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Comment by anon1m0us | Hacker News Reader

"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. "

-- Alfred North Whitehead

What he is saying is that as civilization advances, the amount we need to think to survive decreases. We don't need high IQ's to survive anymore. While being smart is a selective criterion in a mate, other criteria will tend to overweight IQ when the amount of IQ needed to survive decreases.

Thus, IQ will decrease as civilization advances past a certain threshold. Perhaps we have passed that threshold.

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Wow we got really different interpretations out of that quote. In the context of a math textbook, I take that quote to be emphasizing the importance of abstractions and symbols for reasoning effectively.

I don't know if "thinking" in the context of that quote requires high IQ. I think that a high IQ person does less conscious thinking and "just gets" complex problems easily.

I think Alfed Whitehead is supporting IQ rise as civilization advances, since baseline abstractions, problems solving techniques, and patterns are taught to us by our parents / community, and are accumulated over time. We have observed this to be true continuously.

An IQ test is timed and requires pattern recognition and selection for the most part. These things are exactly the type of "operations we perform without thinking" that general intelligence supports. Being good at finding and acting on general patterns without deep thought is extremely helpful and is probably (at least loosely) associated with high IQ.

The further the complexity of civilization exceeds the population's ability to understand it, the more fragile it becomes. People absolutely should cultivate the habit of thinking, because thinking helps us survive disasters.

Not really. He’s talking about the power of mathematical formalism. With a good formalism you just push symbols around following easily memorized rules without thinking about what they mean until you reach your final result.

I disagree. I think the quote is more generally applicable than just mathematics. For example, we can now almost drive a car without thinking about it. We can order groceries just by saying, "hi alexa, please order me some groceries." You don't even have to think about where the car keys are or even how to drive.

What does that have to do with IQ though?

IQ is a measure of one's ability to think, speed of thought, capacity of thought, memory, predictions of the future. A century ago you had to be smarter to survive than now because there were more problems to be solved by the individual. People still built their own homes back then. Grew their own food. Fixed their own cars.

There were more constraints, so people had to be more clever to survive.

Plato tells us this is why Socrates eschewed writing. He considered the written word a crutch and just like walking with crutches all the time would atrophy your legs, writing atrophies the memory.

I don't really buy it, but I can see where you're coming from

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