Intelligence in the Internet Age

ErikPeterson writes to tell us about an article on News.com that takes a look at technology versus intelligence of the general population. From the article: 'Is technology making us smarter? Or are we lazily reliant on computers, and, well, dumber than we used to be?'

Comments

Average intelligence is a constant

[Lord Grey]

So the article basically says that intelligence remains the same overall, but how the intelligence is applied changes wildly as time goes by. Also, that specific applications of intelligence (skill?) in one field does not necessarily translate to another. Both points make sense, but I don't think either one is really news to anyone here. The article actually relates (without saying so) to one of my favorite quotes:

"Civilization advances by increasing the number of things one can do simultaneously."

I wish I could remember who actually said that, and whether I'm remembering it accurately or not. A quick search didn't turn up anything concrete, but I was probably looking in the wrong places.

Re:Average intelligence is a constant

[absolutspl]

"Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them." - Alfred North Whitehead good ole' google.com

Re:Average intelligence is a constant

[RealAlaskan]

A quick search didn't turn up anything concrete, but I was probably looking in the wrong places.

Does that tell us something about your intelligence in the internet age?

Seriously (didn't want to be mean, but couldn't help myself), were you maybe thinking of Alfred Whitehead, who said:

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Re:Average intelligence is a constant

[jejones]

Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics.

An Asimov essay made a point apropos to TFA, and that points out at least one major gaping hole in the "here's an eighth-grade test from a 19th century elementary school; could you pass it?" meme. The Asimov essay dealt with a math book of 18th or 19th century vintage, and pointed out how much of it was spent on things that aren't studied today--because they're of minimal worth in today's world. The example Asimov gave was mixed-base arithmetic (adding shillings and pence and pounds)--the eighth-grade test was chock full of similarly antiquated and now-worthless units of measure.

That said--there is a core of information that people should learn well enough to not need to consult Google, lest one spend one's time looking things up rather than doing something worthwhile. The question is, what is that core?

Re:Average intelligence is a constant

[mbrother]

The above post, and others, proves the point that we're "smarter" using computers. But ascribing a quote to someone isn't hard...

What's going to be harder in the future, and can be hard right now, is knowing how to verify and sift through the information you find on the internet. A "smart" person will be the one who can do this, and a "dumb" one is the one who gets their information from a bogus website full of crap.

That would have been a better and more interesting direction for the article to go.

Re:Average intelligence is a constant

[Henry V .009]

The Flynn Effect actually shows that intelligence has beening rising ~2 IQ points a decade since 1900. Some recent data suggests that this may have petered out beginning in the 1980s though.

It remains an open question as to the cause. It's far too fast to be genetic. A combination of better childhood nutrition and lower disease burden may explain most of it. There has been some suggestion that the Flynn Effect is mainly concentrated on the lower-half of the Bell Curve, but this is contested.

Re:Average intelligence is a constant

[RealAlaskan]

What's going to be harder in the future, and can be hard right now, is knowing how to verify and sift through the information you find on the internet.

That little insight is what made Google what it is. Anyone who figures a good way to really automate that is going to get far richer than they did.

Intelligence is so ill-defined that I feel a little foolish talking about it, but it's more or less correlated to lots of good things, like success in school, ability to write page ranking algorithms, and so on, so we do all keep talking about it, whatever it is.

I do think that over-reliance on technology can keep folks from using their brains, and thus keep them from developing their intelligence. Even someone who is reasonably shrewd about finding factual facts won't gain much by it if he can't analyse those facts.

Re:Average intelligence is a constant

[plover]

Anyone who figures a good way to really automate that is going to get far richer than they did.

Except that reality is perversely the exact opposite of this. Witness the evolution of Google's PageRank or of any set of spam filters.

What happens is that you have people with bad "stuff" (spam, ignorant ideas, marketing hype vs. facts, or whatever.) And these flat-earth people are filtered out by effective spam filters, or left behind by legitimate search engines. So what do they do? They rig the game. Spammers start quoting Jane Austin in between pictures of Vl4GR4. Casino operators place spam-links in unrelated blogs. Homeopathic quackery is disguised as "medical" advice. And all these idiots have to do is figure out how to splatter spam all over until their Google PageRanks show them to be the world's leading authority on "all-natural cures for cancer" or whatever.

Google tries hard. They really don't want quack medicine to show up as the first hit for "cancer treatments," but they've provided the ultimate testing ground for the shysters. All the flat-earthers have to do is keep trying until they look legitimate.

