antiquity and the Middle Ages - lower life expectancy, lower literacy - and which a certain number of historians have shrugged off as part of an overarching "the Dark Ages were just fine, actually" revisionism.
People were about our height in the middle ages. They got stubby in early modern period. However based on bone analysis despite height, they were less healthy.
Men in northern Europe in the middle ages were _nearly_ as tall as their modern compatriots. The average is estimated at 173.4 cm; a little over 5'8". That dropped as low as 167 cm (a little under 5'6") in the 17th and 18th centuries. Average male height in Europe is now something like 178cm, so that's another 1.5 inches. We don't know as much about women, or southern Europe.
I'm sure somebody else has already said this, but Mr. Drum realizes that the examples he's citing are all _works of fiction_, right, and if you compare them to, say, the events of a John Wick or Mission: Impossible sequel that they'll pretty much have the same level of plausibility or "intelligence"?
I guess what I'm saying is that this blog post is inadvertently proving its own point.
Which MI and John Wick movies rely on the protagonist telling a blatantly obvious lie to a person too stupid to tell the difference?
In fact quite the opposite tends to be true in MI films, quite elaborate tricks are necessary to fool the bad guys and usually only lower level ones fall for that kind of stuff.
So yeah, I’m not sure what your point really was here (these films are implausible? Ok, and?) but the general level of stupidity of the characters is not even close to being close.
In a post on the subject of intelligence, asking a question apparently intended to comment on intelligence (but really only interrogating education on Greek classics) beginning by writing... "You remember the story. Atlas has been condemned to hold up the earth for all eternity..." seems to risk irony, as anyone who does have a classics education knows Atlas was holding up the heavens, not the Earth.
True. Even the ancient Greeks weren't dumb enough to believe that a person standing on the earth could hold up the earth. You can't stand on your dog and hold up your dog.
+1
"Maybe the Flynn effect is just because we don't drink as much as we used to right before taking intelligence tests?"
No, the Flynn effect is just a consequence of what IQ tests are - a measure of what's thought valuable in a person.
There's a thought there maybe something inherent to measure, but there's really not much proof that there is. so as society increasingly values abstract thinking among people working with increassingly sophisticated systems we're learning to do so, and doing better at tests to measure that.
It's our education and upbringing that shapes our ability at IQ tests - which is also why they only have meaning across peer groups. What a Masaai in the Serengetti knows and learns won't help them overly much in a U.S context, as a coal miner in Kentucky equally learns little of use for living on the Mara - starting with simply understanding the meaningless little diagrams on the paper of tests.
People aren't much smarter (though they probably are a bit due to better nutrition) but they are certainly better informed as we consume more and more information due to "technical" advances. Books, radio, television. Internet.
For a guy who’s often distrustful of popular opinion and prefers digging into the raw numbers himself, sometimes you really do like to shoot from the hip. Wikipedia has plenty of information. And, as always, Google is your friend.
First off, being hard to understand isn't the purpose of myths. Second, Odysseus had a reputation for shrewdness that far preceded the Horse incident. Third, we don't really know how the Horse Incident transpired since it is part of a missing epic poem in between the Iliad and the Odyssey. What we know about it is from a few summaries, notably Ovid.
The point about water is a good one. I had it with my parents a lot since they believed that when the Bible said wine, it meant grape juice. Interestingly, that's what led to the temperance movement. The tipple of choice in America was usually cider, but when the Slave Triangle got really cranking, the country was awash in cheap New England rum and slightly tipsy evolved into roaring drunk.