People are getting dumber

Apone

Apone

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If you've never seen it, you should watch the movie "Idiocracy".


Personally, I'd fully agree with the argument, but it doesn't seem like any sort of huge revelation. . . so much as a random rant about how stupid people are.

Back in the day people had it hard. They had to battle the giant wooly saber-toothed sloth if they wanted a steak, learn to build a wigwam out of camel poop if they didn't want to freeze, and master the art of crafting a quality cave-wench club in order to reproduce. That's a lot of shit to be required to master.

Today we seem to give a reproductive bias toward people who aren't smart enough to figure out how to get the condom on. Steaks are available at any grocery store, and they end up causing heart attacks to the successful people who can afford them. Malls can house the homeless, and it's illegal to club a 'ho and drag her back to your crib these days. Responsible and smart people have a SERIOUS reproductive disadvantage.


But I don't believe we're "losing intelligence". . . .we're just not killing off the stupid people like the world used to. I believe that peak human capability is still shifting toward a higher intelligence. . . . however we're just leaving behind a large population that is skewing the average back to a lower intelligence.



Interestingly, what seems to be happening is that there are people who are intelligent and capable and can produce far more than they need for themselves. . . . and there are people who can't produce enough food, so they produce more children instead. Society makes sure the stupid people don't die at the expense of the successful people. . . which ends up putting less demands on the stupid, and MORE demands on the successful. If anything, the breadth of human intelligence, and the social safety nets that we maintain, will probably result in the evolution of a sub-population of intelligent elites.


(This isn't meant to be an attack of anyone or any groups of people, merely a humorous take of human intelligence. . . I like stupid people, they actually laugh at my jokes)
 
[video=youtube;aSsiddr5zjA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSsiddr5zjA[/video]
 
'Rumsfeld and big Jewry'?
Really?
 
Apone said:
'Rumsfeld and big Jewry'?
Really?
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I wouldn't call them jews no. I would say they are hiding behind jews. i don't believe that the likes of the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds are reading the torah and abiding by it and observing various jewish religious observances

But people like Donald Rumsfeld are members of various groups and secret societies. For example the freemasons whose stated aim is the rebuilding of solomons temple

So when you think about what areas in american life affect how people think and feel about things what are they?

They're things like: hollywood, psychiatry, banking, entertainment, politics, corporate media

Who runs these things? As the journalists say 'follow the money' and you get to who is running things and who is engineering peoples perceptions
 
Apone said:
That's what it said at the end of the video.
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I didn't make the video i just posted it to show a different perspective on the official line on aspartame

The company that manufacture it and the FDA have concealed evidence form the public that show that aspartame is harmful to people

There's other food additives out there as well that they know of but allow for example monosodium glutomate and flouride in the water. flouride is actually an ingrediant in rat poison!
 
[video=youtube;ElrXrE8AmIc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=ElrXrE8AmIc&NR=1[/video]
 
The lust to believe in true golden age is strong. When one does not like the present one imagines a perfect world that never existed. With a little bit of research and an open mind one can easily see we are living in the best it has ever been for humanity in general (for most this does not help much).
 
grimlock said:
The lust to believe in true golden age is strong. When one does not like the present one imagines a perfect world that never existed. With a little bit of research and an open mind one can easily see we are living in the best it has ever been for humanity in general (for most this does not help much).
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I think if you look at school curricula from 50 years ago and compare them with the current ones, you might form a different view.
 
grimlock said:
The lust to believe in true golden age is strong. When one does not like the present one imagines a perfect world that never existed. With a little bit of research and an open mind one can easily see we are living in the best it has ever been for humanity in general (for most this does not help much).
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The current situation is in flux

The economic situation is worsening so i think its too soon to say whether our current times are better or not

I also think the real issue is not whether or not mankind has managed to make some improvements over hundreds of years but whether or not those improvements should be far more than they are or whether real progress has been blocked by a handful of people with an agenda of centralised power
 
[MENTION=1871]muir[/MENTION] I really don't think that hunter-gatherer societies had aspartame when they switched to agriculture, which the article identifies as one of the key reasons for the intellectual slowdown. We're talking thousands and thousands of years here, not a couple of decades.

I think one of the arguments against this is that we're actually evolving different kinds of intelligence-- perhaps even kinds that haven't been identified or categorized yet, but are a product of living the way we do, in complex societies that demand a great deal of specialization and focus on the details as opposed to the general… not because of any conspiracy, but because the general has grown too complex to comprehend and there is more demand for the specific.
 
I think if you look at school curricula from 50 years ago and compare them with the current ones, you might form a different view.
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..... yeah. I mean, if a Eurocentric and heavily cis-sexist curriculum and "home ec" is an all female class where you're taught how to be a homemaker is a "Golden Age" than, yeah, I see it.

But seriously, this is just bad science. As Jones said, it's a hypothesis with no evidence or proof, like saying women like pink because of berries in the forest.
 
i don't agree we are inferior intellectually. the more we know however the stupider we act (with that knowledge?).
 
