- cross-posted to:
- badnews@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- badnews@lemmy.ml
I wonder if you could analyze internet discussions for an effect.
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I can believe it. Physical inactivity, less creative play for children, distraction all the time.
Mind you, in some ways I don’t buy it - the two of my kids who were very academically motivated both learned much more in school than I did (I went during a conservative time when the schools were doing “back to basics” which didn’t help, but simple research before the Internet was so difficult that I didn’t have access to as much as they did, it took more effort to learn less) and those two are whip-smart. So I think the potential to be smart is higher now. Also maybe we have included more people in the measurements now that it’s easier to get the data.
But physical inactivity does harm brain health, plastic probably does, the dumbing down again in the schools here (is this some 40-50 year cycle?) certainly does. I do, like @drascus@sh.itjust.works work at maintaining my thinking by trying to learn new things, not just get good at what I am good at already; and do a lot to maintain physical health, meditate, and try to guard my sleep as much as possible within the context of a normal life.
Its a lot of work but you have to constantly push. I am 42, but I read a few dozen books a year, I’m constantly learning new languages, new instruments, I write short stories for fun, do creative projects, and meditate. I still feel really sharp but I’m throwing down everyday.
So, I’ve seen a lot of people who were extremely sharp as PhD students become blunted as soon as 9–5 starts.
A lot of decline among adults can likely be traced back to increased cognitive load during working hours, which chips away at intelligence over time as folks burn out.
With kids it’s harder to place, maybe it’s walking the tightrope that is modern social interactions?
Bored people can now tune into (source of entertainment) instead of learning.
I don’t think the capacity for intelligence has dropped significantly, rather we as a society dedicate our time differently.
entertainment
Bingo. We have a winner.
Lack of mental lifting. Critical thinking becomes too hard. Why innovate? The country has become fat, dumb and happy.
Summary The article describes a decline in human intelligence, particularly among young people. The decline is attributed to reducedk reading habits and the negative impact of excessive screen time on cognitive abilities.
Not really surprising given how all the social information delivery services are designed for a constant wall of short dopamine hits, and the platforms used to access the information are designed so no actual skill is needed to be able to access the information delivery services.
You give a rat a button that’s tied into their brain’s pleasure center, the rat will push the button until they die.
All computer-tech needs to be made more open. Not just from an observational standpoint, but the act of making disparate systems work together requires learning and knowledge beyond push button, receive good feels. Megacorp one-stop-shop software/hardware platforms need to be broken up. Both from a walled garden echo chamber perspective, and from a user-use perspective. When a company controls the entire experience, it is too easy to ensure their user is always engaging with their products and spending money/time. Making that company’s life harder, makes the technology better for humanity.
Algorithms optimized for dopamine hits must be banned. As soon as our machines became revenue generators tuned for consumption, it was game over. Older systems, one used to have to learn at least basic things to accomplish a goal, which promoted the act of learning in general.
Basic hardware/software interaction and learning were useful side-effects of personal compute from the 1970s-early aughts. One was forced to occasionally open or fix hardware, one was forced to understand how the software worked. One ended up with basic understanding and approachability of the machines one used. Devices today are just expensive consumption toys with zero knowledge needed to consume. When they malfunction, the user has no reason or encouragement to attempt to fix them, as they can’t see why the device ceased to work.
Big Tech has run amok too long. Governments are barely regulating them. We humans just gotta start saying no.
I fucking believe it.
Causes :
long covid ?
micro plastics ?
screen time ?
sedentarism ?
fast food ?
lack of sleep ?
other ?Short form content like those found on reddit and here on Lemmy have retrained my brain, I’m sure of it. I’m actively trying to fight it, by forcing myself to read full articles, scroll more slowly and try to engage more fully rather than just endlessly scrolling for the next dopamine hit.
It’s easy to justify this behavior because “I’m just getting my news and staying informed” and while partially true it comes at the cost of the medium it’s provided by. Screen “reading” has definitely changed our brains for the worse and most people have no clue its even happened.
