I wonder if you could analyze internet discussions for an effect.
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
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
🤘😠🤘
Everything you said makes sense…except heavy metal exposure. Unless you mean lead or something…
I know the phrase is ambiguous but from context they clearly meant actual metal.
All this and more!
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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.
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”.
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.
A kneejerk reaction from an unreasonable populace doesn’t mean shit. If i point out the Christian religion is cartoonishly evil most people will have a kneejerk reaction to defend the evil religion, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
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
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.
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.