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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

There is an interesting TED lecture about the gradual rise in intelligence, how children are usually smarter than their parents.

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That is a great lecture, and worth linking to (hence this reply), even more so for its lessons about how changes in abstract thinking lead to changes in moral standards and behavior: http://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_h...

If one is more interested in discussion of the effect itself, and whether the IQ score changes reflect actual changes in intelligence between generations, Flynn has a longer and more academic discussion on the subject here: http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/about-us/directory/beyond...

Well, our parents invented things like nuclear energy and semiconductor physics, while we invented, what, social media?

Software that everyone in the world can use simultaneously. Sounds like a pretty good invention to me.

Except that it isn't. For example, if everybody in the world opened a single Google Docs document, then the system would break horrendously. This type of software is still very much compartmentalized.

Sounds like it's still a good problem for us to keep working on then :)

I'm just glad our parents didn't develop the office stapler to perfection instead of working on more relevant issues.

I wish they had spent more time on scalable anonymous election systems, but I guess we'll get there eventually.

> Software that everyone in the world can use simultaneously

Our parents invented the Internet too ...

That's true. Internet is what makes this possible, not social media. Social Media is like a skin on an internet that was developed when gen x was in diapers.

> Social Media is like a skin

Which ironically is what our parents called the "Application layer" when they were designing it ;)

OSI layers were implied. ;)

Incorrectly so :-o

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite#Compar...

What a superficial thing to say. Is social media all you can think of? Every generation is born into a context out of its control and contributes what it can to what it was dealt. If you think social media is the pinnacle of the Generation X,Y,Z group, you aren't looking very far.

We 're listening.

I am your parents. We invented nuclear weapons. We still regret it. So what if we decided to stay the course and figure out how to make a black hole? The first thing that would happen is it would be weaponized. That is what we do. Weaponize stuff. It's an extension of what makes us human-the ability to make tools. At least social media cannot be wpaonized in an immediately lethal way. The worst it can do is make us dumber. and therefore safer to play with.

You are obviously not my parents. Btw, what do you think Hitler used to create that nazi army? social media.

We build the LHC, we landed on a comet, we decoded the human genome...

Evolutionary, not revolutionary. We haven't discovered anything really new in a while. CRISPR-CAS9 and the like may qualify but still I'm not sure they stack up next to the discovery of DNA itself.

All that happened from about 1945 until 1970. Then it stopped. I find it impossible to believe that we learned everything there is in 25 years. Something is broken.

In 1960, say, the discovery of DNA looked like a fundamental increase in understanding, but not revolutionary - kind of like discovery of the Higgs boson looks today.

What's "broken" is that it takes more than 25 years to work out the practical uses of a lot of these discoveries. We see much more of the total fruit from a discovery in 1950 than we do for an equivalent discover in 1990.

Not really, the LHC was designed in the 80s. Genome project launched in 1990. It's true that current generations work on incremental problems. The blockchain and social media are something of note.

Don't forget we are close to an electric vehicle breakthrough to the mass market, and it looks like solar PV is on a cost curve that will potentially mean it will dominate electricity generation in the decades ahead (took it's time getting there, but better late than never.)

Both of which are results of slow incremental progress after decades (and china), which brought the prices of materials (PV panels and batteries) to affordable levels. Of course they are wonderful things, but i cant get very excited about either.

Social media is vastly overrated as a "recent invention," imo. Facebook is basically a copy of MySpace and livejournal which are copies of AOL (instant messaging, profiles, and all). Blogs and microblogs (e.g. twitter) are a nice addition that appeared in the early 2000s, but even they're just a slight reformatting of BBS and forums. Most of this predates the WWW, in some format or another.

Things have definitely evolved a lot, but as far as "social media" (reminds me how much I hated that term when they first started using it, when the basic profile + messaging concept had been around over a decade) goes, it's more like comparing a Tesla to a Model T, rather than a whole new type of technology.

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