MrDoobie said:
As Jones said, it's a hypothesis with no evidence or proof, like saying women like pink because of berries in the forest.
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From the abstract summary:

'New developments in genetics, anthropology, and neurobiology predict that a very large number of genes underlie our intellectual and emotional abilities, making these abilities genetically surprisingly fragile.'

So I guess he's just 'predicting' here… but still, it does make sense that if a large number of genes are responsible, that mutation would for be more likely to occur than with something that involves a smaller number of genes.
 
I don't think we're 'dumber,' per say. I'd say our focus and attention span is more dispersed and our school system underestimates our abilities by adjusting the curriculum to attend to the lowest common denominator. Furthermore, instead of teaching us critical thinking for ourselves, our schools teach us how to think to arrive at the conclusions they want us to arrive at. For example, if I were to take a random sampling of gender studies or literature papers from university and college students across the country, I guarantee that 90% of them will recite the same exact concepts and interpret them the exact same way. Heck, I see it on the forums too. Some folks have never even been to college, but are just as knowledgeable and articulate as the so-called 'educated' folk on the same issues discussed in university lecture halls. Difference is, they probably got their info from another forum site or article on the web somewhere and didn't have to shell out thousands of dollars and spend the next decade or so paying off their student loans just to get a useless piece of paper that didn't guarantee them that dream job after all. We've just learned to regurgitate knowledge and pass it on with little variety or ingenuity because we've learned that there are 'right' thoughts and there are 'wrong' thoughts and stepping out of the boundaries of either might possibly invite scorn from our teachers, peers, etc.

This is because thoughts are value-labeled too and sort you into extremes. Certain thoughts are branded 'liberal' and certain brands are labeled 'conservative' and it's bad to have a 'conservative' thought because that automatically puts you in the same camp as all these other detestable people with conservative thoughts and you therefore agree with everything they say (the same applies to those with liberal opinions in predominantly conservative circles). Nobody wants that headache, so they stay quiet, or maybe they think that 'millions of people can't be wrong' and adjust their compass to go with the crowd instead. We're all taught to comply and be polite and not step on anybody's toes, sometimes to laughable extremes.

Then again, knowledge has always been socially indoctrinated, but the key difference is that now our entire knowledge-base is fully endorsed by one single mainstream culture. As much as it wants to seem all-inclusive, by the same token, it de-humanizes inconvenient view points and encourages people to slot themselves into neat little categories across the board and across the globe. It's simplistic and it's silly and it takes full advantage of the fact that people lap it up because they're looking for two legs to stand on in an age of information that doesn't provide us with straight answers once we start to deviate from the norm.

I'm not even going to touch the discussion on what our diet and typical American life-style is doing to our minds and bodies. Psychologically, we're fucked by the culture of excess and addiction and poor impulse control.
 
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People estimate that when Jesus was alive roughly 50% of people died before the age of 5 and 60% died before the age of 16. This means about half of all people are getting murked before they reach reproduction age. So yes, we were definitely evolving quicker back then. That doesn't mean we were smarter though. The most simple explanation for us not being challenged enough today is because we are way smarter than we used to be, therefor life is easier.

The industrial age is fascinating though because all the perceived benefits of it become detriments if the system breaks. So when vaccines and antibiotics are no longer available we face super bugs, when agriculture is no longer able to be shipped we lack the ability to grow our own food, and when social media/internet/transportation breaks down we have a weaker social structure in our immediate real life circle.

I don't believe in evolving backwards, in nature there is no such thing. I've heard people say "all the dumbasses are making babies now". Sure impulsiveness will improve your chances of reproducing but all that means is impulsiveness is the dominant trait and the smarter trait from mother natures point of view.

Or maybe we aren't more or less smarter, maybe we are just differently smart. That's also a possibility.
 
I can't comment on the research as I'm not willing to pay forty bucks for what seems like a flawed hypothesis. However if this is true, would that imply people who live in areas where their survival depends on creating solutions that provide food and shelter are actually more intelligent than us? Perhaps EQ and IQ tests should be administered to those who live in the same tribe-like community as their ancestors.

It’s easy to look down on our prehistoric ancestors for their primitive, electric screwdriver-less way of life.
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Just like the future will look down on us for our primitive sonic screwdriver-less way of live.
 
Apone said:
@muir I really don't think that hunter-gatherer societies had aspartame when they switched to agriculture, which the article identifies as one of the key reasons for the intellectual slowdown. We're talking thousands and thousands of years here, not a couple of decades.

I think one of the arguments against this is that we're actually evolving different kinds of intelligence-- perhaps even kinds that haven't been identified or categorized yet, but are a product of living the way we do, in complex societies that demand a great deal of specialization and focus on the details as opposed to the general… not because of any conspiracy, but because the general has grown too complex to comprehend and there is more demand for the specific.
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I think there are many factors at play over this issue

There is the physiological effects of the modern diet and vaccines then there is the less tangible effect of what input is put into our brain in terms of information and culture

I think that the ruling class do work to keep people deliberately un-informed

[video=youtube;eZJoCfgAEuE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZJoCfgAEuE[/video]
 
[video=youtube;iFlvkwXCQco]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFlvkwXCQco[/video]
 
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