Already it's become hard to convince my wife that the top hit on a search engine isn't necessarily the most honest or accurate place to get advice. Looking at Google's results, even I might get caught by a sham site at the top named mayo-clinic.com (the real site is mayoclinic.com) Fortunately, many of the stupid sites (alternative-medicine-and-health.com, for example) are self-announcing.

On the bright side, it's possible that intelligence is going to be subject to evolutionary pressures. If the people who fall for the flat-earther's scams run out and try to cure their cancer with laetrile (or whatever the 2000's equivalent is,) then Charles Darwin's theories suggest that they are going to be a self-limiting lot.

Re:Average intelligence is a constant

[rgmoore]

The question is, what is that core?

Each person has their own core of knowledge that's essential to them in their lives, but much of that isn't shared. As a trivial example, I need to know the layout of streets in my neighborhood but not in yours, while you need to know your neighborhood but not mine. If I ever want to visit you, I can use a map (though you'd need to provide your address first). An auto mechanic needs to memorize different things from a surgeon. To a considerable extent, we wind up learning those kinds of things without necessarily trying. I find that I'll wind up memorizing things incidentally when I've looked them up enough times.

The things that everyone needs to know are essentially how to get along in society- the three Rs, the basic structure of society, and how to coexist with others without fighting. Add in the ability to learn new things as you discover that you need to know them, and you've come to the end of what everyone needs to know.

Re:Average intelligence is a constant

[jaseparlo]

The problem is though that the idiots usually manage to reproduce before they knock themselves off, so hoping Darwin will save you won't get you anywhere.

This is the geeks misunderstanding of natural selection - intellectuals love evolution because they think their superior brains will win in the end. This works in the work world to some extent, but on a species scale it's different.

The reality as far as evolution goes (and remember that evolution works on a macro scale, not in your lifetime or the foreseeable future) is that stupid people are at a distinct advantage. While intellectuals tend to have two or one children, the stupid masses are going at it like rabbits. Intelligent are at a selective disadvantage, because we don't pass our genes on as often as the trailer trash chicks that drop out of school by the time they are pregnant at 14 and have 8 kids by their 30th birthday.

*They* are the evolutionary giants, not us. We live side by side now, but when society breaks down in a few hundred years or whatever, the billions of big dumb kids will finish us off very quickly.

Of course, it's even less of an issue for most /.ers, because sitting at home by yourself with your 20 gig porn collection isn't gonna pass your genes on to anything but your keyboard...

Huh?

[Kid Zero]

Or are we lazily reliant on computers, and, well, dumber than we used to be?'

You're asking this here? Can't wait to see the answers. :)

Hmm

[ZakuSage]

Lazy != Dumb

Re:Hmm

[arevos]

In a way, it is. Using your neocortex more leaves you more "intelligent" than using it less.

Assuming that by 'lazy', one means a tendency to avoid work, then being lazy requires one to use their mind more, not less.

A truly lazy person will work out how to achieve the same results with less effort. Necessity being the mother of invention, most innovations come about from people trying to reduce the work they have to do.

wut

[DrEldarion]

i think that you're conclusion bout da net makin ppl dum is rong. their not dum their just typin in da web way. u just dont get it.

sounds like "Feed", by M.T. Anderson

[saarbruck]

for an interesting fictional look at the result of always having the digital world instantly available, check out "Feed" by M.T. Anderson (ISBN: 0763622591)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0763 622591/qid=1127163377/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-2061 972-8686328?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Good question!

[fireboy1919]

Hold on, let me check my new brain for the answer.

Nope. It looks like that's all background noise.

Clearly we is just as smarter as we used to was, and can did our stuff just as much as we used to could.

Both

[phasm42]

Smart people will use technology to augment their intelligence. Dumb people will use it to become lazier. And in between there will be mixes of augmentation and lazy reliance. I don't think there's a single answer to this question. I think this has always been true, but technology amplifies this gap.

right-

[conJunk]

Both points make sense, but I don't think either one is really news to anyone here

exactly... it seemed like it was written because some editor really needed a technology article, fast, and just pulled first thing he could find out of his butt... it didn't really offer anything at all, and when it did, it was all obvious

anyone who grew up in the last 30 years probably remembers wanting to use a calculator in school, and being told we couldn't because we had to learn how to do it first. that's basically still the case, isn't it? technology isn't going to make anyone dumber, unless we opt not to learn things any more.

but really, those people have always been around, and there have always been geeks who want to learn everything anyway. i don't think anything is going to change, except there will be more toys to play with.

