I wonder if you could analyze internet discussions for an effect.
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What does Chat Gpt say about this?
Honestly, I don’t think it is that surprising. Sadly.
I can’t help but think how much science fiction had stories where a civilization created machines to make their lives easier until there was no one left who knew how the machines worked or anyone who could fix them.
Those stories always seemed so far away yet here we are at the beginning with LLMs and machine learning.
Microplastic brain
It’s not, it’s not having to do the math or the remembering. The brain is a muscle, when you have your phone doing all the hard work it doesn’t need to be as buff. LLMs will worsen this problem even more. Microplastics? Maybe single digit consequences.
Idk anecdotal but I do math and programming every day and I still feel like I’m getting progressively dumber.
Lol, you aren’t wrong there.
You (and everyone) are getting dumber because as convenience increases, intelligence decreases.
They didn’t remove math lol
You don’t pass classes if you don’t pass tests
Don’t even think about saying some dumb shit like “they pass them anyway” because that doesn’t actually happen
I am an educator and I regret to inform you that it absolutely 100% does. I routinely encounter calculus students who do not know how to solve for x.
Grade inflation in higher ed is also a serious issue. It was a growing problem when I was in college 15 years ago, and it doesn’t sound like it has gotten better since.
Solving for X is easy. X is always DMX, because X is gonna give it to you. Though I will agree solving for X has become a lot harder since DMX passed away.
At my college you could basically tell your teacher you’re depressed and get a passing grade regardless of your work.
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Ah yes because, as we all know, you MUST pass classes in order to participate in society. And clearly no one can ever possibly cheat because it’s against the rules. Problem solved!
Cheating is against the rules and you shouldn’t do it
Only after I can afford to get away with it
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.
To be fair, the idea that writing has to be this perfect penmanship that will be readable in 1000 years is silly. Write things down in a good enough style for the task at hand.
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.
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 agree. Idiocracy is a funny movie, but that’s it. The entire premise of “stupid people make stupid children” is based in eugenics.
This article seems to be only looking at America based off the sources that I can access without a paywall
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 @[email protected] 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.
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?
i think with kids it’s less attributable to wokedei and more a total collapse of the educational system mixed with higher and higher stress levels as the world loudly strains around them
Corporations have used social media to colonize and profit from our attention spans, including those of children. Our mental capacity and attention spans are limited, especially children’s. When the advertisers have had their fill, how much is left for learning?
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.
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!
You sound like you’re consumed by your own ambition. Hope you’re happy though.
Sounds like he’s living his best life to me.
Not really I mostly do it for entertainment and because I like to see what I can do
Causes :
long covid ?
micro plastics ?
screen time ?
sedentarism ?
fast food ?
lack of sleep ?
other ?Technology, specifically short form social media content, has got to be the biggest driver here.
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
🤘😠🤘
Everything you said makes sense…except heavy metal exposure. Unless you mean lead or something…
And mercury. And other heavy metals. They’re not just neurotoxic but biocumulative so even small exposures over a long time can add up to a lifetime of problems
I know the phrase is ambiguous but from context they clearly meant actual metal.
All of these and more. Did you know our carbon emissions are changing the ratio of oxygen in the atmosphere as a whole? Guess which species is known to get dumber when oxygen deprived. Don’t worry about the warming ocean’s increasing acidity, it just makes the ocean a more difficult habitat for the phytoplankton that make 65%of the oxygen in the atmosphere.
I’m sure our normalcy bias will protect us or maybe the invisible space monkey will save his favorite primates if we can commit a few more hate crimes in his name.
That was already discussed in this post :
https://lemmy.world/post/26948801/15738537copy pasted what i wrote :
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.
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.
So far I’m liking lemmy more because there is a lot less per post. I find I’m enjoying each thread more fully. It’s like I’m not endless scrolling because I can’t. I’ve actually read more articles in the day since I’ve joined than in my last 3 months on reddit.
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 😆
It’s social media and political manipulation.
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.
Every building before like 1978 has lead paint, but people forget that so does the land around them. I live in an area with older homes and we’re frequently warned not to grow vegetables within 10’ of the house because the soil is too likely lead contaminated from peeling or stripping exterior paint over the years
It’s definitely worth having your soil tested before growing anything you plan to ingest in an urban environment.