Heavy metal exposure
Sugar
The proliferation of food additives being used that are known to dramatically lower IQ
The gelding of our education system by morons who favor religious dogma over scientific fact
Criminally underfunded schools thanks to political leaders who see investing in future generations as budget waste
Failure to teach children critical thinking skills before exposing them to technology that makes it simpler for them
Being constantly bombarded and overstimulated every waking moment by media
Being chronically overworked and underrested
Climate change
Take your pick. The answer is “probably, yes.”
Everything you said makes sense…except heavy metal exposure. Unless you mean lead or something…
It’s social media and political manipulation.
idiocracy intro?
(IE the theory it pushed was in short, smart people do family planning, try to wait for everything to be perfect… and forget to get around to having kids).
Meanwhile on the less intelligent spectrum. Shit I’m pregnant again!!!.. Oh and I got the girl in the trailer next door pregnant.
Or for a real world example… look at Lauren Boebert, the 35 year old grandmother in congress.
Yes absolutely (and i was afraid to say it out loud).
But now, we have also to explain why it did not so much apply in the past millennias … or tens of past millenias. (again, i am afraid to say it … don’t want a shitstorm)The massive lowering of the bar of “good enough to stay alive”. Life expectancy was consistantly in the 30s up until the 1870s. Simply having kids was life threatening… doing so while malnourished even more so.
Natural selection favors traits that increase the odds of having offspring, as well as those that avoid death before having offspring. Avoiding death is a lot easier than it used to be.
For what it’s worth the average life expectancy was 30-something. That didn’t mean that everyone, or even the mostly everyone, just dropped dead at 30.
It did, however, involve an awful lot of people dying in childhood. Often due to diseases that these days we’ve almost stamped out, but now antivax morons are working hard on bringing back!
Yeah, I at least assumed that was understood with just “expectancy”, obviously people live longer than expectations, and some die unexpectedly young. Key point is if you were given a mission where you must become a baby, and carry on life until you have 6 kids reach the age of 18. But you could chose what time to be born in (but not pick location, class or race), the lowest difficulty mode of that game would almost certainly be after 1950s… and prior to the 1800s would be viewed as very hard mode.
Yes. Thanks for stating these hard facts.
Part of the answer is that mortality rates were far higher 150 years ago. A couple might have 5 children but only 2 survive to adulthood.
Because i agree with this, i encourage you to push this idea further to its conclusion.
If you have an idea that you regularly get called out on, you should probably say it and be willing to truly listen to what people are saying about it…lol
i did it often enough. Now someone else did it for me and I’m very happy they did.
P.S. : Often it’s not my ideas but the harsh direct way i express them 😆
Don’t forget lead.
Lead was a much bigger problem in the 1970 when it was in road vehicles fuels. But now its only use in some small plane fuels. There is also much less use of lead paint and lead in water pipe systems.
N.B. : Study in that article is about decline from 2010 until today in 15-year-olds.I remember still having to ask for unleaded gas, and that was in the '90s. Plenty of houses still have lead paint and lead pipes. Sure it was more of a problem in the 70s, but it didn’t go away after that.
Lead paint is encapsulated and not going to enter your body. Which houses have lead pipes? Even the houses I’ve lived in over 100 years old have all had complete copper plumbing.
Most schools do. And Trump just axed the program trying to replace them all.
Lead paint is not going to enter my body, but that’s because I very rarely put unknown things in my mouth. Toddlers operate differently
Meanwhile, it’s presently in many other sources like chocolate and spices. It’s part of the soup, it’s not doing us any favors, but it’s far from the sole causative factor.
So for quick context the reason why it’s present in foods specifically plants is because the plants naturally leach it up.
So the quality of soil is most important…
In my personal observations less intelligent people tend to have more children.
Therefore population IQ drifts towards bottom.I suspect that’s because they do not fully understand all their future struggles and fates of their children in the world, fucked up by climate crisis and resource scarcity.
This is the plot to a fictional movie. Intelligence is a factor of many things, and most of those factors are not genetic.
Your observation seems close to the opinions of old school eugenicists. “The wrong people are having children”.
The intro to Idiocracy doesn’t actually mention genetics.
Smart people value intelligence and people who value intelligence will raise their children as such.
Parents who don’t value intelligence don’t raise their kids with intelligence in mind.
