Are people getting dumber?
 

"Dumber, smaller, and weaker"
"Human intelligence has declined since Victorian era"

Are people getting dumber? Has our grip on menial things like vocabulary, grammar, and etiquette slowly loosened to the point of no return?

What's causing this gradual increase of human stupidity?

It's because of you…. ;)

:laughing: you're a good kid. I like you.

This movie will always be funny ... and eerily prophetic. :laughing:

Between brain surgery and my stroke I am definitely dumber than I was before this summer.

With the internet everyone's dumb opinions has a platform. There are just as many dumb people, now were just more aware of them.

People are getting smarter I would assume. Just menial things like language aren't as important in this era.

People are getting smarter. We just notice the dumbasses easier now since they're in the papers, on Facebook and in comment sections.

Did you guys read the articles?

No. Because in the digital age, ignorance is a choice, and I'm choosing to stay ignorant.

Alright, I'll read them.

Eurgh, read articles? I don't do that stuff.

I haven't conducted many mass studies upon the cognitive faculties of mankind, so my input here ain't the most credible, but I think the most reasonable answer would be I don't know... but I doubt it. I think we can expect a lot of people to say "But other studies show IQ averages have risen worldwide!" or "IQ tests aren't an accurate measure of intelligence!" or "Reaction time tests aren't an accurate measurement of brain performance!". All of those things are true. There are a lot of things that we are good at measuring. We can measure the length of a plank, we can measure the speed of a car, the speed of light to a significantly accurate point, the chemical composition of a distant planet, the time it will take for an asteroid to hit the planet Earth and the approximate location of the impact, the amount of rocket fuel needed to fly a fancy robotic science lab from Florida to Mars, but none of those things are sentience, we really suck at measuring sentience, it's hard to measure something you're still trying to understand on a basic level. Universities are still arguing over whether or not people can be left-brained or right-brained. Science fiction movies like Lucy or Transcendence are still playing with the idea that we only use a minuscule portion of our available cognitive capabilities. I think until we really have a firm grasp on what intelligence even is, we won't be able to conduct any accurate studies on the overall intelligence of an entire evolving civilization, regardless of how many IQ tests we take.

Right now I think the best thing to do would be to stop asking "are we more or less intelligent than we used to be?" and instead ask "are we much better off as a civilization than we used to be?". The best way to do that is to investigate trends in healthcare, economics, employment, communications infrastructure, scientific progress and innovation, educational resources available to common people, safety, natural resource distribution, freedom of democracy, social equality, and so on. And I think the longer you look into topics like that the more you'll find we're improving in all of those areas at an accelerating pace.

As it has been mentioned already, the information age and the very sudden explosion of social networking has put us all on a stage, everyone is watching everyone and it's much harder to hide mistakes than it was in the past. Every moment of idiocy is caught on camera, our triumphant moments as a species are often massively overshadowed by skateboard bail compilations and funny cat videos, but progress is still very much in full swing and a closer look at human progress is usually a lot more reassuring than Huffington Post headlines.

if you're talking cognitive ability i believe there is some evidence of a slight decline, but not something that would be really noticeable, over the last 10,000 or so years, but i could be wrong. i heard about it on the radio.

if you're talking about how delusional we are then i would say we started to peer through the veil for a bit in the last couple centuries and then the people in charge realized how useful our delusions really are.

this is confusing to me

wouldn't those be included in how intelligence is monitored throughout history??

but even still I have no idea how you actually rate different era's of intelligence in the first place, or why it would even matter. Looking at these kinds of things in a vacuum is pretty useless imo.

I didn't read the first one because **** info wars. The study its based on seems kind of biased, especially with the comment towards the end saying that education is a confounding factor to write off what would suggest that we are getting smarter. With a situation like intelligence, better education explains a rise, it hardly confounds it.

Id also like to note that IQ isn't permanent like many claim and have claimed.

yea... i never got that. you can practice and study logic puzzles and easily raise your iq score.

If people are getting their information from infowars then it's certainly possible that those people are getting dumber. Not sure about humanity in general though.

Guy sounds like a quack. If the equipment wasn't as reliable, and your information is therefore suspect, then at the very least you probably shouldn't be sure enough of your theory to endorse it publicly.

That's a poor quote to highlight if you want to discredit him. An abacus is less sophisticated than a calculator but it's results are just as accurate/credible.

You do simple addition and subtraction with abacuses and calculators, not determine someone's intelligence.

Sophistication =/= Reliability/Accuracy, is the only point I was making.

You could very well be right, it wouldn't be the first time someone has made a skewed claim to promote their own work. I try not to pass judgment on that kind of stuff/people unless I understand the science behind it though.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art...3/#!po=45.0570

I doubt anyone is going to fight through this whole thing but I think it boils down to the Flynn effect is real but they’re not sure why.

It seems to me only idiots breed, especially in massive numbers

Our idiots are yesterdays uh...not idiots idk

When you’re doing parent/teacher conferences and one girl comes in with both her parents all three extremely literate and then a single mom comes in with six kids none of whom can read it’s easy to get the impression the gene pool is ****ed.

I guess back in the day the stupid six didn’t even have a teacher.

The numbers say you’re right as far as I know.

I’m feeling lazy so I’m not going to check this but my understanding is there hasn’t been a notable evolutionary change in the human brain for a 100,000 years, at least that’s been identified.

It's less of a physical change in the brain and more how we use it, but it seems like people are able to comprehend abstract concepts more readily due to increased communication/global consciousness. We're not getting more in-depth with our thinking, but we are able to at least humour things that either indirectly affect our lives or don't affect us personally at all.

This isn’t directly related but pretty interesting. I read in a reliable source yesterday that 400 million people in India live without electricity and have little to no contact with anyone who does. They’re not in cities but they’re in villages that have no connection to any power grid.