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Comment by kovek | Hacker News Reader

> It's very possible that our understanding and implementation of childhood development has a larger impact on intelligence than these presumed random mutations.

Bones from burial sites of past hunter-gatherer societies are associated with larger jaws and mouths, while bones retrieved from former farming cultures have decreased jaw size. [0]

I believe jaw development has effects on mental health. Thus, I think our non-genetic changes do happen to affect our mental capabilities. There must be other factors than jaw size that do so.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_jaw_shrinkage?wprov=sfti...

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I believe it. I read the pop sci book “Breath” recently—as I remember it says jaw development has degraded in modern humans because of the availability of soft foods and increased mouth breathing. We need to chew to develop properly. Apparently this impacts the sinuses and airway which causes sleep apnea and other respiratory issues, leading to bad sleep and worsened cognition overall.

> I believe jaw development has effects on mental health.

Why? I am honestly curious.

Someone else posted around the same time as you. Apparently it has been postulated that decreased oxygen to the brain and being tired (from sleep apnea related to jaw development) causes cognitive impairment. So... give everyone a CPAP machine to sleep with?

If you go down the rabbit hole of weird libertarian beliefs, you may stumble upon “mewing” sometime after paleo diets and nofap.

To a visiting alien, libertarian associated beliefs would look positively sane compared to numerous mainstream practices, like daily consumption of highly processed foods coupled with little physical activity, factory farming of meat, mono-crop agriculture, and the rituals of social sensitivity signalling that change by the year, ranging from personalized gender pronouns to micro-aggression avoidance.

It's important to note that the aforementioned are all extremely mainstream, with leading academic and corporate institutions adopting and promoting them.

I love that there's an internet forum where one minute I can be reading someone who's explaining why the US government needs to create a new agency to regulate social media and the next I can see someone named CryptoPunk say that it's mainstream society that's crazy not libertarians.

Yes and cranial measurements determine intelligence too…

Come on people. We’ve been down this road before. It’s not good.

Cranial capacity doesn’t determine intelligence, just as height doesn’t determine basketball ability. Nevertheless, good basketball players tend to be tall, and intelligent people tend to have large cranial capacity. These are well documented correlations, with multiple studies observing those.

So, does evolution and biology stop at the neck somehow?

Or if it does not, are we better off staying ignorant than trying to discover some knowledge, however fractional and incomplete?

I don't believe in either.

The Turing test is like saying planes don't fly unless they can fool birds into thinking they're birds. - Peter Norvig, via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

IMHO other intelligence tests are the same - they tend to measure familiarity with established systems of rationality and response within a given culture only.

Here's a thought experiment. Imagine a student who can't read, or who can't read the language the test is written in, or are an elementary learner of that language. They would tend to score poorly. All communication is like this, not just written tests. But the logical basis upon which rationality is measured within said tests is also a language, and its drawbacks exactly parallel that of language itself. Perhaps what IQ and similar metrics are really measuring is cultural indoctrination and familiarity as a highly tangential proxy to the basic cognitive abilities which they actually purport to grade.

It's impossible for there to be an objective measure of intelligence as it is an adaptation to a specific environment.

As others have said before me, an IQ test measures how adapted you are to IQ tests.

Goodhart's Law (Popular formulation): When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

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