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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

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If everybody is connected to the internet, shouldn't the mean and median IQ be exactly 100?

He thinks the IQ of white people (North America and Europe) is 100. He’s implying the rest of the world are lower IQ.

The only thing he clearly stated is that he thinks the global average isn't 100. That could imply miscalibration depending on how you think the metric ought to work. He's also implied that he thinks the correlation between internet usage and high IQ is stronger the farther back you go.

Both of those things seem like fairly reasonable hypothesis to me. You are the one inserting race into it.

The blogger says that the average IQ in Europe and North America is 100 but that "the mean IQ of the world is a tad less than 90 today, and it's expected to fall to about 86 by 2050." So the blogger thinks that some races are much stupider than Europeans, and that if their share of the global population rises, average intelligence will fall. That sure sounds like he thinks this is a genetic difference and not poverty, disease, or lack of education.

The blogger cites a website which cites Richard Lynn for these 'facts'. So this is about race and IQ, quod erat demonstratum.

> So the blogger thinks that some races ...

You are misrepresenting the author. He made no such claim. He did not articulate what he believes the underlying mechanism to be.

It would be perfectly reasonable to inquire about the mechanism, or question the accuracy of the prediction. It is not reasonable to make accusatory conjectures about his beliefs.

The blogger is repeating (with citation) a claim by Richard Lynn, and by the end of his life Richard Lynn was open about being a 'scientific' racist who believed that different races had genes which caused large differences in average intelligence

Differences in average IQ between countries is well established and not even controversial AFAIK. What they mean is debated. Their existence cannot really be debated at all.

IIRC it correlates very strongly with socioeconomic factors, at least within the US. That doesn't make it useless but it does raise an awful lot of questions.

The direction of causation between IQ and economic success is pretty difficult because they obviously drive each other.

naked ape refers to all humans. you misread it. stop looking to be offended.

Sorry I was too low IQ to understand the reference, my bad

It said "ten billion naked apes". Clearly talking about everyone (in a few years' time).

you naked ape. hahahaha

calling the yet not internet users “naked apes”

It's almost certainly just a wanky way to say 'human', an allusion to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Ape

Who cares that the whole is getting dumber? I thought that was the entire idea behind the internet? I didn't create it either and my IQ isn't in the 150s-- it got dumber when it let me on, too.

The problem with the internet today is that the top (i.e. google) is going along with the bottom, the so-called enshittification. They are promoting the types of people this article is complaining about into direct visibility with its monopoly powers on search and discovery.

It's in my niche, of course too. People from India with no connection to the industry and just a wordpress are the #1 query for almost every result for the past ten years. It's nuts. My niche is at the forefront of the enshittification, but soon this will be your niche too.

Google basically kills off every consumer webapp like this to promote garbage wordpresses, content from the hindustantimes and other virtual detritus onto your browser. Look at r/SEO, are they focused on creating quality or scamming people? I'll give you a hint, research their mods' SEO websites. Yet Google cannot seem to get enough of it.

I think it's far from determined that web4 will be web2 but with more third world-problems but it's not looking great for the people who are building consumer apps right now.

"naked apes" are humans. Us. All of us. Not "not yet internet users".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Ape

Not exactly. Interpreted charitably, in the context, it could be replaced by "the unwashed masses".

The author seems to have harboured the idea that internet was good only back when it was for a select few. I don't know how he reconciled that with his apparent distaste for gated communities.

Ethernal September is actually a thing, so he isn't that wrong. I get the aversion towards elitism... But those of us who used the Internet in the 90s still know what happened when the "masses" started to flood it.

The original Eternal September was about AOL users getting access to Usenet in 1993. And yet, “people on AOL in 1993” would easily be in, what, the top 5% in quality of Internet users today? Maybe higher?

Hell, your “masses” flooding the Internet in the later 90s were still much better than the population now.

And here’s this guy writing about how bad things had gotten in 2004. Buckle up, buddy: you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Imagine what brave new world the future holds. Never assume things are so bad that they can’t get worse.

Gated communities arbitrarily bar your entry. That is categorically different from having some minimum standard which anyone is welcome to make an attempt at.

> The author seems to have harboured the idea that internet was good only back when it was for a select few.

I mean ... not wrong.

But the decline is not because "stupid people" started using it. The reason is that more people started using it, which made it of tremendous commercial interest and brought all of the dysfunctions of an unregulated free market.

I guess he did end up abandoning the internet afterall

As shall we all one day

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