Public schools aren’t actually about education. They’re about job training and obedience, so they wont fill the gaps the parents are leaving.
it is not genetic, it is environmental. Children of parents with less intelligence will not be raised to be intelligent. They might be lucky/resilience and try to get the most support outside the house, but it is much harder to accomplish, and often is even met with harassment at home, due to the rest of the family being insecure about their own lack of intelligence. And that is only if they rebel, which is not necessarily true as they will not only lack easy access to basic knowledge about the world/science, but will also not be introduced to the importance of learning about it from their closest figures of authority. Escaping that cycle it is even harder if the family is facing economic hardship, which is true for most modern families in general. It really isn’t that hard to figure that out, the kneejerk reaction that the statement always gets is annoying.
the kneejerk reaction that the statement always gets is annoying.
I agree with everything you said, but I’m going to point out something. If there is a common kneejerk reaction to some particular topic, there’s probably a reason for that. You yourself said its annoying? I suppose its predictable then. If you can predict that people are going to react in some way, you can write with more explanation to clarify that you aren’t actually supporting something like eugenics. The poster I’m responding to did not do this.
I took this lack of explanation as support (which, on reflection, might be leaping to conclusions). The overall tone of the comment is rather judgemental.
The commenter is also wrong; IQ hasn’t been “drifting towards the bottom”, the average IQ increases every year. Its why they have to constantly adjust the tests, because 100 is meant to be an average score by design. This is primarily why I chose to respond to him. He’s not saying " which is why we should invest in family planning" or “we should invest in children’s education”, he’s making an untrue statement, and then pretending that this will cause some sort of feedback loop. Dumb people making more dumb people.
IQ is not some absolute quantitative metric of intelligence. The people who treat it like it is… I find that a lot of them are pushing some sort of angle or simply don’t understand it.
yes that makes sense, thank you for explaining.
Intelligence is a factor of many things, and most of those factors are not genetic.
You are very vague…
Im not going to write some big long podt, just two things:
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people, on average, are not getting dumber. Anything you noticed observationally about dumb people having more children does not seem to have any effect on the world. Human nutrition has improved vastly over the past 100 years, as has education, etc.
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IQ increases every year. I don’t think this is evidence people are getting smarter because I think IQ is a poor measure of intelligence. I’m pointing this out to you because your statement about “IQ drifting toward the bottom’” is factually untrue.
IQ drifting toward the bottom’" is factually untrue
So, this post is wrong?
Sorry, I thought this was in another thread that was actually talking about IQ. I’ve clicked through too many articles.
This article doesn’t mention IQ at all, even though your response does. IQ isn’t an absolute quantitative measure for intelligence even though many people conflate them - this is probably why the article doesn’t mention it.
I’d dig into the Financial Times article that this Neoscope article is about but it’s pay-walled. The neoscope article makes some case for intelligence declining (I don’t have time to read those citations right now), but I’d point out this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with less intelligent parents having children. It could be evidence that the material conditions for us ordinary citizens is declining as a whole (I think we would both agree on that point). Cost of living is up, people are working longer. Long COVID probably has something to do with it, and stress.
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All this and more!
Right after this message from our sponsors.
Why not the aggregate of all of these?
Why are you putting a space after your punctuation?
i agree that some aggregate of all of these, and to various degrees, and differently for different people, would apply. Also, i did not say more so to let the discussion open.
Now, about text formatting in here :
.
i wanted one line for each items
yet I didn’t want it in 2 lines/itemssee examples here :
line # 1(no spaces + one line feed) line # 2
line # 1(no spaces + 2 line feed)
line # 2
So, the only way to get the formatting i wanted is to have two spaces at the end of each lines followed by one line feed.
For future reference, you can add a \ at the end of your sentence.
So you can accomplish this.
And then this.
But don’t put one on the last listed sentence, or it will look like this.\Good tricks 😁
(Yet on my keyboard, “space” and “LineFeed” are way quicker to type.)Not quite sure what that means. I’m on iOS, but whatever works!
I meant between your last letter and the punctuation marks. Not the spacing of the lines. Use an asterisk for lists if that’s your goal?
- like so.
ok. You mean i type : “goal ?”
instead of “goal?”
