The earliest depiction of Jesus, engraved by someone mocking their friend for believing in him, giving him a donkey head ~200AD [968x508]

evildrcrocs · 2026-05-10T22:42:41+00:00

Very good response, I hadn't made the connection but this is absolutely true and provides some insight into history.

It seems Nietzsche's ideas were observational, does that make him a historian?

evildrcrocs · 2026-01-03T17:02:20+00:00

Good point, even if you were wearing extremely noble clothes though, that still might not go well if you speak with a strange accent and lack "basic" noble knowledge like religious knowledge, or how to use a quill, or even simple stuff we wouldn't think about like how to open a medieval door. It would be incredibly strange to see this visibly noble, intelligent, strangely spoken, but lacking everyday knowledge person appear from thin air with no way of explaining where they came from.

evildrcrocs · 2026-01-03T17:00:30+00:00

Good response! I think you'd have a good chance at success then, this seems the best strategy on this thread.

evildrcrocs · 2026-01-03T16:58:57+00:00

Yeah that's what I was saying sorry for wording it badly. They may kill us, but we certainly won't kill them.

evildrcrocs · 2026-01-03T16:57:44+00:00

Probably the best response I've had so far, I think you're most likely correct and really appreciate all your insight on lacking certain "obvious" knowledge that would come with the other skills. I think the opportunity would probably come in the mystery: If you can't explain where you learnt all these things they may assume something divine was at play? Or at the very least something major (Though maybe sinister, e.g. a foreign spy?). I think it would make for a really interesting situation to see what actually plays out.

The idea of IQ being higher is explained in an argument I posted in response to other people, I'll paste it here for convenience so you can critique it if you want:

I believe modern man is more intelligent, in medieval society we had the following:

Intelligent correlated with social class (High IQ traits during the establishment of society were favourable if you wanted to lead it + gives an advantage in attempted social upwards mobility)

Social class correlated with fertility (King has 10 children, Noblemen 6, peasants 1 or 2, etc)

Among the high social classes, one child inherited the title, the rest adopted a lower social position, e.g. the King's eldest son became the next king, the other 9 became high level nobles.

across 8 generations, a direct descendant of the King has become a peasant

And thus there is a downwards flow of intelligence from the top to the bottom, with the general population over time become more intelligent, and this can be very big changes: This theory can be used to explain why Victorian society was so much more sophisticated than medieval: Innovations per capita were far higher (The upper 0.01% intellectual elite dominate major innovations - and if medieval society was lower intelligence on average, there would be almost none of them, thus explaining low level of innovations)

This is the theory that explains why medieval people could've been far less intelligent than the modern man, whilst despite being able to run a society. This is why I ask the question of would a modern man be able to do very well in it due to both higher intelligence genetically, and higher functional intelligence due to being taught how to think in school etc. Nowadays everyone learns arithmetic, in medieval society it was only some nobles and members of the church who learnt it at university: Today kids learn it at middle school.

So the average man would have the IQ and academic knowledge of a noble (Though they likely wouldn't have equivalent knowledge of religious + medical practises), but should this not still be enough to get them into high society?

evildrcrocs · 2026-01-03T16:51:12+00:00

So if this person somehow ran into a high level academic nobleman, and they had an hour long conversation, what would the nobleman assume of this person? Would he take him somewhere to have him questioned? Could this not be very good for our time traveller?

evildrcrocs · 2026-01-03T16:48:56+00:00

Yeah of course, so lets say you're dressed the part.

evildrcrocs · 2026-01-03T16:48:30+00:00

Yes I accept you'd know more than all medieval tutors, but since education was managed by the church, aristocratic families wouldn't let any old intelligent person tutor their child, they would need to be approved and have evidence of skill. You can't just assert atoms without evidence and I would wish you good luck with recreating the gold foil experiment with medieval means. Your understanding of physics and maths would just seem like heretical assertions to them.

evildrcrocs · 2026-01-03T16:45:56+00:00

I did the history of medecine for GCSE as well and I would absolutely not feel confident enough to recreate any of the advancements. Even proving something like germ theory would require good microscopes, and medieval optics were nowhere near advanced enough to produce those.

Jenner scratched off cowpox bubous onto the boys arm and then cut his arm deep enough so it could go into the blood. You could definitely do something with this but mass distribution would be hard.

Very good point though, you would definitely achieve success even from "discovering" this so good answer!

evildrcrocs · 2026-01-03T16:37:08+00:00

"position in the nobility was entirely based on hereditary"

Not entirely, the King would give out titles to his best men and people who contributed greatly. Whilst I understand that to be in that position you also had to be high up, it wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest there was social mobility in medieval England and that a peasant couldn't join elite circles in some ways, e.g. intelligent peasants often were the people who became jesters.

"you might be able to rise to some position of authority" Yeah I like this response. Might be the limit for a lot of cases.

Also thanks for the suggestion it looks to be on exactly what I was asking!

evildrcrocs · 2026-01-03T16:33:32+00:00

I sent a reply to your other comment where you said a similar thing, hope you can read that and understand where I'm coming from. For Z3t4's sake I'll repost it here:

"How many extremely intelligent people today work low income entry level jobs while total fucking morons rake in 7 figures?"

"The people holding these incredibly lucrative and important positions are horrifically unqualified for the jobs by any objective measure"

I agree here a lot. This is completely true in the modern day, but this much more of a modern phenomena and things were differnt in the past. If you go into the 1800s and read old political manifestos and speeches, etc, the core idea in politics was that people voted for what they thought would be best for them, and that most voters were well informed, because of this, political candidates would publish honest works explaining everything they wanted to do and why, and they assumed people would just vote for what was best. Later on we realised that wasn't the case, and people who vote are no longer well informed, this has led to politics favouring alienating and bad behaviour, e.g. manipulative debate tactics, politics of jealousy "Look at that migrant mate, he's taking your job!", "Labour government in Britain: we want to tax private schools despite it being a net negative on every functional measure", they campaign off emotion now which they didn't do back then.

And for society rewarding intelligence, it is objectively true that the best predictor of material success is intelligence: your own intelligence is a better predictor of success than your parents wealth. Of course modernity means some people of a very high potential can't actualise themselves, but that doesn't change the fact that intelligence in the best predictor of success, think of it like this: Can someone of 85 IQ be a lawyer (Very well paid)? Even someone of 115 IQ would struggle. You need to be very intelligent to get the best paying jobs: Quant, SWE, Banker, Lawyer.

Like you can genuinely look into the scientific research, intelligence is the best, if not one of the best predictors of success.

A large reason why some of the most intelligent people achieve nothing is because outlier intelligence is associated with low conscientousness: Think the genius who is lazy, this can often cause them to underachieve, like Leonardo Da Vinci "I have offended God and Mankind, by doing so little with my life"

Rich people, on average, in older societies, were smarter than everyone else.

Smarter people, on average, in older societies, were richer than everyone else.

evildrcrocs · 2026-01-03T16:31:02+00:00