Context: IQ tests: are humans getting smarter?
Intelligence is a topic in which explicability possesses an uncanny correspondence to the behavioural practices by and through which it is defined. Having framed longevity as a plausibly necessary function of intellect, Social Darwinism arrives (yet again) on the Pale Horse as meritocracy wearing a clown hat. Having once or twice found myself in social situations highlighted by the presence of someone speaking with unnecessary volume about their high I.Q. and long-standing membership of Mensa, I can’t help but wonder if those few metrics by which we assert significance of dependent variables in this context represent something other than those objective facts they lay claim to.
In as much as it is or might be considered a measure of intelligence, knowledge is effectively usefully-compressed information. Compression offsets or displaces complexity to an environment as a distributed referential system. “Intelligence” is a self-propagating frame of semantic dependency on reflexive psychological games that human Egos play: attempting to individuate, isolate or alienate the value of information systems from their environment.
Are humans getting smarter? No, but aggregate systemic complexity grows and drags us all along for the ride.
Daedelus Kite 