Is the current generation really that smart?

Discussion in 'General Chat' started by cap.toon, Sep 13, 2018.

  1. Miserys_End

    Miserys_End 「Lv1 Pretend Person」I'm the preson i pretend to be

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    @ai-chan you just proved without a doubt you would be the bestgirl to lead a transmigration harem. Not only are you cute, but also smart and hard working... Add all that to your sexual appetites and inclinations and you would dominate any isekai novel r18 or otherwise.
     
  2. honglath

    honglath I miss my PC

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    It is a conditional affair.

    Like previous posters said, it depends on who and how is transported.
    A rich kid who's been living a life meant to have then eventually inherit the family business might do quite well as a businessman in almost any type of society. In the wild though, they'd be dead within a week.
    A poor kid running around all the time doing anything to make a buck will adapt fastest to almost all types of foreign environments.
    But all of the transported, regardless of previous circumstances will die on the spot if the new world's environment is different from our own.
    I live in a temperate climate. To move to any other type of climate, I'll need to do at least one vaccination to build up a minimum of resistance to whatever will be waiting for me once I get there. Else the sudden change will kick me like a mule, if not kill me outright.

    We are adjusted to the place we live in. A sudden shift will break a balance that has been carefully developed through years of trial and error. Adaptation is not immediate.

    Beyond basic biology and personal origin, we must take into consideration what is likely the most important point: plot armour. We ain't got none.
    Which is why it matters less if the transported is smart. First and foremost I'd the "luck" to give them what they need, when they need it.
    Protagonists are guided by a plot, so what do you do when there isn't any?
     
  3. lychee

    lychee [- slightly morbid fruit -] ❀[ 恋爱? ]❀

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    Hm I don’t believe the current generation is intrinsically smarter than the previous one. Depends on your definition of “smart” though — technology is more advanced and we teach kids in school new things today that we didn’t know 50 years ago, but I don’t believe the human mental capacity is intrinsically different.

    I think novels deeply underestimate the intelligence of people in the past. Ancient people are portrayed as having cave men intelligence, but I would venture to say that people in the past were just as sly, street-smart, specialized, and talented at their own affairs as people are today.

    There’s a certain degree of arrogance to assume that we as aliens from the future know better than inhabitants from the past, especially when we don’t have full information surrounding the context of a situation available to us.

    For instance, suppose a salesperson with their modern experience believes that giving out free samples is a highly effective method of raising awareness for a company brand and ultimately brings in a net profit — but is this modern wisdom still applicable when you take it out of the setting/culture it came from?

    This is an extreme example, but the general cautionary message is generalizable to many situations not limited to isekai novels. Arrogance about one’s perceived intelligence can and often does readily backfire.

    Being right about the principles of a theoretical formula does not mean it is guaranteed to work when you try to apply it in real life. Experience (“knowing the home ground”) is more valuable, and isekai transmigrators have none of that by the virtue of the definition that they came from an effectively alien world with no prior interpersonal connections.

    All of this aside...... I do think probability/statistics is an incredibly powerful modern knowledge set that would be immensely useful to know prior to transmigrating (particularly in settings with a monetary economy), mostly on the basis that it isn’t intuitive and not something you are likely to pick up later on the fly after transmigrating.
     
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  4. cap.toon

    cap.toon Well-Known Member

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    Yes. It has been discussed that we don’t know as much as we think we do. There r structure in ancient cities that even we ponder over how the ancient people made them; like the pyramid. It has been standing so long, cut so precise, and stone super heavy—you can’t honestly believe people had moved and pulled those on logs.

    I do wonder, how such a society with such advance technologies that even we can’t describe or won’t publicize the truth of the matter, suddenly vanish.
     
