Comment by DanielHB
1 day ago
25% of humans died before reaching 5 in 1800s US, today it is <1%. Its been at least 5 generations since this value dropped dramatically.
We have not ended up with "humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc."
> We have not ended up with "humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc."
Haven't we?
Objectively we’ve only become smarter (IQs have increased), stronger (fitness records continue to be broken), etc. since infant mortality shrank. If you believe otherwise please provide evidence.
If continuously sample range [0..inf), then average will grow with time.
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So it depends on how you want to measure it.
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This line of reasoning leads to “some people are weak and unworthy of life because they are impure.” I don’t think rolling back our work to end infant mortality to prevent weak people from living is the right answer.
> This line of reasoning leads to
It doesn't "lead to". Supporting a wrong conclusion even with a valid argument is as old as time. Fans of eugenics don't need an excuse to go down that path.
Our natural and artificial environments shape us for better or worse. We're bigger and more intelligent as a direct outcome of better nutrition. But we also have far more people with deadly allergies because we're so good at managing them now.
Probably throwing quite the grenade here, but around 29% of pregnancies end in termination globally. Absent cultural considerations, it's questionable whether life expectancy has improved in absolute terms in modern times
Child mortality rates are rapidly dropping globally as well
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
https://ourworldindata.org/children-saved-global-health
I don't think it's a grenade unless you are implicitly trying to mean it that life begins before birth, which ultimately is a definition game since it's actually quite hard to define life, hard enough that calling it "life" is a matter of personal worldview. I personally think it's quite reasonable to exclude pre-birth "deaths" from life expectancy, or event infant deaths sometimes, depending on what you are trying to measure.
In any case I didn't know this number and it's quite relevant to the discussion of how much we got rid of natural selection.
For those who believe in God, she performs way more abortions than humans do.
How would you know?
When you make an outrageous claim the burden of proof is on the claimant. Given that there isn't a real indication of anything to the contrary, it is reasonable to assume reality is still the way it always was and humans are too.
Which is the outrageous claim? We normally require new medical treatments to be proved safe, rather than assume they are safe until proved dangerous.
This feels hand wavy.
I could make the same claim of a bridge before it collapses, without realising the steel was weak, or had micro fractures.
Where's the proof? What an outlandish claim! Don't you see traffic flowing as normal?
Of course, we shouldn't drop all advancement due to worries. I do think we should study the results a bit more closely though.
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We have, we just have much, much better conditions for food, hygiene, personnal safety and medicine.
But have worse hormonal health (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7063751/), and are less fit (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4033061/). The flynn effect also seems to decline in some parts of the world: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289619301679
It just doesn't compensate the immense gains tech created.
Turns out it's ok to be weaker if you don't have to worry about dying of parasites, malnutrition, cold.
Which, you could conclude, means the individual is weaker, but the species is stronger.
We haven't created humans from scratch using genetic engineering yet, why would you think our current state has anything to do with the comment you are replying to?
I like the spirit of what you are saying but the smart part isn’t true at all. IQ peaked around the mid 1990s and as someone that lived back then that tracks.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
Look at Fig. 3. The world seems to be experiencing a reverse Flynn effect.
The abstract quite literary cautions against the way you're interpreting the data. The relevant quote:
> Notably, these gains do not uniformly translate to a rise in underlying GMA, suggesting the presence of domain-specific improvements and test characteristic changes over time. Conversely, the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests, also reflecting specific abilities not attributable to changes in the latent GMA factor. Our findings further challenge the validity of claims that changes in the general factor drive the Flynn effect and its reversal. Furthermore, they caution against using these scores for longitudinal studies without accounting for changes in test characteristics.
I don’t agree with their interpretation at all and neither do lots of other studies around the world that get the same result.
> the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests
What else would this be but intelligence? Imagine if your AI didn’t know what words mean and couldn’t do math and you still tried to make the assertion that it was just as intelligent.
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IQ is not a unit, it's a z-score. Z-scores can only be compared within the same cohort against which they are computed and given the same test. Given that the cohorts and tests keep evolving over time, it makes no sense to track IQ across large time periods.
The reversal of the Flynn effect is more likely explained by other factors such as the explosion of social media, endless addictive entertainment, and all the attention manipulation that comes with it. Conception didn’t change that much at a large enough scale during this short time period to explain it.