finding high quality old blogs is a joy. and most old blogs are high quality because of selection bias. people who could write blogs before 2007 say had the specific knowledge about hosting a personal website, etc. so they belonged to the educated class. but the selection also favours computer scientists since they had the most knowledge about hosting a website.

writing this has made me realise that i rarely read accounts/blogs of uneducated/poor humans. selection bias. if i try to think about ‘old books’ that have survived, marcus aurelius comes to mind. but he was an emperor. did the poor of his period wrote accounts, and if they did, did they survive the test of time?

i digressed. back to the point.

i found another high quality blog - John Myles White. i never read about who the person is. its my strategy to keep my prior neutral and base the words solely on its logic.

this blog - Same Old World feels (i don’t have the word for it). as in the post was written in 2008. 18 years ago. what the author is mentioning is that even though IQ scores have gone up(Flynn Effect), the world is same because instead of superstitious beliefs based on religion, people now have superstitious beliefs basis surface level science.

the blog strikes me for two reasons -

  1. what the author is mentioning is something i am guilty of. listening someone say ‘scientific terms’ increases my priors without me actually putting in the efforts to check their claims. the author mentioned this in 2008. I’m in 2026. i’m just a biologically programmed being. funny of us to think we’re different.
  2. that india lives decades behind the west. or atleast the educated west. i say this in reference that what the author mentioned in 2008 is something that my peers and I are now catching onto. we’re learning these ‘dopamine detox’, ‘calories’, etc stuff now. which maybe is not necessarily a bad thing. it means that the top 10%ile indians are now where top 1%ile educated westerns were 2 decades ago. i’ve no clue what i just wrote.

TIL - Flynn Effect - that average IQ of humans has been rising.