Rationality Quotes December 2013

Cyan

Rationality quotes time!

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Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
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Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Not a very good one, though. Most of the ancients that people pay attention to these days are the ones who were well-fed and well-read; it's strongly suspected much of the Flynn effect is population-wide increases in those two variables (as well as similar things like reduced disease load).

If true then why has it been acting on white Americans post 1960?

4Randaly12y

You mean well-fed in the sense of "not starving," but that doesn't imply "well-fed" in the sense of eating a healthy diet. There's reason to think that upper-class Romans would have been even more damaged by lead poisoning than the poor, and there's good evidence that even emperors were deficient in iodine.

4private_messaging12y

Yeah. The raise is not a simple shift of the entire curve. Though, this resonates with another topic: there's a lot of people today living in conditions vastly inferior to Americans or Europeans of 1910, mostly in Africa, scoring about the same on the IQ tests as western folks from the 1910 supposedly did. I see a plenty of people both accept the Flynn effect (whenever thinking about their superiority to people of the past) and think that said IQ gap is caused by inherently lower abilities (whenever thinking about their superiority to people of other races).