What if the true source of progress is people becoming nicer? (OK, I am just trying to be a contrarian here, but in the opposite direction of the usual.) Catholics and Protestants getting tired of killing each other, agreeing on “live and let live”, and maybe let Jews live too, and heck… we might also let the nerds live.
And now people spend more time inventing and discussing their inventions (no one will report you to inquisition just because you said something about atoms), and who knows with some luck it might become a source of income (because people will not immediately steal your inventions, either to destroy them or to sell them as their own). -- Hey, I am not saying that people were super nice centuries ago; just more nice than even more centuries ago.
To put it more “mathematically”, when people get nicer, some of the energy they previously spent on hurting each other gets redirected to other purposes, and that includes progress.
If there is more stuff, there is less reason to fight over it.
There will be less fighting for material reasons, but other reasons exist too. Some people never have enough. But maybe those who have enough can sometimes coordinate to stop them.
Smarter in terms of raw mental capacity? No, I doubt it.
They were getting more educated. In particular, in the 18th century there was a new, mechanistic view of the universe that was spreading, and this was crucial to the development of science and engineering.
The Flynn effect presumably started before there were IQ tests to measure it.
Prenatal and early childhood malnutrition generally lower IQ, as does catching certain diseases in pregnancy or early childhood. Child labour might be bad for IQ too—not sure about this one though because a lot of modern schools are basically equivalent to child labour but being in school is not generally thought to lower IQ. So knocking a population out of Malthusian equilibrium would be expected to result in IQ rises.
Better health and nutrition could plausibly have led to higher average intelligence, good point.
However, I think a large part of the Flynn effect is not actual raw intelligence increasing, but better education that leads people to score better on formal intelligence tests.
Were people getting smarter? (But if so, why?)
What if the true source of progress is people becoming nicer? (OK, I am just trying to be a contrarian here, but in the opposite direction of the usual.) Catholics and Protestants getting tired of killing each other, agreeing on “live and let live”, and maybe let Jews live too, and heck… we might also let the nerds live.
And now people spend more time inventing and discussing their inventions (no one will report you to inquisition just because you said something about atoms), and who knows with some luck it might become a source of income (because people will not immediately steal your inventions, either to destroy them or to sell them as their own). -- Hey, I am not saying that people were super nice centuries ago; just more nice than even more centuries ago.
To put it more “mathematically”, when people get nicer, some of the energy they previously spent on hurting each other gets redirected to other purposes, and that includes progress.
What if the true cause of people becoming nicer is material progress? If there is more stuff, there is less reason to fight over it.
There will be less fighting for material reasons, but other reasons exist too. Some people never have enough. But maybe those who have enough can sometimes coordinate to stop them.
I suspect there is actually a reciprocal relationship, not simply one-way causation.
Smarter in terms of raw mental capacity? No, I doubt it.
They were getting more educated. In particular, in the 18th century there was a new, mechanistic view of the universe that was spreading, and this was crucial to the development of science and engineering.
The Flynn effect presumably started before there were IQ tests to measure it.
Prenatal and early childhood malnutrition generally lower IQ, as does catching certain diseases in pregnancy or early childhood. Child labour might be bad for IQ too—not sure about this one though because a lot of modern schools are basically equivalent to child labour but being in school is not generally thought to lower IQ. So knocking a population out of Malthusian equilibrium would be expected to result in IQ rises.
Related: here is an essay about how the Black Death may have triggered the Rennaissance by reducing Europe’s population enough to temporarily knock everyone out of Malthusian equilibrium. https://www.nhd.org/sites/default/files/Franke_Senior_Paper.pdf
Better health and nutrition could plausibly have led to higher average intelligence, good point.
However, I think a large part of the Flynn effect is not actual raw intelligence increasing, but better education that leads people to score better on formal intelligence tests.