Were we smarter 100 years ago?

http://www.thepublicdomain.org/2009/07/17/were-we-smarter-100-years-ago/

by emontero1 • 17 years ago

19 22 17 years ago

frossie• 17 years ago

Summary: Accounts of the legislative hearings over the 1909 Copyright Act (which dealt with the newfangled invention of mechanically reproduced music) cover many of the same issues that are relevant today, but with all parties engaging in a much higher level of debate than is currently evident.

Guess they did better before we let the TV cameras in :-)

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

Angling for the perfect five-second sound bite makes all debate more inane, but the debate about copyright is a particularly awful case: most of those TV cameras are owned by major media companies that have an axe to grind.

It's not a coincidence that the media industries have a degree of political influence that's out of proportion to their size. If you're a politician, it's good to avoid irritating major media corporations, and it's even better to have them on your side.

This is why Larry Lessig eventually gave up on trying to make his arguments more eloquent and went into the corruption-fighting business. Eloquence is great, but it doesn't do much good when the fix is in.

grellas2• 17 years ago

It is a modern conceit that intellectual progress has made modern generations smarter than those that preceded them.

A hundred years ago, far fewer people got advanced educations but those that did were thoroughly well-versed in the liberal arts (as classically defined), meaning that they had been grounded in Latin, rhetoric, and similar subjects that trained them to be highly articulate in their forms of expression (as is easily seen from a glance at these hearing transcripts).

Those who went on to become lawyers, politicians, etc. were indeed elitists but the best among them were highly talented, very bright, and quite capable of making many of our modern politicians look pathetic by comparison in their forms of expression.

The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is widely regarded as a classic high point in the venerable lineage of that work - whose aim, it is worth recalling, was to gather all the world's knowledge in an advanced and erudite state.

They may have used pen and paper back then, or sometimes typewriters - and their knowledge base was far smaller than what we have today - but we have nothing over them in terms of innate intellectual capacity.

asdlfj2sd33• 17 years ago

Exactly. When you compare youtube comments to anything written 100 years ago you must be tempted to think we've gotten A LOT stupider.

But what you have to realize is, that 100 years ago most people couldn't even read or write. But today they are making youtube comments - progress!

quellhorst2• 17 years ago

The Internet used to be mostly filled with intellectuals and I thought people here were much smarter than the general population I encountered. Today the net is a cesspool.

eru• 17 years ago

> But what you have to realize is, that 100 years ago most people couldn't even read or write.

You mean, globally? In the industrialised nations, people were quite literate in 1909. Especially in the USA with all the emphasis on bible reading.

endtime2• 17 years ago

>were thoroughly well-versed in the liberal arts (as classically defined), meaning that they had been grounded in Latin, rhetoric, and similar subjects that trained them to be highly articulate in their forms of expression (as is easily seen from a glance at these hearing transcripts).

Is that your definition of "smart"? It sure isn't mine.

>Those who went on to become lawyers, politicians, etc. were indeed elitists but the best among them were highly talented, very bright, and quite capable of making many of our modern politicians look pathetic by comparison in their forms of expression.

The ones you've heard of, sure - they are the ones worth remembering. But if you don't think there were just as many moronic politicians back then you're just being naive. Anyway, politicians are a self-selecting group - and a terrible group from which to sample if you want to get an idea of an era's general intelligence.

grellas2• 17 years ago

The classically trained people of that era displayed a high level of intelligence in many fields, including science, literature, law, politics, etc. I will grant that the article does not give evidence of this apart from what the transcripts reflect in a particular area - I just know it from wide reading of materials from that era.

People who can express themselves well in complex fields such as law (as reflected in these transcripts) are usually pretty smart as well. It is a general indicator, though obviously not the only one.

I am certainly not claiming that earlier eras did not have their share of moronic politicians - I was once a history major and read about them all the time! They are all-pervasive in every era.

I just don't think people today are innately smarter simply because our knowledge base has expanded.

randallsquared3• 17 years ago

The Flynn effect suggests not. :)

stavrianos2• 17 years ago

I think it's more likely the Flynn effect is a reflection of our getting better at taking tests.

bokonist• 17 years ago

The Flynn effect mostly appears in only certain puzzle tests. There is no Flynn effect in vocab and numeracy, despite far longer hours spent at school. This indicates to me that we have gotten better at certain abstract puzzles, perhaps because the rising prominence of IQ tests made people study those puzzles more. The Flynn effect only proves that those kind of puzzle tests are very flawed at measuring innate aptitude.

randallsquared3• 17 years ago

I think that your objection is, rather, an indictment of schools and the surrounding bureaucracy.

Anyway, do people study such puzzles? For such a consistent, widespread rise, you'd expect it to be pretty obvious that they do, but I'm not sure.

synnik• 17 years ago

100 years ago, education was rarer, but very strong. The records we have from those days are from the best and brightest.

Today, education is more broadly available. We can read the words of the brightest of our time, and the dimmest. They are all online for our reading pleasure.

So are we smarter? Are they smarter 100 years ago? Odds are, no to both questions. But we certainly have a visibility into the full spectrum of today's people. We don't have that view of olden folk. Our perspective will be skewed.

gaius• 17 years ago

Yes it's like Victorian buildings, bridges, etc. Those Victorians sure knew how to build to last!

But wait, we only see their buildings that did last. Everything that's not a Victorian structure is evidence of something of theirs that didn't...

known• 17 years ago

"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone

dctoedt• 17 years ago

In computer terms: the CPU(s) and RAM of humans -- the wetware, if you will -- are presumably much the same, on average, as they were 100 years ago.

But it seems indisputable that we know how to deal effectively with more of life's threats and opportunities than we did back then.

(Again in computer terms, our libraries of event-detection and -handling routines are much more sophisticated than those of a century ago.)

As a simple example, just think of how much more more the average person knows about, say, healthy eating and the downside of smoking -- this isn't to say, of course, that there isn't still a lot of work to do in disseminating that knowledge.

So yeah, there seems little question that we are indeed 'smarter' (in the sense used above) than we were 100 years ago.

Were we smarter 100 years ago?

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