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
If you’re in a contaminated area, you’re contaminated. Hopefully not enough to make a difference if you don’t eat paint chips.
- But smaller chips are part of the dust that gets everywhere.
- Chips and stripped paint is part of the soil that may be pulled up into any vegetables grown in that soil.
- heavy metals bioaccumulate so even small exposures over enough time can add up to a problem
- it’s not just lead, mercury is notorious for bioaccumulating up the food chains for many seafoods
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…
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.
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 problem with eugenics is proposed solutions, or criteria based of prejudice.
I claim it’s both fine and correct to state that the wrong people have too many children. You’re the wrong people if you have more children than you can adequately care for, to raise sufficiently for them to have a successful life. You’re the wrong people if you have children you’re not prepared for or otherwise can’t commit to raising or don’t have the ability to raise.
It’s wrong, eugenics, when
- it’s prejudicial such as based on race, culture, religion
- you’re judging another person’s worth, their rights on that worth, or their opportunities on their worth
- you take it to an extreme, such as only the wealthy should have children.
- you prescribe a solution that imposes your will on other people, or worse, legal or medical intervention
Better answers include- better education helps people make better choices
- better medical care helps people know their choice will succeed
- better safety nets help each child succeed even when their parents made a poor choice or had unexpected life events
- better childcare options help give the parents a chance to succeed with trying to earn a living while raising a child
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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.
It is simpler than all that. Elite parents send their children to elite schools and universities. Their children then learn how the world works and are equipped with the skills to engage with the people running things.
The lower classes do not value education in this fashion. Their children do not have parents at home who understand how the world works or how our society is organized. Even if those children are smart or gifted they have no idea how to learn the skills they need or how to properly use their gifted abilities.
If you automatically assumed that intelligence having a hereditary component to it meant that I was trying to say that all dumb people’s children were also dumb 100% of the time, you might not be as smart as you think.
Wealth has a hereditary component.
- Intelligence has a hereditary component to it.
That is eugenics. https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism
If one believes the accuracy of film’s central premise—that the dumb are reproducing at a higher rate than the smart, which will lower the world’s intelligence until idiocy reigns supreme—it’s only natural to want to stop that from happening. From there, it’s not at all that great a leap to begin believing that maybe there should be some kind of policy only allowing intelligent people to reproduce—in other words, sterilize the dumb.
This is just the author asserting their own absurd leaps in logic as the intended message behind the movie, which it clearly isn’t.
A 2015 Pew study looked at how many kids that women with postgraduate degrees have given birth to over the past half-century. In 1994, 30 percent of women with a master’s degree or higher were childless, a number that’s since dropped to 22 percent. In 1976, 10 percent of said women had one child, while in 2014 that numbers up to 18 percent; those with two kids rose even more dramatically, from 22 to 35 percent.
The author draws the wrong conclusion from this data. Just because women with degrees are having more kids now than in the past doesn’t mean that women without degrees haven’t always had more kids than women with degrees. It’s very telling that they never bring those numbers up.
The issue is the thought that people cannot grow and learn. Regardless of upbringing, anybody can choose to persue knowledge. The horrible state of public education is most likely the root cause, in my opinion. The US has chose not to invest in it’s people and now we are seeing the results.
You’re absolutely right that access to education can greatly improve intelligence. Critical thinking skills are just that - skills that must be learned. Genetics are just one of countless factors involved in how intelligent someone ends up being.
I saw Idiocracy a while ago, so I can’t remember every detail to bring up examples, but I think the characters surrounding the main character did show growth and a willingness to try to learn things. I don’t think we see much of an education system in that movie’s portrayal of the future either.
It’s also worth noting that while your genetics absolutely affects your brain structure and chemistry, parents can pass on stupidity or intelligence to their children in more ways than just genetically. After all, most people learn more from their parents than from anyone else.
I would recommend rewatching it. I tried to rewatch it with a friend and didn’t get more than 30mins in before they were done.
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.
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.
I fucking believe it.
