I wonder if you could analyze internet discussions for an effect.
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Causes :
long covid ?
micro plastics ?
screen time ?
sedentarism ?
fast food ?
lack of sleep ?
other ?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.”
Heavy metal exposure
🤘😠🤘
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.
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 😆
It’s social media and political manipulation.
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.
Technology, specifically short form social media content, has got to be the biggest driver here.
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.
Idiocracy keeps becoming truer and truer every year.
is anyone here talking about the systematic dismantling of public education and starving of teachers and children in terms of learning resources and actual food
also i again have to complain about Idiocracy, the comedy film that suggests intelligent rich people will solve our problems and stupid poor people will doom society, where in reality you have incredibly wealthy and also incurious, unintelligent ghouls hoarding generational wealth, making it a top priority to have tons of children in order to make their ‘superior’ genes take over.
I agree. Idiocracy is a funny movie, but that’s it. The entire premise of “stupid people make stupid children” is based in eugenics.
The fact that teachers need to beg for pencils is disgraceful. Teachers should get paid more and not have to pay for their supplies.
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.
Tech companies hire psychologists to behavior modify us to be engagement zombies. That alone must have done a number on intelligence.
One, we’ve off loaded much of our critical thinking and researching skills to Google et al. This will only get worse as we develop stronger AI assistants that perform a majority of the “thinking” tasks. Technology frees the mind in some ways and reduces the need for certain functions. I read an article probably 10 years ago about how Japanese struggle to write because cell phones and computers have taken over much of that skill.
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I fucking believe it.
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.
Neat! Tell us more!
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.
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.
Every generation will be more intelligent than the last, our exponentially complicating world requires it.
Every generation will be more knowledgable than the previous… but there is no guarantee they’ll be more intelligent.
