Dwarkesh Patel

When the Bible is being written, especially the Old Testament, is exactly when selection for intelligence is the highest point it's apparently ever been.

But obviously the thing we're referring to is not, or the thing we care about is not direct performance in an IQ test, especially in the past.

I think the thing I'm trying to understand better is this

Is intelligence more broadly?

And maybe just that IQ test intelligence is not that correlated with here is a new world environment and go figure out how to process food there and make shelter and everything else.

All the things which, you know, your colleagues like Joseph Henneker talked about, like how modern people underestimate the difficulty of doing this kind of thing with a small band of people.

Anyway, this is a like...

Maybe that's not IQ test intelligence, and that's why we don't see that strong a selection effect on this thing.

But just intuitively, it seems like regardless of the value system, it just seems very valuable to have this trait maxed out.

So I'm being very speculative.

Julian Jaynes has this famous theory in The Origins of Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind that

I'm butchering this, but fundamentally, the way I understand it is that up until Homer, basically everybody was schizophrenic.

In the sense that people genuinely thought that

gods or whatever were real people that you were communicating with.

And his claim is that ancient texts seem to show people behaving in this way.

Yeah, exactly.

So another trait you find under selection is the trend away from body fat since the agricultural illusion.

Why is that?

This is also another way in which the data goes against

a common story.