Also, if you aren't physically well, this will hinder your performance. So it's really quit hard to sort out if your "low IQ" is due to your poor health or if your poor health is due to your "low IQ."

And I put that in quotations marks because I know a fair amount about IQ tests. I used to be somewhat seriously involved with a thing called The TAG Project where I was briefly Director of Community Life and I rubbed elbows in cyberspace with people who worked at the Gifted Development Center in Denver, Colorado and such.

There are a lot of problems with IQ tests and with the history of IQ testing and yadda. Most IQ tests top out at around 145 points, which makes it inherently hard to measure anything about that and tests are only tools and only as good as the person administering them and can be gamed and so forth.

The first test that started the whole IQ testing thing was never intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness in France because they couldn't use age at that time since a lot of kids didn't have birth certificates and their exact age wasn't always known and there was huge differences in school readiness between the big city kids and the rural farm kids and it was the rural farm kids who tended to not have birth certificates and birth dates.

So they asked a guy, I think named Binet, to create a test to sort out which kids were ready for school and this went down in history as the first IQ test. This is where you get the Stanford-Binet, if I recall correctly.

The entire concept of IQ is problematic for a lot of reasons and it ends up being sort of circular, self-reinforcing logic and self-fulfilling prophecy. If you do well on a test, we believe you are the best and brightest and have a great future and we put you in better classes for "enrichment" and we give you better opportunities and so on and so forth and then we announce that "See: Smarts are how you succeed."

I've managed to do a lot of things the world told me couldn't be done because I was one of the smart kids and all that, but I also have serious health problems and spent years homeless and no one was lauding me as one of the smart people when I was homeless. And I didn't seem that smart during that time. I was very, very sick and my forum comments were full of typos and so forth.

I still thought I was smart. I was still pulling off things the world said couldn't be done against long odds under difficult circumstances, but I was very poor and I wasn't getting social recognition for any of it and people were literally calling me "crazy" to my face, probably in part because I was homeless and still had the self concept and self esteem of one of the smart kids who graduated at the top of my class and had a lot of academic awards and the world had problems with me acting like one of the privileged people while I was homeless.

I find the whole selection through IQ that you describe dubious at best, and I seriously doubt the usefulness of it. It is a good predictor, but not that good.

However, what I do see is a society today that requires higher abstract intelligence than 20 years ago, which in turn had higher requirements than 20 years before that.

This is partly a function of population going up. It means we need more complex systems for the world to be able to support that population and for human life to work.

In the time of President Lincoln, the average education level of a woman was about 2nd to 4th grade and most of them were homemakers. I used to talk to folks in Pakistan and they had similar education levels for their women. It's one of the youngest countries in the world in terms of demographics.

In my father's day, most people grew up on farms and it was common to stop formal education at the eighth grade. You typically completed high school if you were planning on going to college and becoming a doctor or lawyer or something.

My dad dropped out of the tenth grade. It was the Great Depression and he was a big guy and he could earn a man's wage and finishing school didn't make sense and it wasn't the stigmatizing failure that it is today.

He joined the Army and he had so many Army schools that he got out of going to Korea. He fought in WWII and in Vietnam and he had his bags packed for the Korean war and got a phone call the night before that he was the only guy in the battalion -- about a thousand people -- with all the military schools they wanted for teaching ROTC. She he and some officer got out of going and he taught college ROTC instead of fighting in the front lines of the Korean war, even though he was a high school drop out.

And in his day, enlisted soldiers like him never had college. That was limited to officers.

By the time my husband was well into his Army career, enlistees needed some college to make it to the higher enlisted ranks and I have seen articles that a lot of factory workers these days have college degrees.

It's not really shocking that we need more information in the system to make the same resources go further for purposes of letting 7 billion people occupy the same land mass that used to support a lot fewer people than that and make sure there is enough to go around. If you build up, you can fit more people in the same land area than if you build out.

And this is something that can be overcome to a large degree by education and "practice" so to speak.

Lots of people use tech today that would have been special tech only found at a university or in a research facility or whatever and now it is the norm. I think you are making a mistake to conflate that trend with some kind of measure about individual intelligence.

Ant colonies change over time. They mature and behave differently. The individual ants aren't anymore intelligent and they don't have books to read or whatever. The system of the ant colony undergoes what you might call cultural changes and the ants in a later stage colony inherit the accumulated wisdom and they aren't any smarter or better educated and they don't have a higher IQ individually, but the system becomes more intelligent in some sense anyway.

And that's kind of what you are seeing with humans, more or less.

I'm not trying to pick some kind of fight. I'm just talking on the internet with a stranger during a pandemic about a topic I know a fair amount about because it interests me. And that easily comes across as fighty and that's not really my goal.

So you aren't required to agree with anything. I'm not trying to "win" some argument. You said a thing. I responded. You chose to reply for whatever reason. Rinse and repeat and here we are.