Re:right-

[conJunk]

Lots of high schools have really bad teachers who basically teach their algebra classes as if they were a "learn to punch things into a calculator but not understand what happens" class. Students don't really have an option as to who their teacher is and even then, some school systems make this type of thing go on uniformly. When people try to go up in higher level college math, they're fucked.

i don't know... i've had bad teachers, and i've had good teachers. I think if a student is really interested in a subject, he or she will find a way to learn it.

algebra is a funny example, becuase the number of people who would put in the effort to learn algebra despite a bad teacher is a small group of people. that's us, the geeks. we like algebra, we think it's pretty. we're a minority.

i think that with the kinds of people we (geeky slashdot people) like to hang out with, and with the kinds of jobs we get, it's easy to get a skewed perspective of how people really think and what they are in to. it's like in college. i went to a small liberal arts college, and i would meet kids all the time who would say stuff like "how do these conservatives get elected? *i* don't know anyone who would vote for them"... well... there's a big america out there that i just don't like to be in touch with...

the same is true for technology... when we invented calculators, people who would never have leared math in the first place could now do it... that didn't stop anybody who would have learned it anyway from still learning how it's done

Re:right-

[j-cloth]

we like algebra, we think it's pretty
I want that on a t-shirt. ThinkGeek? You Listening?

Not an amazing revelation

[jandrese]

Basically, technology makes us more efficient, which is an assertion that few on slashdot are going to dispute. This means we can either do more with our time, or have more leisure time and look "lazier" to someone without proper context.

During the dawn of agriculture, humans had to work their butts off every day tending to fields or getting ready for the winter or they would die. These days you can work a mere 8 hours a day in a cushy office job and have all of the food and shelter you need. Modern man looks a lot lazer--he only works half as much time wise--but due to technology he's actually contributing more to society than his primitive ancestor.

It's a trick.

[hungrygrue]

Or are we lazily reliant on computers, and, well, dumber than we used to be?'

Any honest answer to that question will be modded -1 flamebate.

Yup, and he wouldn't survive today either!

[garcia]

Does that mean he's not as bright as an economist from the 1950s? Is he smarter? The answer is probably "no" on both counts. He traded one skill for another. Computer skills make him far more efficient and allow him to present more accurate--more intelligent--information. And without them, he'd have a tough time doing his job. But drop him into the Federal Reserve 40 years ago, and a lack of skill with the slide rule could put an equal crimp on his career.

Or, on the other side of the ruler, put that same economist from 40 years ago w/his slide rule knowledge into today's world and watch him be as equally worthless.

Computers, the Internet, and the information available to us nearly instantaneously has made us a completely different culture all together. There is no use comparing us to those in the past. It's just not the same... I remember when I was learning about cells and my father said to me, "When I learned about cells we knew of the cell wall and the nucleus. Look at what you have to know." Now students probably don't even have to know that - Google tells them everything they need to know. That doesn't make them dumb - that makes them have room to learn TONS more.

I am honestly looking forward to the day when wireless Internet is combined with Internet mapping software (i.e. GMaps) and an online collaboration. Say goodbye to speed traps (your autorouting will know the locations of the traps and route you around it or warn you to slow down).

The possibilities are endless and the creative factor is incredible!

one way technology hasn't helped intelligence

[H310iSe]

Aside from the obvious one, spelling, I think the word processor has encouraged at best a different kind of intelligence.

It used to be you had to conceive your entire essay/story/etc., then have each paragraph, and each sentence, held in your head to some extent before you started writing. Think once / write once (edit once) and then type it out. Now you can start a paper/paragraph/sentence with nothing in your short term memory, just kind of roll it out and go back a million times to edit/redu/rethink/rework it until it's all coherent.

Basically, for certain tasks, the more that's stored in the electronic memory the less is (needed to be) stored in your brain.

IMHO....

[lem0n263]

The truth is that we (humans as a whole) haven't grown progressively smarter or dumber, just we have learned how to get information when needed. just my 2 cents

Re:IMHO....

[interiot]

So, 100 years ago, people could have set off an atomic bomb, flown to space, and printed up some million+ transistor circuits, if they only knew the right people to talk to? The only difference between Einstein and Pythagoras is that Einstein talked to more people?

No, it's because our knowledge builds on top of the last generation's knowledge, and along with writing those ideas down, humanity's knowledge base becomes exponentially larger.

Look it up

[nucal]

Never memorize anything you can look up. Einstein, Albert

which you can look up here

Re:yes or no question?

[Bonhamme Richard]

Define intelligence:

If it's based on mostly memory specific tasks (like speling, for xampl), then I'd say the information age, with spell checkers and the like do make us 'dumber.'

