The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis

[Rev Thwack]

The interesting thing about neat and tidy and palatable theories about human development is that they are rarely true. That said, I have a theory that advances in human intelligence are driven by leisure time. We don't get smarter because of survival pressures, but because when we aren't stressed by survival pressures, we sit around and think about stuff, and make up neat stuff to play with.

I got into a huge argument about this many years ago, because I suggested something similar and it was pointed out to me that my idea (which was phrased differently than yours) was essentially endorsing elitism, and argued that it implied trust fund babies were smarter than people with blue-collar jobs.  I think the difference is I talked about wealth, and you're talking about leisure time.  Not necessarily the same, I realize now.  I should revisit this idea with that in mind.

Pointing out a connection between wealth/leisure/opportunity and the intelligence/possibilities isn't an endorsement of only a select few having such benefits, but points out another of those painful thoughts... that if you did't have good graces in your birth then you started out disadvantaged in comparison to someone else, meaning that you are more likely to have challenges and difficulties in your life, meaning problems and hardships others don't have to face, meaning those painful thoughts we try to not have, so let's block them out with the warm security blanket of just dismissing such claims/evidence as something it's not such as "endorsing elitism".

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The interesting thing about neat and tidy and palatable theories about human development is that they are rarely true. That said, I have a theory that advances in human intelligence are driven by leisure time. We don't get smarter because of survival pressures, but because when we aren't stressed by survival pressures, we sit around and think about stuff, and make up neat stuff to play with.

I got into a huge argument about this many years ago, because I suggested something similar and it was pointed out to me that my idea (which was phrased differently than yours) was essentially endorsing elitism, and argued that it implied trust fund babies were smarter than people with blue-collar jobs.  I think the difference is I talked about wealth, and you're talking about leisure time.  Not necessarily the same, I realize now.  I should revisit this idea with that in mind.

So the person you were talking to was completely out of touch with reality, I take it? It's well-known and not really at all controversial that wealthy kids perform better on IQ tests, academically, and pretty much everywhere else across the board than poor kids. It's not because of any genetic difference in potential, it's just because of socioeconomic advantages, including free time. This phenomenon is what is generally accepted to cause racial disparities in IQ scores in the US; the disparities map pretty much exactly with economic disparities.

[LMNO]

Well, it could be interpreted to mean that the wealthy are "better than" the poor.  Which is a really shitty attitude to have, and could lead to behaviors like dismissing a person's thoughts based upon their economic status.  I'm not saying anyone on this board does that, I'm saying this was pointed out to me, when I was young.  I didn't want to be that kind of person.

But I think we're talking too much about me and my stupid youth, and we've gone away from both the OP and Nigel's point.  Apologies for the unintentional narcissism.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

No worries! And your friend did have a point, in that it's important to make sure that line of reasoning isn't used as an excuse ("they're stupid because they're poor") rather than as a fulcrum for promoting greater income equality.

[Pergamos]

Charlie Stross asks "why are there so many stupid people"?

I have a speculative answer:

We are hominids. One of the things that makes us different from other primates is that we have language. Language enables us to communicate about our environment and to communicate our interior states. This is a very powerful tool; it means that if, for example, you have figured out a better way to peel a banana, you can tell me about it, and I can acquire that trait.

Our ability to exchange extended phenotypic traits without genetic exchange (thank you, language faculty!) makes us, as Dawkins pointed out in the 1990s, exceptional.

Because of this ability, we don't have to invent everything for ourselves, individually; we can borrow one anothers' good ideas. So we only need to be smart enough to understand and use the cognitive tools created by our most intelligent outliers.

Let me re-formulate that hypothesis: The evolutionary pressure selecting for general intelligence (to the extent that general intelligence exists) breaks once a species develops language.

And a logical corollary of this hypothesis is that we are only just smart enough, on average, to be capable of horizontal transfer of memes. Once language and culture arrived (note specialized usage of term 'culture'), we didn't need to get any smarter: we could "borrow" from one another. Therefore we're only just smart enough to do this.

(I call this Charlie's Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis.)

Steve Hynd suggests that this could explain the trajectory of the Republican Party at the moment:

My analogy is this: the Republican Party has lost the minimum intelligence to listen to its outliers because it has lost the minimum intelligence to realize that its outliers are now on its left-moderate wing.

[...]

To borrow from Charlie, the Republican Party – a memetic entity – has become too stupid for horizontal transfer of new memes which would fit it for survival in a cultural environment which is rapidly changing in demographics and in its attitudes to bigotry of various stripes. It can change that and evolve or it can stay the same and become extinct.

One of the things that's amusingly contradictory of this is that in America, the average IQ has risen 27 points over the last 60 years, which, in context of the correlation of socioeconomic improvements over that span, would seem to indicate that when you lighten survival stresses upon the general population, intelligence rises.

Or that without survival stress  you are able to devote more resources to focusing on the sort of abstract knowledge that IQ tests test for.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Charlie Stross asks "why are there so many stupid people"?

I have a speculative answer:

We are hominids. One of the things that makes us different from other primates is that we have language. Language enables us to communicate about our environment and to communicate our interior states. This is a very powerful tool; it means that if, for example, you have figured out a better way to peel a banana, you can tell me about it, and I can acquire that trait.

Our ability to exchange extended phenotypic traits without genetic exchange (thank you, language faculty!) makes us, as Dawkins pointed out in the 1990s, exceptional.

Because of this ability, we don't have to invent everything for ourselves, individually; we can borrow one anothers' good ideas. So we only need to be smart enough to understand and use the cognitive tools created by our most intelligent outliers.

Let me re-formulate that hypothesis: The evolutionary pressure selecting for general intelligence (to the extent that general intelligence exists) breaks once a species develops language.

And a logical corollary of this hypothesis is that we are only just smart enough, on average, to be capable of horizontal transfer of memes. Once language and culture arrived (note specialized usage of term 'culture'), we didn't need to get any smarter: we could "borrow" from one another. Therefore we're only just smart enough to do this.

(I call this Charlie's Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis.)

Steve Hynd suggests that this could explain the trajectory of the Republican Party at the moment:

My analogy is this: the Republican Party has lost the minimum intelligence to listen to its outliers because it has lost the minimum intelligence to realize that its outliers are now on its left-moderate wing.

[...]

To borrow from Charlie, the Republican Party – a memetic entity – has become too stupid for horizontal transfer of new memes which would fit it for survival in a cultural environment which is rapidly changing in demographics and in its attitudes to bigotry of various stripes. It can change that and evolve or it can stay the same and become extinct.

One of the things that's amusingly contradictory of this is that in America, the average IQ has risen 27 points over the last 60 years, which, in context of the correlation of socioeconomic improvements over that span, would seem to indicate that when you lighten survival stresses upon the general population, intelligence rises.

Or that without survival stress  you are able to devote more resources to focusing on the sort of abstract knowledge that IQ tests test for.

Way to restate a small portion of what both MLNO and I said.