(There’s a funny aside on Thermopylae, and the limits of ‘excellent leadership,’ yes they did well but they ultimately lost. To which I would respond, they only ultimately lost because they got outflanked, but also in this case ‘good leadership’ involves a much bigger edge. A better example is, classically, Cortes, who they mention later. Who had to fight off another Spanish force and then still won. But hey.)
I know this is an aside to your aside, but as an avid Sparta-hater, I want to point out that we don't have much evidence that Spartans are good at military leadership, and indeed plenty of evidence in the other direction:
Sparta's opponents often won using clever, innovative tactics, such as at the Battle of Phyle (404 BC), the Battle of Olpae (426 BC), the Battle of Cyzicus (410 BC), the Battle of Arginusae (406 BC), Battle of Tegyra (375 BC), the Battle of Leuctra (371 BC), and the 2nd Battle of Mantinea (362 BC). The Spartans, so far as I have found in reviewing these 51 battles, never made a single creative strategic or tactical innovation. They were sometimes clever; mostly through treachery and trickery.
That said, you have to remember that pretty much all of the primary sources you read on this topic are written by Athenians for Athenians, and less about preserving an accurate historical record for future generations (or even propaganda/promoting internal Athenian solidarity) and more about making specific political points for their own internecine fights. So you should pay more attention to what's objectively verifiable (things like win-loss records, inputs and outputs) and less about the overall vibe that they present.
Let's flip through the hypotheses and see whether the evidence is compelling:
The average reader has gotten smarter and prefers shorter, simpler sentences.
Doesn't seem very plausible to me. In general smarter texts tend to have longer sentences, at least in English (compare academic journals to popular science articles, or HPMOR to Harry Potter). That said, maybe there's a Simpson's paradox thing going. Also, I'm less sure which direction it goes in Chinese, unfortunately.
Longer sentences are more suitable for reading silently, but shorter sentences are more suitable for reading out loud.
This seems eminently plausible to me. It's easier for me to hold a sentence in my head when reading quietly, than to express the whole idea with the right intonations if I were to read out loud. Somebody like Trump, with a more vernacular style, speak in shorter sentences than someone like Obama, with a more literary style.
Longer sentences (in English) are just better, i.e. they promote faster reading and better comprehension.
I do not find this plausible. I expect books to evolve to become more readable, rather than less, as writers collectively get more practice and we have greater cultural evolution.
Shorter sentences good. Why? They communicate clearly. Younger me spoke longer sentences. And abstract ones. People didn't get me. So I changed: short sentences. Clear sentences.
It's net-positive. Think more clearly now, too. Why? Simpler explanations necessitate deeper understanding.
I wonder what the trend is across different languages, and whether that'd help shed some light on various hypotheses. For example, I rarely read Chinese, and even more rarely classical texts, but my vague impression is that older Chinese texts are understood to be much more semantically dense than modern Chinese books, which are slightly more semantically dense compared to English.
I can't find one with older Chinese and modern Chinese side-by-side (because most modern Chinese readers are expected to understand older vernacular and even classical Chinese, with some difficulty) but here's an example with (afaict original) Three Kingdoms text (700 years ago) compared to the English.
Original (I think):
話說天下大勢分久必合，合久必分。周末，七國分爭，並入于秦。及，秦滅之後，楚、漢分爭，又並入於漢。漢朝自高祖斬白蛇而起義一統天下。後來，光武中興。傳至獻帝，遂分為三國。推其致亂之由，殆始於桓、靈二帝。
(81 syllables)
Wikiquote translation:
It is a general truism of this world that anything long divided will surely unite, and anything long united will surely divide. At the end of the Zhou Dynasty, seven kingdoms vied for supremacy, and became part of the Qin Dynasty. Similarly, after the Qin Dynasty was destroyed, Chu and Han vied for supremacy, and became a part of the Han Dynasty. The Han Dynasty had ruled over a unified empire ever since Emperor Gaozu chopped a white serpent in half.[3] Later on, Emperor Guangwu reestablished control of the country.[4] After that, control of the empire was maintained through the generations until the time of Emperor Xian, whereupon the empire divided into three kingdoms. If one were to deduce the origins of the Han Dynasty's decline, one might start with Emperor Huan and Emperor Ling.
(221 syllables)
As far as I can tell, this is approximately representative of the rest of Three Kingdoms. I don't know how a modern Chinese writer would express the same concepts, but I'd guess it'd be around 140-200 syllables or so.
I also get the impression that if you go further back, and see writings in wenyan ("literary"/classical Chinese) the disparity would be even larger, and you more regularly see 3-6 syllable sentences that attempt to express a complicated concept in Art of War or the writings of Confucious.
Naively, I'd guess that there's something of a convergence here: Chinese writings have gotten less dense and have more words per sentence, whereas English writings have gotten more terse and have less words per sentence.
