Things I learned from comments on yesterday's post

Things I learned from comments on yesterday's post - Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz

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Things I learned from comments on yesterday's post

[Dec. 26th, 2012|01:55 am]

Scott

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First, the friend I had the original discussion with wants me to clarify his point. It wasn't just that we have three thousand times the population. It's that we have higher literacy, more wealth, more useful technology like Google, more understanding that academics is actually a thing you can do instead of "that weirdo who stares at right triangles all day", and especially the Flynn Effect which means our average IQ is greater than that of the ancients.

(actually, if you extend the Flynn Effect backwards, the ancient Greeks would have had IQ of -600, which seems unlikely. A more reasonable guess would be to just give them the furthest-back-in-the-past IQ we have reliably measured, which is the 1930s average of 80, but it could be that whatever mysterious force runs the Flynn Effect worked differently then. Also, some people say the Flynn Effect works only by bringing the dumbest people to average, which would mean it shouldn't affect the genius level)

So, he says, really if we were working at Athens level we should have ten, twenty thousand Platos. Since comparing us to the greatest intellectual engine of the ancient world is unfair, he would accept merely a thousand Platos. I apologize for not presenting this stronger argument, but it doesn't change much to me. In either case, there's an obvious deficiency of Platos we have to do something about. Since none of the arguments I raised were quantitative, they can handle a 20 kiloplato deficit as easily as a 1 kiloplato deficit.

Second, Gwern points out a different study on the arbitrariness of popularity than the one I was thinking of but which is still very interesting:

In a 2003 study, psychologist James Cutting (2003, 2006) briefly exposed undergraduate psychology students to canonical and lesser-known Impressionist paintings (the lesser-known works exposed four times as often), with the result that after exposure, subjects preferred the lesser-known works more often than did the control group. Cutting took this result to show that canon formation is a result of cultural exposure over time.

Third,

drethelin gives the example of a cluster of geniuses I previously never appreciated: the Martians. They were a group of Hungarian scientists who all emigrated to the US around the same time, including Theodore von Kármán, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Paul Erdős, and Leó Szilárd. When Fermi was coming up with his Fermi Paradox, someone, awed by the number of Hungarian geniuses, suggested that superintelligent aliens had landed on Earth and were posing as Hungarians (hence the name). Intriguingly, Wikipedia adds "The Hungarian educational system is still superior to the American, and the Hungarian scientists were seemingly superhuman in intellect." If an educational system, of all things, helped produce John von Neumann, I should look into this further.

(but Gwern suggests "The example of Hungary suggests that maybe this is just an example of being fooled by randomness. Randomness produces clumps, and little is clumpier than geniuses.")

Fourth, and this isn't technically something I learned in the comments thread but I thought it was relevant: Half The Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong. The stuff about facts having a half-life was cute, but what really interested me was this:

In 1947, the mathematician Derek J. de Solla Price was asked to store a complete set of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society temporarily in his house. Price stacked them in chronological order by decade, and he noticed that the number of volumes doubled about every 15 years, i.e., scientific knowledge was apparently growing at an exponential rate. Thus the field of scientometrics was born.

Price started to analyze all sorts of other kinds of scientific data, and concluded in 1960 that scientific knowledge had been growing steadily at a rate of 4.7 percent annually for the last three centuries. In 1965, he exuberantly observed, “All crude measures, however arrived at, show to a first approximation that science increases exponentially, at a compound interest of about 7 percent per annum, thus doubling in size every 10–15 years, growing by a factor of 10 every half century, and by something like a factor of a million in the 300 years which separate us from the seventeenth-century invention of the scientific paper when the process began.”

A 2010 study in the journal Scientometrics, looking at data between 1907 and 2007, concurred: The “overall growth rate for science still has been at least 4.7 percent per year.”

This seems like a very suboptimal way of measuring science; you might as well just weigh science textbooks and say we have 784 pounds of epigenetics knowledge. But it still seems better than nothing. And having just seen the GDP graph above, and knowing of course about Moore's Law, it would seem oddly plausible for there to be a constant and invariable Official Growth Rate For Science.

Fifth, a few people make the argument for "no, ancient Athens really was that great. From

celandine13:

Put it another way: we don't have aristocrats today.

Aristocracy was a pretty horrible thing on net because it kept most people peasants and slaves by force. On the other hand, it was a pretty sweet deal for the aristocrats. They were encouraged to develop their skills to the utmost. In some cultures (Vedic India, classical Athens, the Royal Society in the late 1600s) the small group of people in an aristocratic culture were at a really high level intellectually and even physically and socially. And they were free (culturally/psychologically free, not just legally) to tinker around, to play intellectually, in ways that enabled some of them to invent whole new fields of science and philosophical paradigms. Aristocratic culture is focused on living well, being an excellent person, and doing things...it's what people would be like if there were no higher-ups left whose approval you could chase. But no matter how rich you get today, no matter how privileged, you can't join an aristocratic culture that gives you that focus on all-around arete and freedom. I haven't met the super-rich, but I went to college with some pretty rich kids...and they were just as needy and plugged into the system as anybody else.

We have enough wealth in modern society that we could probably afford to include more people in aristocratic cultures/communities, if anybody were willing to build them. It wouldn't necessarily have to include the whole serfdom/slavery aspect. You could sustain a free lifestyle on a lot less effort than most smart people usually spend making their living, if you managed to create a cultural reality where *you* and your pals were at the top of the food chain and there was thus no need to gain someone else's stamp of credibility (e.g. "I'll be a real professional if I become a lawyer.") If you could get 150,000 more-talented-than-average people to actually believe they were aristocrats, they'd probably perform more like Classical Athens.

Sixth, Chris posted one of the most interesting graphs I've ever seen, which I reproduce below:

You see (the log of) US economic progress being ramrod-straight, with the tiny exception of a blip for the Great Depression, for the past 200 or so years.

If this is true, it...kind of invalidates an entire class of political arguments? Like, it should be very hard to believe taxes hurt the economy when taxes have increased ten or a hundredfold over the past few centuries but the economy has kept going exactly according to trend. The same is true of government regulation. And those are both conservative ideas, because conservatives tend to talk about the economy more, but any liberal claims about increasing economic output - Keynes, women's lib, I don't know - also seem completely ineffective. I don't know why this isn't being talked about more.

(Also, apparently the Civil War didn't hurt the economy?)

michaelvassar told me at our community Christmas party tonight that he thinks the graph is completely wrong, or at least that GDP is a terrible measure that wouldn't capture real changes in the economy. On the other hand, commenter Chris, who says he's an economic historian, says of it that "The data are pretty decent. Not fantastic, but certainly not noise (unlike, say, the Angus Maddison pre-1800 GDP data, which is largely educated guesses). But the steadiness of growth after the start of the Industrial Revolution in the United States is a fairly well-established fact in economic history." Yet another thing I need to look into.

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From:

widgetfox
2012-12-26 10:29 am (UTC)

John von Neumann prodigious before entering formal education system.

Taxes

Shadowstats??????

Murray, On Human Accomplishment

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