[MUD-Dev] Clients

[Adam Wiggins]

[coder at ibm.net:]
> On 12/02/98 at 10:45 AM, Mike Sellers <mike at online-alchemy.com> said: >At
> >Is this humor?  This is a pretty easily refuted assertion (if anything
> >the IQ of the average US adult has risen slightly in the past 20-30
> >years).  
> 
> This is a tough one to define given the poor state of the definition of
> IQ, how to measure it, and what relevance its attempted measurement has to
> its definition.  There is also significant question on the validity of
> there being one universally applicable definition of intelligence as vs
> several definitions each of which applies partially and to different
> extents to each individual.
> 
> Note for starters how dependant IQ tests are on education and (often)
> cultural assumptions.

This brings back a quote from a book by Carl Sagan ("The Demon-Haunted
World") I read a while back.  Had to dig it up because I found it
so amusing.


         Every generation worries that educational standards are
      decaying.  One of the oldest short essays in human history,
      dating from Sumer some 4,000 years ago, laments that the
      young are disastrously more ignorant than the generation
      immediately preceeding.  Twenty-four hundred years ago,
      the aging and grump Plato, in Book VII of Laws, gave his
      definition of scientific illiteracy... [long quote here]


This would seem to indicate that, by now, we should be incredibly
stupid and not at all educated.  Or, I suppose one could consider
the subject matter to be getting much harder and more involved;
Plato mentions, among other things, the ability to count without
the use of fingers, the ability to distinguish between odd and even,
etc.

I don't have anything to add here, just find it interesting to ponder.