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Vaniver comments on Rationality Quotes December 2013 - Less Wrong
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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).
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.
I have a historian standing next to me right now who says the lead poisoning story is BS and people who propagate it should be shot/severely eye-rolled at. He says that:
-Romans did drink lead-sweetened wine but
-only lower class romans did so because they could not afford better
-lead-sweetened wine continued to be drunk up until the 18th century
-While some people undoubtedly died, saying it caused the fall of the Roman Empire is a ridiculous just-so story
-particularly because the sweetener was used centuries before and after the fall with no increasing usage leading up to the fall
-and the eastern Roman empire continued to exist for another thousand years anyway.
But they weren't consuming huge amounts of unstable polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils, either.
They were, and who said they're bad anyway?
Olive oil is only 10% PUFA and I doubt they were getting 10% of calories from olive oil. Benefits of PUFA are at much lower doses, or in the case of Omega-3 making up for huge O3/O6 imbalances.
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).
If true then why has it been acting on white Americans post 1960?
If I remember correctly, researchers suspect that there was significantly decreased lead exposure around that time. I personally prefer to think of it as the Flynn Result rather than the Flynn Effect, because the second seems too much like the Flynn Cause. There are a bunch of reasons why measured IQs could increase, and some of them are there sometimes and not other times, and the measured increase fluctuates accordingly.