6 ms·

Were we smarter 100 years ago?

19 points by emontero1 17y ago

frossie 17y 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 17y 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.
grellas 17y 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 17y 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!
  - quellhorst 17y 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.
    - sketerpot 17y ago
      That's an awfully broad statement, don't you think? The Internet used to be an area with a higher-than-normal density of intellectuals, and now you can only say that about some parts of the Internet. But please don't lump it all together as if there was some sort of equivalence between (say) Hacker News and 4chan and Christian Youth Forums and YouTube and the Energy from Thorium forum. If the net is a cesspool, then so is the entire world.
      - kragen 17y ago
        Oh hey, I didn't even know about the Energy from Thorium blog; there's a forum too? Is it good or bad?
      - quellhorst 17y ago
        Sure, but those bright stars like hacker news eventually burn out too. Hopefully it doesn't happen too quickly.
  - eru 17y 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.
randallsquared 17y ago
The Flynn effect suggests not. :)
- stavrianos 17y ago
  I think it's more likely the Flynn effect is a reflection of our getting better at taking tests.
- bokonist 17y 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.
  - randallsquared 17y 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.
    - stavrianos 17y ago
      Well, didn't you play with brain teasers and abstract shape puzzles and such as a child? Or edutainment software? Studying doesn't have to mean nose-to-the-grindstone.
      - randallsquared 17y ago
        I'm in my mid-30s. If there was anything we'd recognize as "edutainment" software in the 70s and early 80s, we couldn't afford it. Anyway, I have an average-software-engineer IQ, more or less, on tests in the 80s, and I can't remember ever doing much brain teaser or abstract shape puzzles -- those weren't interesting to me. I spent every waking hour I could reading past age seven or eight.
synnik 17y 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 17y 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 17y ago
"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
dctoedt 17y 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.

19 points by emontero1 17y 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 17y 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.

grellas 17y 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 17y 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!
- quellhorst 17y 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.
  - sketerpot 17y ago
    That's an awfully broad statement, don't you think? The Internet used to be an area with a higher-than-normal density of intellectuals, and now you can only say that about some parts of the Internet. But please don't lump it all together as if there was some sort of equivalence between (say) Hacker News and 4chan and Christian Youth Forums and YouTube and the Energy from Thorium forum. If the net is a cesspool, then so is the entire world.
    - kragen 17y ago
      Oh hey, I didn't even know about the Energy from Thorium blog; there's a forum too? Is it good or bad?
    - quellhorst 17y ago
      Sure, but those bright stars like hacker news eventually burn out too. Hopefully it doesn't happen too quickly.
- eru 17y 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.

randallsquared 17y ago

The Flynn effect suggests not. :)

stavrianos 17y ago
I think it's more likely the Flynn effect is a reflection of our getting better at taking tests.
bokonist 17y 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.
- randallsquared 17y 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.
  - stavrianos 17y ago
    Well, didn't you play with brain teasers and abstract shape puzzles and such as a child? Or edutainment software? Studying doesn't have to mean nose-to-the-grindstone.
    - randallsquared 17y ago
      I'm in my mid-30s. If there was anything we'd recognize as "edutainment" software in the 70s and early 80s, we couldn't afford it. Anyway, I have an average-software-engineer IQ, more or less, on tests in the 80s, and I can't remember ever doing much brain teaser or abstract shape puzzles -- those weren't interesting to me. I spent every waking hour I could reading past age seven or eight.

synnik 17y 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 17y 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 17y ago

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

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

dctoedt 17y 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.