But if its based on reasoning ability, the information age has probably raised average intelligence. I may not be able to spell, but I can handle many different kinds of systems and adapt to new ones in ways that people 100 years ago probably couldn't. And the fact that I have to constantly learn new tech (how to upgrade this software, how to program my new VCR, etc.) plays into that.

Not seeing the downside.

[Godeke]

Intelligence is *not* remembering phone numbers. Intelligence is the application of ideas to solve problems. Having a strong memory can be helpful in some tasks (and certainly an amount of working store is a minimum requirement) but memorizing long chains of random data is pointless. Seeing patterns in *seemingly* random data, perhaps that requires a larger working store, but it also seems like a great place to apply computation.

I don't see the downside of the Internet, instant communication, computational power etc as far as intelligence goes. The example they give of a financial analysis: the modern analyst uses computers to build models and compute massive numbers of "what if" possibilities. The old analyst would be force to spend an immense amount of time and effort to compute one of these.

Likewise, I have on tap an immense number of resources on administrative tips and such. I could keep it all in my head, but why when I can search for solutions, bookmark them and document the least amount to be able to do it all again in the future?

Cause or Effect

[Orne]

I have long maintained that the mother of invention is not necessity, but in fact laziness.

Why do we have remote controls for our televisions and garage doors? We could very well get out of our chairs and cars, walk the 5 feet, and do it ourselves... but no, we have a machine to do it for us. I could drive down to the library and look up some information, but now I have the internet on a PC in my den to answer my inane questions.

I don't bother driving out sunday morning to buy a paper, or even getting one delivered. Too much work, when I already have the computer to serve it up. Or if I'm real lazy, I could get digital cable, where I just push the "Guide" on the remote control, and it tells me what's playing in the next X hours.

Are these really things we "need" (ala necessity) ? Perhaps, perhaps not. But they are all labor saving devices. I'd draw a conclusion here, but I think I'm just too lazy to finish.

Way dumber.

[BigZaphod]

Oh yes. Certainly dumber.

Of course I have no actual evidence for this. But that's cuz I'm dumber now than I was yesterday when I'm sure I had the proof bookmarked someplace. It keeps getting worse, too. By this time next week I'll probably forget how to form sentences and have to google each word in order to build up my thoughts. That'll probably suck. Of course since I'll be dumber I won't notice anyway.

Also, as someone else noted

[Sycraft-fu]

Lazy doesn't mean dumb. Smart people often apply their intelligence to try and automate something so they don't have to do it. Our UNIX admin here at work reworked our new account system. Previously students had to come to the computer room, show their ID, get added, go long in to telnet, run a shitty script that often didn't work, have someone manually create the Windows side of the account,. Now they go to a webpage, enter their university ID, it checks their affiliation, makes and synchs all the accounts, and does so in about 5 seconds.

Now his motivation for this was laziness, basically. He was sick of dealing with a massive rush of students the first week and having to have the whole computing staff bust their ass on meanial shit. So he found an intelligent solution to the problem. This year, the first day was hardly any different from any other.

Lazy, perhaps, not dumb.

Re:Also, as someone else noted

[TeknoHog]

Laziness is one thing that drives new inventions, but there's also the sheer joy of hacking. People like us enjoy solving problems.

If there's a job that would take the same time either by brute force, or by writing a program that does the actual work quickly, I'd choose the latter. I'd probably choose it even if it took slightly longer than the grunt route, because of the fun and the experience/education gained. There's also this weird sense of inherent wrongness/evil in doing grunt work, if a clever alternative is available.

For the lazy...

[Spy der Mann]

the google query is:
"are we more stupider than we used to was?"

Intelligence versus knowledge and skill

[tod_miller]

And 'uneducated' farmer 200 years ago was perhaps one of the more educated general folk, knowing much about the land. He used technology of his time.

Today modern farmers know more or less? They certainly know different things. The article is redundant because it doesnt define intelligence.

Certainly people are more free thinking today, and have been educated in how to learn things (I would hope, judging by teh intarwebnet masses this isn't so). So peoples intelligence (natural free thinking, ability to push their minds) is up, so is knowledge, such as random facts from wikipedia.

Why? 200 years ago there were only 112 music, documentary cultural and shopping channels available on cable, not there are more. You get it.

Information is flowing like quick silver (most of it is like shit, like engaydget blogs), we are at a time where for the FIRST TIME in history free, mass communication is available to all (potentially) unrestricted and secure, globalized and revolutionary.

First thing that happens? it all starts getting locked back down again... anyway... people don't truly appreciate the internet until their own mum buys something from china, without realising.

No, I don't mean made in china, I mean a chinese company, selling internationally.

