Quote:
Originally Posted by htismaqe
Even primitive people (by modern standards, when judged against the Greek and Romans) had astounding understandings of the natural world. Ancient Celts and Teutons built burial chambers that were perfect aligned with the passage of time, so that months, years, and even centuries later, the sun would shine through a pinhole and illuminate the buried body inside.
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And I also think we fail to adequately differentiate between extremely smart and genuinely brilliant.
I would say that someone in the top 20% of the population in terms of raw intelligence is closer to the bottom 25% than he is the top 5% if you were to 'score' that intelligence.
It's kinda like the richter scale -- the difference between a 2 (barely felt) and a 6 (moderately damaging) is nowhere NEAR the difference betwen a 7 (powerful, 4 billion lbs of TNT) and an 8 (cataclysmic; 123 billion lbs of TNT).
When we're talking about thousands of years people, that's a long time for several of those truly staggeringly intelligent people to pop up. And when they do, the world changes.
And when they're gone, it goes backwards (often because we lacked the means of memorializing what they knew). Until the next wave builds out of it, another brilliant person comes along and the cycle begins anew.
But finding the smartest guy on CP isn't going to find the guy that re-set society and started moving it forward in antiquity. Because you're talking richter scale level gaps between that guy and historically brilliant.