… well this is because i have poor eyesight … and i want to see the “?” clearly.also ...
9876
- 123
- 456
… again I don’t like it because there is an unused line just before the first bullet point which I don’t like.
dependency on AI can be another
The decline of American intelligence has been ongoing since before AI
Yes it is possible … but this factor is difficult to measure, as it may go both ways, depending on motivation to learn new things and if that AI is a good teacher or … is giving ready-made (and bad) answers without helping to go further.
Idiocracy keeps becoming truer and truer every year.
Unfortunately, that movie’s main message was about eugenics. I am not arguing that anti-intellectualism is not spreading like a cancer, but that movie is not the best thing to reference.
I don’t think it ever actually promoted eugenics. It just explored the natural consequences of two facts in a comedic way:
- Intelligence has a hereditary component to it.
- Stupid people have more kids.
It never tries to push any eugenics-based agenda. It would have if they tried to say that dumb people shouldn’t be allowed to have kids, but they never went anywhere near that.
Wealth has a hereditary component.
Yeah as the smart child of two dumbfuck parents who can barely read please stop repeating this dumb shit.
Two smart people don’t always make a smart baby. Two dumb people don’t always make a dumb baby.
It is eugenics.
- Intelligence has a hereditary component to it.
That is eugenics. https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism
Shit. I know shit’s bad right now, with all that starving bullshit, and the dust storms, and we are running out of french fries and burrito coverings. But I got a solution.
I’ve heard the climate crisis isn’t helping. More carbon dioxide in the air, the less we think good.
So, for people who don’t get the joke, a quick overview.
Atmospheric CO2 has increased from ~280 parts per million to ~430 ppm now. This causes problems besides global warming; notably ocean acidification. Scientists try to infer CO2 levels in the past from various indirect evidence. It seems that levels have not been this high in many millions of years, much longer than the existence of our or most other species.
That said, direct effects from these elevated CO2 levels are extremely implausible. We exhale CO2, meaning that indoor concentrations are typically much higher than these elevated atmospheric levels. On top of that, you have a lot of combustion, especially in cities. Cities have elevated CO2 concentrations compared to the surrounding area (think about smog). The northern hemisphere has higher concentrations than the southern one. The CO2 concentrations most of us live with have more to do with our immediate surroundings than global levels. Fun fact: Roadside grass can have a radiocarbon date of thousands of years.
The most iconic CO2 measurements (Keeling Curve) are taken on Hawaii, on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. I have heard that Elon and the felon are shutting that down now.
High CO2 levels can become a problem in badly ventilated places. CO2 is slightly heavier than air, so it can build up in wine cellars or cesspits. Fermentation creates the CO2. Typically, that kills more than 1 person. Person #1 goes down, passes out. Person #2 goes down to check on them.
Can’t tell if joke or … gestures vaguely at post
This is one I feel is getting largely overlooked.
Present day atmosphere is about 400 or 450 PPM compare this to :
CO2 poisoning (Hypercapnia) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercapnia
→ Physiological effects :
A high arterial partial pressure of carbon dioxide ( Pa CO2 ) causes changes in brain activity that adversely affect both fine muscular control and reasoning. EEG changes denoting minor narcotic effects can be detected for expired gas end tidal partial pressure of carbon dioxide (…) increase from ((53,000 PPM)) to approximately (…) (66,000 PPM = 0.066 atm). The diver does not necessarily notice these effects.
The FT source seems to be behind a paywall, and this article seems to be jumping between a bunch of possibly unrelated issues (focusing on young adult cognitive decline but looking at whole population reading rates and numeracy ability).
I wouldn’t worry about it … it wasn’t that high to begin with
I always remind my friends when we have political debates about so many things … we aren’t that many steps away from the cave we emerged from 100,000 years ago
There’s also no real proof that high intelligence is actually a productive evolutionary trait.
We’re juuuuuuuuust smart enough to grow like a cancerous parasite and are getting close to killing our sickly host organism.
Since humans have made many horrendous things we will easily agree on some things we would want to change in humanity. Yet, at some point, it’s difficult to define exactly what would be better … what would be more “productive” as you wrote.