  5. Deleted member 128349

    Deleted member 128349 Guest

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    Actually no. If you were to be transported into the ancient past, you would have none of the necessary infrastructure to produce something that could be classified to be a product of the Industrial Age. You seem to underestimate how difficult some things were in the past, even traveling from one place to another was not only difficult and took lots of time, but could also end with your death or life on slavery, so that wouldn't be very easy. And in order to build a steam engine (which I don't know how to build despite having extensive knowledge of physics and being able to calculate the maxima and minima in a light interference experiment as well as other stuff), you would need high quality steel or a comparable alloy, which would be quite hard to produce back then, if you don't even know how most ores look like or were to find coal.
    Even if you would prepare for several months and amass the necessary knowledge to advance technologically, you would still need lots of time to convince people in the past to help you and even then, you can't jump over a certain step of technology, and recreating everything is very hard, will take enormous amounts of time and may even sometimes be impossible, due to the location or political situation. And even several people will still have serious problems with achieving anything noteworthy.
    So, it may be possible to create one or two industrial age tools, but only with luck and a strong focus on only these things.

    Well, sounds really nice, but is far harder than you might think. Most knowledge nowadays is specialized and barely anything worth without pre-existing infrastructure. Even if you have a Ph.D in quantum physics, you wouldn't profit from it in any way in ancient times and even as a normal engineer, your advantage would be tiny, because almost none of the modern materials exists, so you can't create most stuff, you would know about. And you seem to underestimate the people from ancient times, the Romans were quite capable and Ancient China also, almost all ancient civilizations were proficient in architecture and warfare (and gun powder is neither as easy to make nor as powerful as one might think.
    And aside from all that, you probably would never get into the position were you would have access to the ressources that are neccesary to use your knowledge.

    Good points, but I would disagree on probability and statistics. Back then it was far harder to collect the neccesary information for any kind of statistical data and even if you would be able to get some data of that kind, it wouldn't give you much advantage. Most people were poor back then, so there aren't many consumers for products and food was produced by the "peasents" themselves, so also not much to make money on. In addition to that comes the lack of ways to prepare against nature, so agriculture will always be full of problems due to not enough/too much rain, insects, diseases and other stuff. And if you take into account that at least (probably even more) 70-80% of the people back then worked in agriculture, you see that you can't do much with your knowledge.
     
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  6. insania

    insania Well-Known Member

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    You have quite a number of good points in your argument. In fact, I think it is interesting to know that there are actually more limitations to the so called "modern knowledge cheat" than I thought. I agree with many of your points and they make me wonder why do many novel authors even think that the "modern knowledge cheat" is almost omnipotent in the first place. One of the worst things about the "modern knowledge cheat" used in many series is indeed the compartmentation you addressed in your points. The thing many authors assume is that things in real life work in a very simplistic manner in which only having one field of knowledge is enough to produce a certain result or create a certain invention. This is the furthest from the truth as far as I am concerned since many things in real life are actually more complicated than we initially thought the more we learn about them. This applies to any field of study and are not just limited to the science, engineering, business fields.

    The other thing which is an even bigger problem but is also related to your point about compartmentation is that many authors have close to zero understanding of the subject matter in any of the fields they talk about. This is something I find the most problematic in many series that involves the "modern knowledge cheat". Things like business, engineering and even military affairs are described in a very shallow manner to the extent that they are barely even scratching the surface of the subject. Furthermore, many authors also explain and apply these concepts in these fields incorrectly and make things always go perfectly for the protagonist which is just utter nonsense. In fact, if you present their works to anyone who actually studied a lot about and understood these fields, they would call these works out for being utter rubbish and being a gross misrepresentation of the concepts in these fields. This is justified since many authors can even misunderstand and apply the most basic of concepts in these fields wrongly. It makes me wonder how many authors actually properly studied or worked in these fields at all for that matter. Even if they did not studied or worked in these fields, they also did not even bother to do their due diligence by at least properly researching the concepts they are writing about or consulting an expert in these concepts for help making things even more insulting.

