I've been listening to this book called Range by David Epstein, and one of the stories he told has captured my attention and has my thoughts racing. 

He's describing how during the rise of socialism in Uzbekistan there was a rise in industrialization, and a guy who was interested in studying what happens when more secluded "primitive" Uzbek villages go under this industrialization how there ways of thinking change. This guy had a constant group, the ones who were not yet affected by industrialization and then compared it to different villages and villagers who have had more education and exposure. I think the guys name sounded like the word "fairy" or something. Anyways he asked theses people across the spectrum of industrialization exposure abstract questions. For example bears in the north are always white Iceland is in the north, what color are the bears? The villagers who had not yet been industrialized refused to answer the question because (if I am recalling correctly) they only know things in the context of their life. They were unable to categorize items together too like if you had the words, Hatchet, Hammer, Screw driver and Log, they would say things like well you need all of those things to complete a particular task. They couldn't parse through them and say these are tools so the log is not apart of the group. 

My first thought is, wow thats crazy because imagine only basing your world with what is right in front of you and then meeting a person from a far away land you have never even heard of before. Some of those people when confronted with that exact scenario weren't able to think abstractly like for example not asking questions like what are the people like there, do the same rules govern that land etc.

Anyways the author was saying that generation after generation, the IQ of people around the world rose. I don't yet know when this book was written but he must not have heard the news. For the first time the IQ of people has been lowering. People are no longer able to think as conceptually, as critically.

Since this new study came out after the book was published I wonder if there is a correlation between the books goal of emphasizing how having a range of knowledge causes us to come with more creative solutions and think critically versus how we learn and work in this current society which is to specialize as much as possible. What I'm saying is, yeah sure I think social media has made us idiots but the goal all along in industrialization is to have more specialized workers. Now we have heralded the savants, prodigies, experts and specialists to our detriment, we are now moving backwards in our abstract thinking. 

We now live in a world where thinking is the way we make money. All of the jobs people want are behind a computer, we've become too specialized as a society. 

The thing is I also finished listening to the book The Mind Extended by Annie Paul she was making the argument that because the questions that we are encountering are more complex than ever we now need to start thinking as a group. Of course, she was speaking more scientific writings and how one paper had over 5,000 contributors or something wild like that. But, I do wonder if there is some validity to that in the day to day world. We are now encountering such complex societal questions, and problems that we are simply incapable as individuals to think about it. That triple decker burger with an onion ring in the middle is simply too big for us to eat by ourselves. So, we are taking short cuts, we are taking things for exactly how we see them rather than asking questions. I think the rural Uzbek villages lacked abstract thinking because of ignorance, I think we lack abstract thinking because 1. we were taught to specialize and 2. its too much for one person to think by themselves. 

I'm excited to finish the Range book, I don't think I am interpreting the book the way it was intended rather I am trying to "think abstractly" and correlate things that seem disconnected. He also mentions a bit about AI in the book and again I have too look up when this book was published but if he mentions it some more I would like to think about how it correlates to todays landscape.