Each day I speak to almost 30 nationalities, and I try and get something from each of them. Who did that 200 years ago?

The fact that there is a hetrogenous level of education now is great, and I see that when this moves globally, and EVERY child on earth gets a good, competative education, we will realise we are no longer breeding hatred into generations but understanding.

Or some crap.

To confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image: kidnaps

random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org

Ah, the 'more leisure time' myth

[BeanThere]

The Khoi-San bushmen live in a near desert and yet compared to modern Western societies, once you've factored out all the activities required for survival, they literally have more leisure time than we do. It is a myth (propagated by who?) that "primitive" societies have to "work their butts off just to survive". We are the ones working our butts off, just to survive and "keep up with the Joneses".

OK, granted, more primitive societies do not produce the kind of 'excess wealth' and R&D environments that allow us to create and afford things like hospital care, roads, modern medicine and cool gadgets. But nonetheless this still seems like a counter-intuitive result, and it should very well make you wonder why, for all our technology, we are working as hard or harder than ever before, and why our stress levels are higher than agrarian or hunter/gatherer societies.

This is not a technology problem, it's a cultural problem - somehow we are willingly enslaved by the "modern work ethic" ('wave slaves'), driven perhaps by the ruling class, who implement systems that result in massively uneven distribution of wealth. It is possible to create enough "stuff" to allow us all to work fewer hours, but something else is wrong with the system that prevents this from actually ever happening. We've been conditioned to think eight hours a day is normal and is not much, but really, think about it, who came up with this "eight hours" concept anyway? Eight hours a day is nearly your whole life, as most of the little remaining time goes to sleep or "administrative" tasks like grooming, eating, buying groceries, etc. What do you have left, maybe an hour or two a day on average?

Re:Ah, the 'more leisure time' myth

[lgw]

That's only half the story, however: I could achieve the same standard of living as a stone-age tribesman with very little work indeed. The simple fact is, technology improves our expectations as fast as it improves our efficiency, so it will always take more-or-less the same amount of work to achieve a standard of living that "the average person" in a given society would find acceptable. The technology available just determines what the work ethic in your culture will provide for you.

another hypothesis: language is evolving

[slew]

Although I don't have any evidence (not that is required on /.), my hypothesis for the Flynn effect has always been that language is in fact improving the human ability to abstract information better than it has done in the past and will continue this improvement over time.

The flimsy basis for this argument is that when babies are young and don't know any language, memory and intelligence seem very rudimentary, but as they learn language, they gain the ability to store, categorize, recall, and cross-link concepts and ideas to form intelligent behaviors. It stands to reason that it is quite possible that the more efficient the language, even if the symbolic processing capability is constant, the more apparently intelligent the resultant behaviors can be. Language (and the ability to process more complex information) is something that is constantly developing/evolving and can do so faster and independent of other forces like DNA evolution, possibly explaining how this effect has been going on in the past and also allowing for this effect to continue for the forseeable future.

One of the leaps of faith that has to be made to adopt this philosophy is that intelligent behavior is something that is the result of language (or more generically, symbolic processing), not any "magic" phenomena of the brain that requires evolution and genetics to change. This includes not only the behavior of test taking, but the more "real-world" behavior of surviving in an increasingly complex world.

As a cheap example, the invention of a language to express numbers has allowed humans to become more intelligent in mathematics than before that improvement has occured (e.g., "one" vs "many" vs a counting system). It allows us to organize our thought about math better and allows us to exhibit seemingly more intelligent behavior about math related things.

As a possibly future example, wouldn't it be great if we had a language to communicate musical queries better than "humming" to your friend to try to get them to remember the name of a tune? Seems to me that years from now when we look back we'll see how dumb we were that we had to use humming and grunts and groans to communicate and organize our thoughts about music. What morons we are ;^)

An analogous ideas is how "compression" has allowed a constant amount of digital bandwidth convey an increasing amount of information/per-unit-time, as improved compression techniques have evolved. Sometimes the improvement in compression has been low-level (oversampled uart vs binary manchester coding vs 8/10 coding vs PRML) medium level (MNP5, LZW) or high level (mpeg/jpeg video/picture compression). Even with a fixed capacity, the improvement in language has brought great increases in throughput (although improving throughput isn't the same as improving intelligence, it's still something to ponder).

This idea of evolution of language allowing improved representation of abstract ideas and resultant apparent increase in cognitive behavior has always intrigued me as I've pondered the difference between "chinese" ideographic style language vs "european" alphabetic style language. Is there any inherent advantage to either?

Intelligence is the difference....

[MrCreosote]

between knowing 1+1=2, and knowing why.