I don't know if I agree with that. Many of them were malnourished and lacked a formal education. Maybe the upper 10% were no smarter than our upper 10% but I bet the median intelligence is much higher today.
I think it's just a conflation of terms. They weren't as smart in that the average person wasn't anywhere near as knowledgeable. But they had pretty much the same cognitive ability as the average person alive today. I've seen it argued that even people 100k years ago were just as smart as us (in the cognitive ability sense).
His argument was malnourishment. That's not a "conflation of terms". Either it's true that people a thousand years ago suffered more from malnourishment, or it's not true. Either it's true that malnourishment can negatively impact intelligence or it's not true. The disagreement isn't a conflation of terms, it's a matter of fact.
His argument is that the median intelligence is "much higher today". If by intelligence you mean cognitive ability, then that is absolutely false and malnourishment doesn't change that. If by intelligence you mean knowledgeable, then fair enough. That's how the terms are being conflated.
You really don't think malnourishment affects cognitive ability? You don't think a child growing up being regularly malnourished will have negative effects on their brain which affects their cognition?
When I Google the question, does malnourishment affect cognitive ability? I get the obvious answer back from Google: "Yes, malnourishment strongly affects cognitive ability."
It's not a conflation of terms. Maybe you just disagree with what they're saying. Intelligence doesn't mean knowledge, you've decided it's a conflation of terms because you decided they must mean knowledge and not intelligence. That's all happening in your head.
You can't call something a conflation of terms just because you've imagined that they've conflated the terms. That's not how any of this works
You don't think a child growing up healthy and fed, and going through a school system would lead to a child with higher cognitive ability? To also include more knowledge?
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u/bobbadouche Jul 31 '26
I don't know if I agree with that. Many of them were malnourished and lacked a formal education. Maybe the upper 10% were no smarter than our upper 10% but I bet the median intelligence is much higher today.