I wonder if it’s religion the true cause/s
Why are our brains shrinking?
111–120 of 199 posts
Re: Why are our brains shrinking?
#112Don't you ever forget that intelligence is not directly proportional to encephalic mass. Intelligence is related to number of synapses.
Brains getting smaller doesn't mean any capacity is lost. Maybe the design was improved, as in metabolicaly less demanding, or developmentaly more reliable.
Who knows
Re: Why are our brains shrinking?
#113It seems like the majority of the comments are not taking into account that this trend began approximately 70,000 years ago - slightly before the various things people here are blaming such as TikTok, Google, writing, Javascript and Twitter. Cutting-edge (heh) technology 70,000 years ago was the stone blade as well as the earliest known primitive art. An interesting guide whenever you're trying to put this kind of th…
For some reason I saw your list of things people are blaming as
...Google, "writing JavaScript"...
I said to myself: Ouch and damn! Fair point.
Edited a typo and for clarification, I love all languages and am dripping with sarcasm and snark for all of them equally.
Re: Why are our brains shrinking?
#114Although our brains were getting bigger progressively, around 70,000 years ago they plateaued, and have been shrinking ever since. John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, explains how, over the last 20,000 years alone, human brains have shrunk from 1,500 cubic centimeters (cc) to 1,350 cc, roughly the size of a tennis ball.
Except this requires extrapolating brain volume from the skull , which probably inaccurate compared to modern day MRIs. So i would take this claim that brains are shrinking with some skepticism.
Re: Why are our brains shrinking?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are so many problems with this post. * Implying a connection between IQ and brain size * Implying IQ is a measure of a person's worth to society * Implying people below some magic IQ threshold that renders them unworthy are being "given" resources
While the first one is probably really wrong, the other two are clearly fine. Imagine a unique cat with an IQ of human. Would you say it is more worth to society, than any other cat? Probably so. Is there a magic IQ threshold that renders other cats not as worthy as humans to not be given the same kind of resources? In a way yes, as you would draw a line. Intelligence is what makes humans humans.
I do love cats, but it's not clear to me what an extremely high IQ cat would be useful for. I suspect it would fall somewhere between lethal and unusually annoying.
Re: Why are our brains shrinking?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are so many problems with this post. * Implying a connection between IQ and brain size * Implying IQ is a measure of a person's worth to society * Implying people below some magic IQ threshold that renders them unworthy are being "given" resources
While the first one is probably really wrong, the other two are clearly fine. Imagine a unique cat with an IQ of human. Would you say it is more worth to society, than any other cat? Probably so. Is there a magic IQ threshold that renders other cats not as worthy as humans to not be given the same kind of resources? In a way yes, as you would draw a line. Intelligence is what makes humans humans.
IQ is a culturally-biased measure that, on its best day, is useful for comparing different cohorts and, if it's being used for a good purpose, bridging any gaps. It only measures individual intelligence by a very narrow view of intelligence. There are plenty of high IQ dupes and highly effective people who'd flub an IQ test.
Re: Why are our brains shrinking?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cutting-edge (heh) technology 70,000 years ago was the stone blade as well as the earliest known primitive art I think it's important to remember that technology is highly, highly iterative. It's not like if Elon Musk were born 70k years ago we'd have cavemen with electric cars. In fact, if all of us were somehow warped back in time that far, I fear we'd be even worse off. We know how to roll fiber optic networks a…
If an intelligent modern person with some knowledge of history was sent back to 70,000 years ago (70 kya) we'd probably be able to bring significant help to the group - assuming we were accepted into the group and not immediately killed by our ancestors in peak physical condition. Personally, I'd attempt to introduce: - art and culture from the far future (flutes, 42 kya; figurative art, 40 kya) - Simple ovens (29 ky…
I knew a professor that loved getting freshmen classes because he could disabuse them their Yankee in king Arthur's court ideas about how easy it'd be to bring technology back to the past. He had a whole slew of experiments that would explore path dependence and the difficulties of creating technologies with the available resources. Nominally this was to help them not underestimate the intelligence of early humans, but I think he enjoyed it.
These things are easier if you have an idea ahead of time of what you're making, but that has to work in a cultural context and that still doesn't mean they're easy. For instance, how would you would you build a useful saw out of stone? Can you recognize the wild ancestors of wheat and convince someone to keep at the process of domestication for thousands of years?
It's likely that ancient humans were adept at many of these things, like salt preservation, warm clothing, contraception, spun fibers, and boats. Many of the others (agriculture, wheels, etc) simply wouldn't make sense outside their native cultural contexts.
In the meantime, you'd probably have to learn from them the basics of survival.
Re: Why are our brains shrinking?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish I could upvote this more. I would be willing to bet a number of such comments did not even read the article and responding based on impulse with their gripe about modern society du-jour.
A thing on HN you will see frequently is that someone will be told that X happened and they’ll explain confidently post hoc why. Occasionally, they will misunderstand this as Y happening and they’ll explain that. In the best universe, they will misunderstand X having happened as Y having happened and explain it even though Y did not happen. The existence of this last characteristic makes me trust post hoc explanation…
The point system here is meant to help people find insightful comments. There was even a time on this site when it was used like that. But now it's used to show support for opinions you agree with and to find the confident idiots with grand theories of how the world can be modeled.
Re: Why are our brains shrinking?
#119Perhaps it is female (or family) intelligence and impulse control driving the age at which a female paired off and had children. Paleolithic life expectancy was something like 22 to 33, and much of that after very high infant/maternal death rates. With such life expectancies, females would likely be bearing children at ages we today would find positively shocking. Simply surviving childbirth would be a huge selection…
> Paleolithic life expectancy was something like 22 to 33, and much of that after very high infant/maternal death rates. This is a widespread belief but it is an urban myth. Most of the average mortality from the Paleolithic is weighted downward due to infant and childhood mortality. If you lived past 15 years there was a good chance you would grow old. A 2008 study found that once infant mortality was removed the av…
Doesn’t the father give the dowry?
Re: Why are our brains shrinking?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're making a value judgement like "better" and "worse" as if there was a clear global optimum that you can reach. Why do you assume that's the case? Let's assume there even is a global optimum. Why do we think this global optimum would be invariant on environment? We have clear examples of species that fail to adapt to their changing environment quickly enough dying off. If you took the survivors of a change and t…
Surely having sharper and more intelligent humans is an objectively better uncontroversial outcome. If there's even a chance that our environment is somehow downregulating important features such as intelligence, we must find a way to reverse that process.
> Surely having sharper and more intelligent humans is an objectively better uncontroversial outcome
What if there's a level of intelligence above which humans decide not to reproduce?