This is demonstrably untrue. IQ has increased consistently for decades, far faster than genetic factors can explain. Environmental factors like education, nutrition, and medical care are the obvious explanation.
Maybe across the whole population because most people were struggling to eat enough and received almost no education.
If we compared average modern humans against average well fed and educated ones from 200 years ago would that still hold up?
I suspect the average college educated human from 1800 would obliterate the average college educated human from 2026.
> At the elite level, marathon performance is defined by energy availability as much as physiology.
> Maintaining a pace of 2:50 per kilometer requires a constant supply of fuel. Even small disruptions in energy delivery can result in significant time loss.
coppsilgold is the one who made a hard-line, clear-cut dichotomy when they said "it's easy to do harm [but] it's all but impossible to do any good". bglazer referenced several interventions that are known to increase IQ which challenge this dichotomy. Saying that it is difficult to separate "doing good" and "stop doing harm" is agreeing with the point that coppsilgold created a distinction without a difference.
This also assumes that IQ testing has remained static. It has not. IQ tests continue to evolve and there are >1 of them and they do not all agree. I.E. the tests themselves might be responsible for some of the variance.
it's hard to separate IQ decreasing and return to mean with IQ stabilizing
in 20th century most of the world moved past famine and toxins - did any factor of similar scale happen in 21st century as well to start looking for opposite processes?
Yeah I have been reading a lot of posts like this lately. Technical blog post clearly written by an LLM summarizing something vibe-coded. They always start using project-specific jargon right away and they never give you enough context or backstory to understand why this thing exists. It's seems very clearly to be a symptom of someone pointing an LLM at a repo and telling it "write a github page for this project".
It really shines through in pieces like this that LLM's have a severely constrained worldview and underdeveloped theory of mind. They can't imagine that a line like "A 200-line POC that goes from 0/5 to 5/5 in four proposer steps" means nothing to me as a subtitle for the page. After all "proposer steps" and "5/5" are *right there* in it's context. Surely everyone has "proposer steps" in their context, right?
I have this problem with other people all the time. They can’t fathom why someone else wouldn’t have their exact context at any given moment. They say some non-sequitur and are immediately incredulous that I’m asking wtf they’re talking about.
Ah causal data! It’s a shame none of the scientists or statisticians thought of getting causal data. How would we get that? Well maybe we could just inject amyloid into a person’s brain. Or simply remove all the amyloid from a person’s brain. That should do it, right?
I mean an amyloid injection is wildly unethical and it’s also not the natural progression of Alzheimer’s. Removing amyloid is a simple matter of investing billions of dollars into drug development. Also how do you tell whether that was actually “causal” if the patients improve after plaque removal.
I mean come on, you have to work the evidence and the experimental tools that we actually have. This kind of epistemic puritanism doesn’t help anyone.
I work in this field. It’s more or less correct but kind of lacking in detail. Cancer is a property of all multicellular life. I think it’s best understood as the behavior of a dynamical system that loses the feedback control that keeps cell growth under control.
It’s a bit jargon heavy but it’s a nice case study in how tumor growth is controlled through all the same mechanisms that normal tissue growth uses. Even cells with an outright cancerous gene mutation are basically still just doing normal growth and development.
" Cancer is a property of all multicellular life."
In practice, though, some species are way less prone to cancer than others. Orders of magnitude of a difference, even in mammals. Bats, notoriously. Or naked mole rats. On the other hand, mice get cancer fairly reliably.
Which means that there are biologically realistic way how to keep the danger at bay, and they seem to involve the immune system.
This is quite similar to how eLife does publishing. You still have to submit to them but they basically just add reviewer comments and an “eLife Assessment” that serves as the quality/curation signal rather than a binary publish/reject
> If you're an influential figure at a top-5 department in your field ... you all hate $journal.
That's the problem, they don't hate these journals, they love them. Generally speaking they're old people who became influential by publishing in these journals. Their reputation and influence was built on a pile of Science and Nature papers. Their presentations all include prominent text indicating which figures came from luxury journals. If Science and Nature lose their prestige so do they (or at least that's what they think)
This was very apparent when eLife changed their publishing model. Their was a big outpouring of rage from older scientists who had published in eLife when it was a more standard "high impact" journal. Lots of "you're ruining your reputation and therefore mine".
Maybe I am underestimating the gap in status between the "influential figures" I imagine and the people I actually know.
I see: my friend has 10-15 years of experience in their field, they have enjoyed success and basically got the equivalent of a steady stream of promotions.
I map this onto my big tech/startup experience. I mentally model them as: they are "on top of the pile" of people that still do technical work. Everyone who still has the ability to boss them around, is a manager/institutional politician type figure who wouldn't interfere in such decisions as which journal to publish in.
But probably this mapping is wrong.
Also, I probably have a poor model of what agency and independence looks like in academia. In my big tech world, I have a pretty detailed model in my head of what things I can and can't influence. I don't have this model for academia which is gonna inevitably lead to a lot of "why don't you just".
Same thing happens to me when I moan about work to my friends. They say "I thought you were the tech lead, can't you just decree a change?" and I kinda mumble "er yeah but it doesn't really work like that". So here I'm probably doing that in reverse.
For example, spearheaded by Knuth, the community effectively abandoned the Journal of Algorithms and replaced with with ACM Transactions on Algorithms.
however it's difficult. a big factor is that professors feel obligated towards their students, who need to get jobs. even if the subfield can shift to everybody publishing in a new journal, non-specialists making hiring decisions may not update for a few years which hurts students in the job market.
I think we could understand consciousness perfectly and still find it divine. In fact, I think however it arises is probably so beautiful that it would be wrong not to call it divine. Of course not in a literal, theological sense, but I think the true deep complexity of the human brain and consciousness is worth the title.
Why does focusing on nearer things cause myopia? See if you're curious at even a basic level, you'd realize that there are important *details* about stuff like this where it actually helps to have some actual subject matter expertise and knowledge.
I believe during a certain age range your eyes determine they've grown to the correct size based on how well they focus, and ancestral humans mostly focused at far away things. When we spend lots of time indoors and looking at screens, our eyes adapt to this as the default focus. Since they're also evolved to look at things nearer than the default focus but not farther (since it's meant to be at infinity), this creates myopia.
That's a lovely theory, if quite imprecise in terms of the actual biology of eye development. The actually important part of science (the part that requires a lot of expertise and judgement) is figuring out how to make that an actually testable hypothesis and then whether or not its true.
> a certain age range your eyes determine they've grown to the correct size based on how well they focus
A certain age -> which one? Why?
your eyes determine -> How? What molecular growth signaling pathways are involved? How do they integrate with your brain's visual processing centers and how does that relate to "how well [your eyes] focus". Is there a biomechanical signal from muscle stress or eye curvature?
How would you test this? You'd have to change this process somehow to show that the effect is real, but you obviously can't do that with humans, so you'd probably have to use mice, but their eyes are different, but how so?
Without any of this information, it's a nice "just-so" story about cavemen looking at the horizon, but not much more than that.
You don't need to know the molecular growth pathways to test a biological hypothesis. We don't know which molecular pathways cause lung cancer when you smoke.
We absolutely do know about the molecular pathways that cause smoking induced lung cancer. It’s TP53 and RB1 mutations (among many others). There are probably more than a hundred thousand published papers about precisely this question
I occasionally say please and thank you to ChatGPT for my own sake, not for the LLM's. They're sufficiently similar to humans that allowing myself to be a jerk subtly degrades myself and makes it more likely that I'm a jerk to real people.
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