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Comment by 082349872349872 | Hacker News Reader

Another (albeit optimistic) possibility: today we have an informal oral culture contrasted with a formal literary culture, so Graham perceives the latter as synonymous with thinking. However, before literacy was widespread there was, on top of the informal oral culture, also a formal oral culture, so maybe with the popularity of short video clips we might see a resurgence in structured speech?

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If you observe the trend speech has actually devolved with the arrival of popular internet networks. Today's elites talk in a fashion that would embarrass even their immediate parents, let alone their ancestors.

Just look at the quality of presidential debates and political discourse we've been having for the past decade. Not just in the US, but all over the world. The situation is perilous.

The total IQ on the planet remains constant even as the number of people increase, I guess. Although I really wasn't expecting the average to go down this fast--consider the idealistic and rationally thorough political speeches of the 70s and 80s, and the way things went quickly downhill from there...

As someone said, it's no wonder The Matrix chose the 90s as the peak of human civilization.

> The total IQ on the planet remains constant even as the number of people increase

IQ, (from “intelligence quotient”), is a number used to express the relative intelligence of a person.

So for the whole population it is constant by definition :)

The recent political speeches at the economic clubs of Detroit and Chicago were a little deeper than Dick and Jane! Also 21 Nobel Prize economists found the content to be deep enough to disagree!

Yes, I picked SOTU because that's a general audience, unlike economic clubs.

And heading in the direction of Dick and Jane doesn't mean that we ever reached it; according to https://community.jmp.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/8926i... recent SOTUs should be comprehensible to high school freshmen.

(full discussion at https://community.jmp.com/t5/JMPer-Cable/Regression-to-model... ; through 2018 — anyone have 2022?)

EDIT: keep in mind that the expected "general" audience for the SOTU has also expanded dramatically due to technological change in between 1790 and 2018...

I'll be generous and pretend you said intelligence, not IQ.

What is the mechanism you propose, by which the birth of a child makes every person now living incrementally dumber?

Personal anecdote only, but I'd suggest lack of sleep. Every time a kid is born, the total amount of quality sleep extant adults get drops.

(Kids, if you ever see this, I'm not saying it wasn't worth it. But seriously, 2AM every night for months?)

Political speech probably chases not even the median, but the marginal, voter, so you'll see that US SOTU addresses having been going regularly "Dick and Jane"-wards for the last couple of centuries.

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwPnJXXX5Ic

the simplification of speech and writing is a trend that had been going long before the advent of the Internet.

Devolved by what metric?

The usual one: young people are using it!

Devolved in the ability to speak on-point without ad hominems.

Others in this thread are likely using their own metrics; my responses were all based on declining Flesch-Kincaid score of State of the Union addresses (from "20th" grade to 8th grade over 200+ years): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41961710

Oral culturals often had other physical representations of thoughts in stories. The physical objects that held the stories could be women cloth or carved wood. It may not be actual writing as much as coherent cultural transfers through objects that PG is referring to.

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