Unfortunately, thinking through your three hypotheses, I can't think of whether the evidence presented can actually differentiate between them.
The average reader has gotten dumber and prefers shorter, simpler sentences.
Maybe the average Chinese reader has gotten dumber and prefer longer and more expressive sentences compared with the terser style that's laden with implications, chengyu, and unstated background stuff.
Longer sentences are more suitable for reading out loud, but shorter sentences are more suitable for reading silently.
Reading out loud (e.g. to children) is probably much more common in modern China than historically.
Shorter sentences are just better, i.e. they promote faster reading and better comprehension.
Maybe there's an optimal sentence length and/or semantic density for faster reading and better comprehension, and as the total amount of writings accumulate, more languages converge towards them.
There's also a fourth explanation for why written Chinese has gotten less dense, not expressed above, which is the availability of paper and printing. Naively if printing and screens are very cheap, there would be less pressure to compress a lot of your ideas with the same amount of paper/ink/writing labor.
Thinking this through more, I'm pretty confused overall. It sure seems like if evidence of a trend in one direction supports a theory, the exact opposite trend ought to be dispositive in a different direction, at least for most theories. And yet I can't see a clear way to rule any of them out.
I think in an ideal world we'd have prediction markets structured around several different levels of investment risk, so that people with different levels of investment risk tolerance can make bets (and we might also observe fascinating differences if the odds diverge, eg if AGI probabilities are massively different between S&P 500 bets and T-bills bets, for example).
I thought about this a bit more, and I'm worried that this is going to be a long-running problem for the reliability of prediction markets for low-probability events.
Most of the problems we currently observe seem like "teething issues" that can be solved with higher liquidity, lower transaction costs, and better design (for example, by having bets denominated in S&P 500 or other stock portfolios rather than $s). But if you should understand "yes" predictions for many of those markets as an implicit bet on differing variances of time value of money in the future, it might be hard to construct a good design that gets around these issues to allow the markets to reflect true probabilities, especially for low-probability events.
(I'm optimistic that it's possible, unlike some other issues, but this one seems thornier than most).
I agree that Tracy does this at a level sufficient to count as "actually care about meritocracy" from my perspective. I would also consider Lee Kuan Yew to actually care a lot about meritocracy, for a more mainstream example.
You could apply it to all endeavours, and conclude that "very few people are serious about <anything>"
Yeah it's a matter of degree not kind. But I do think many human endeavors pass my bar. I'm not saying people should devote 100% of their efforts to doing the optimal thing. 1-5% done non-optimally seems enough for me, and many people go about that for other activities.
For example, many people care about making (risk-adjusted) returns on their money, and take significant steps towards doing so. For a less facetious example, I think global poverty EAs who earn-to-give or work to make mobile money more accessible count as "actually caring about poverty."
Similarly, many people say they care about climate change. What do you expect people to do if they care a lot about climate change? Maybe something like
We basically see all of these in practice, in significant numbers. Sure, most people who say they care about climate change don't do any of the above (and (4) is rare, relatively speaking). But the ratio isn't nearly as dismal as a complete skeptic about human nature would indicate.
I thought about this for more than 10 minutes, though on a micro rather than macro level (scoped as "how can more competent people work on X" or "how can you hire talented people"). But yeah more like days rather than years.
Makes sense! I agree that this is a valuable place to look. Though I am thinking about tests/assessments in a broader way than you're framing it here. Eg things that go into this meta-analysis, and improvements/refinements/new ideas, and not just narrow psychometric evaluations.
Consider using strength as an analogy to intelligence.
People debating the heredity or realism of intelligence sometimes compare intelligence to height. I think, however, "height" is a bad analogy. Height is objective, fixed, easy-to-measure, and basically invariant within the same person after adulthood.*
In contrast intelligence is harder to determine, and results on the same test that's a proxy for intelligence varies a lot from person to person. It's also very responsive to stimulants, motivation, and incentives, especially on the lower end.
I think "strength" is a much better analogy, if you want a non-politicized analogy to think about intelligence more clearly. It's clear that strength has both environmental and genetic factors, and that strength is real.
It's obviously possible to make a composite measure of strength if we wanted to do so. Further, singular tests of strength (eg dead lifts or something) would correlate well with other tests of strength, so you can cheaper proxies, while also being clearly limited in both normal and edge cases.
However, believing that there's a single objective and unambiguous measure of strength would be just as silly as believing that some people cannot be stronger than others.
Strength is clearly valuable for getting through life, while not being enough by itself to solve most problems. A good composite measure of strength should have predicative validity. Being stronger is usually better.
Most people don't build their identities or moral worth upon believing that stronger people are morally superior, though of course some people do.
*(you decline by maybe an inch between 20 and 60, but otherwise it's completely unchanging over time barring having your legs cut off or something).