    Due to the above reasons, I avoid novels with the "modern knowledge cheat" like the plague since there is no point in reading a work which misrepresents real world concepts and fields of studies. I mean no offense to anyone in my following sentence but I feel that it is necessary for me to say it for the benefit of people who are either thinking of reading or are already reading such works. Reading these work do not make people smart. Rather, it makes them dumb since they are fed with nonsense and rubbish through the misinformation in these works. Yet, it baffles me to no end that there are many people who even think they thoroughly understand any concept or field of study just by reading these works and who praise the authors of such works for being very knowledgeable in these concepts or fields of study. After all, the authors who write these works are best described as "fools pretending to be a sage" and hence their works are not worth paying any attention to. Hence, if anyone wants to get accurate information about any field of study or concepts in such fields, they are better off consulting an expert or doing their own research using trustworthy sources such as textbooks and journal articles relating to their subject matter of interest. Enrolling in a reputable educational institution that teaches such fields of study or working in jobs in such fields to gain experience can also be considered as well.
     
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  7. lychee

    lychee [- slightly morbid fruit -] ❀[ 恋爱? ]❀

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    Fair enough. XD I mostly approached this from the perspective of there was one thing you could study before transmigrating, I felt like the most valuable topics are the ones most generalizable regardless of the setting you end up in. Math (and stats) fall into the category of being invariant roughly no matter what universe you’re in because they’re grounded in counting — if 1+1=2, the math falls into place without any outside assumptions.

    On the topic of agriculture and risk — it’s precisely in situations of high risk when applications of statistics are most useful and profitable. The history of the stock market on Earth has its origins in the grain trade in the medieval ages and speculation by merchants whether to buy/sell/store and at what time, given the relative unpredictability of the market. The earliest financial instruments were invented at a similar time — for instance, purchasing securities and contracts in advance for future commodities on the speculated value of say, wheat that an estate is expected to grow next year.

    So yes, I’m already floating in the hypothetical realm of the bourgeoisie. XD But then again, I was sort of raised under the mentality that *comparitive advantage* is important to have in order to be successful at life... :blobpensive: in short, there are very few things that I can think of that I might have an comparative advantage over the natives on in the first place. My gender aside, there’s no way my physical strength can compare to ancient people, and for domestic things like weaving/sewing intricate patterns on textiles by hand like women did in the past, there’s no way I can catch up in skill with people who have been doing that all their life.

    So I think it’s important to think carefully about what strengths you have that you can play to. It’s a hard pick and might be different for different people.

    I do think it’s unreasonable to take a self-sufficient approach (e.g. 1 man army) to the isekai survival premise though. People who believe/admit they don’t require the help of other people effectively handicap themselves in a world where realisitcally there is no such thing as a standardized exam to be taken in isolation in cubicles. The person who actively solicits help and relies on the expertise of others generally speaking ends up ahead, even if they’re not as “smart” as the antisocial one.

    So a takeaway message might be that if you transmigrate, you will most likely suck at most things relative to the indigenous people. Your only hope is if you can find someone to cushy up to, and then you play it from ear from there. XD So the question here is that can charisma even be learned? Hahaha
     
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  8. cap.toon

    cap.toon Well-Known Member

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    I don’t think the Britain really spend a lot on the colony? The people who went were indenture servants, people who finds way to pay for their passport over. The rest were very poor people seeking lands, thought of seeking golds, and or for religious reason. The King has to only spread rumors. They were probably pissed off because America at that point is a earned resources and incomes to the mainland.
     
  9. reagents 11

    reagents 11 disaster personified

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    They did. Tools, supplies, arms including fighting off Spanish and French (some other European too like Swedish and Dutch as well). The people that live off the colony were of servants and peasants yes much more of them were slaves (sometimes making up most of the colony population that runs plantations) but the tools that they used and security they're provided with were from these wealthy noble house or from the crown itself. The fact that the leading figure were of military general status as well fit very well of rebellion rather than independence revolution.
    By the point that American colony's started to feed off and building off everything it originally built and grown for home exports running their own economy in sort they're no longer in position to keep subservient to it's original providers yes that's the thing that the British can't figure out until it was too late. All the best wishes for US independence i only regretted that they started in wrong foot in my opinion.