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Lots of things were discovered or invented just by someone in the right place at the right time.
Sure, lots of basic technology is discoverable by average people who get lucky, but fundamental scientific stuff is almost never discovered by luck. Algebra, geometry, timekeeping, chemistry (in contrast to alchemy), etc require abstract creativity that average people don't have. Once those theoretical explanations are understood, average people can learn about them, but discovering them requires a much higher level of intelligence. Steam engines weren't discovered by someone who happened to be in the right place at the right time, they were created by someone who figured things out at a much deeper level.
STW would look like a forum for intellectuals 🙂
Except we'd all be dead without antibiotics, wouldn't have the wheel, no electricity to run our computers, living in caves or huts
wouldn’t have the wheel
We'd most certainly have the wheel...
...29ers though would be in short supply
Except we’d all be dead without antibiotics, wouldn’t have the wheel, no electricity to run our computers, living in caves or huts
We weren't all dead before antibiotics
We would have the wheel as some average people would have come up with it
Probably wouldn't have electricity or computers (probably a good thing)
We could live in houses as average people can make houses. I live in a house made of mud with a straw roof and it is fine.
Algebra, geometry, timekeeping, chemistry (in contrast to alchemy), etc require abstract creativity that average people don’t have.
I think we'd have got there in the end - a different route perhaps, but unless we were all very stupid we'd have managed. The genius of Newton et al. is coming up with it in a flash of inspiration, in their heads, not arriving at it by slow hard graft.
What you need is someone who's prepared to sit down and work on a problem. These people don't have to be geniuses, but they have to be methodical and persistent.
Average people don't have abstract creativity? Phew, anyone for eugenics.
If everyone was average we wouldn't get standout statements like this..
You’ll be up to your pustulated arm pits in retro lurgy soon
🙂
The genius of Newton et al. is coming up with it in a flash of inspiration, in their heads, not arriving at it by slow hard graft.
No. Newton and Leibniz independently developed integral calculus. That's not something you get to by slow hard graft, it requires a massive conceptual insight that average people don't have. Once you get the concept, the details are fairly easy to grasp even for fairly average people, but you'll never get there without that massive conceptual insight. That's just one example. Descarte's synthesis of algebra and geometry is another. Seems kinda obvious in hindsight, but no average person would ever have figured that out just through slow hard graft. Without fundamental leaps like that, none of the modern stuff we take for granted would have been possible.
double post - just raising the average!
none of the modern stuff we take for granted would have been possible.
Well, if you don't know what you are missing. Just as we don't have things today that we will have in 200 years time but I am not missing them.
Average people don’t have abstract creativity?
It doesn't say that average people don't have abstract creativity. It says that they (or we, to be honest) don't have the level of abstract creativity needed for the discoveries that shake the foundations of our knowledge. Leibniz, Newton, Einstein, etc didn't merely invent some cool gadget, they completely reconceptualized our understanding of how things work. Average people's minds just don't work at that level.
I still think humans wouldn't have survived. The USP of humans is big brain - which allows outliers to make leaps forward and others to understand these.
If we weren't wiped out by more physically gifted species IIdont think we would not have made it past the stone age. Just think of the intellectual stretch to develop even the most basic forms of metallurgy from a zero base.
Even with our huge intellectual capability most of human timeline is "pre-history" and even with the establishment of anything approaching civilisation population growth was very slow until industrialization and the development of modern medicine.
World population since 5000BC
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/
The thread title says “If humans were historically all of average”. You can only achieve that by removing the people at the upper and lower ends of the spectrum, not by only removing the upper end.
I hadn't really aimed such a daft thread at stats literate people, I had thought of cropping both sides of the normal distribution curve to make the thread acceptable to certain statistics and maths types on here - but decided that a hypothetical world would be more entertaining with the idiots left in it.
Part of the entertainment value in a proper toilet/shower thoughts thread is in offending fellow nerds into nit picking anyway.
The genius of Newton et al. is coming up with it in a flash of inspiration, in their heads, not arriving at it by slow hard graft.
It takes both - and it takes the graft of many too.
It has been said of Einstein that he was an overnight success after 20 years of failure. These flashes of inspiration don't just happen to clever people effortlessly. Its people who've pitched themselves against a problem in a context where lots of people are also trying and challenging and sharing findings. In retrospect we hang the merit on one person but they'll have generally been part of a whole constellation of people who were approaching a problem form all sorts of angles.
Logie Baird and his invention of television for instance - he didn't invent it, he just managed to make a working version of the idea. But the idea preceded Baird's solution by decades and numerous were attacking the problem in different ways. His flash of inspiration was just the cherry on the top but 'television' was really just a combination of other people's efforts and ideas.
And thats the issue with inspiration and creativity generally. We tend to think of it as something that comes from within - that from inside of this person comes something that never existed before. But really what is happening when creative or inventive people are being creative and inventive is that they are noticing things, filtering things out and making connections - its not coming from within.
Most of the responses seem to indicate the stupidest people being left behind. Your average person (in my opinion) is pretty smart. Add to this that some people can be gifted in one way and not in others and I don’t think things would be as terrible as some are making out.
My wife’s late grandfather was extremely intelligent. To the point where you couldn’t really have a conversation with him as he’d just lose you. However, he had zero emotional intelligence and was an utter ****wit when it came to making a brew, sandwich, putting up a shelf etc.
I think we would die off much quicker as a species if the super intelligent (in IQ terms) didn’t have the average person to look after the day to day stuff. Whereas the average joe could just muddle along. Yeah, we’d be missing out on some breakthroughs, but we wouldn’t know about them anyway.
Where are we drawing the line with regards to intelligence and is it basically the high IQ types that we’d be without or the mechanically minded, those good with their hands etc?