- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
No, it’s not just you — people really are, per a number of surveys, way less intelligent than they used to be.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20250316190341/https://futurism.com/neoscope/human-intelligence-declining-trends
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
You must log in or register to comment.
Every generation is more intelligent and connected than the last.
No corporate media article is going to change that.
This is laterally just an attempt to make older people think the young are stupid and lame.
That’s not what studies are currently showing as we are seeing a decline in testing scores across many nations. The article literally mentions this.
Dont argue with that guy. He’s a troll.
A bit sensationalized, but there is a solid evidence that students are doing worse in the US than a few years back. From what I’ve read, it’s probably the year gap from COVID because data suggested the decline was steeply after that year and mostly impacted low income, rural, and communities of color who were most impacted by the shift to remote school.
This is an averages thing, though, as it’s tied to other data that suggests absenteeism skyrocketed and never quite came back to pre-pandemic levels. A large group of people just not doing education is going to sink the scores.
Now, people citing biological reasons like long COVID and microplastics aren’t necessarily wrong, but I haven’t seen as much evidence of cognitive impacts. The reason I still give it some credit, though, is historically IQ goes up every generation (and then recalibrated since it’s centered on 100) and a big part of that is physiological (e g. deleading gas, reducing air pollution), though access to information (radio, TV, internet) also contributes.
Interestingly enough, you’d think reliance on social media makes you dumb but we don’t have evidence of that, it’s mostly just really bad for teens mental health. We’ve always had stupid forms of entertainment.
A lot of students just straight up couldn’t do remote learning because they didn’t have home internet or suitable computing and they got screwed. Attitudes towards sick days also changed and many parents still keep their kids home sick based on now expired COVID rules
also, shabbling together school online over ~3 months isn’t exactly… smooth to say the least. Teachers can’t pause a YouTube video without hunting for the triangle in the corner, much less operate a computer long enough to share and control a zoom call of 30 kids.
I literally got a daily 0 for participation in a class where I clicked the “join call” button and was met with like 4 other kids, no teacher. For some reason there was a bug where there were just 2 different calls it would connect you to at random and all the teachers assumed it was kids being lazy and wouldn’t listen to parents.
Also the teachers had no idea what they were teaching either, they spent all the time learning how to ‘recover the google when they clicked the minus button’ so they couldn’t learn about the English lesson.
After a month I just switched to my states online classes instead of my highschool pitiful attempts. It went well for the rest of the year. Pretty easy because when you had to do phone calls the teachers were so overworked they’d like literally anything. For my physical education class I submitted a like 30min time for a mile, the teacher didn’t say anything. Took an online class that wasn’t offered at my school this year, it was definitely harder, but still pretty easy.
Yup, hence why it impacted who I mentioned: low income, rural and people of color (who get bad Internet due to racial redlining). Good point regarding changed attitudes of sick days, though.
My pin is on mold. So many young people I know today in the UK live around mold or likely have mold hiding somewhere due to living in old buildings, likely because it’s the only choice they have.
It’s not mold. It’s education.
Says the mold. Schools are useless shit anyway you learn fuck all apart from how to speak, read, and argue and think and seeing as most people who all go to the same schools with the same programs never learnt it, I don’t think schools have much of a part in it.
Schools are useless shit anyway you learn fuck all apart from how to speak, read, and argue and think
But this is precisely a failure of education. We don’t pay teachers well so there’s no incentive for good ones to stay.
Class sizes are too large so individuals can easily fall behind unnoticed. Or the opposite, talented kids get bored and aren’t challenged because the class can only move at the pace of the slowest individual.
Too much of education is steeped in tradition and no attempts are made to make the syllabus relevant to the real world.
Schooling isn’t tailored to the individual so you’re forced to learn the way your teacher dictates when an alternative approach may suit you better.
Right, education has nothing to do with how smart or dumb we are.
I read this in a dumb voice in my head, it sounded kinda like goofy but like, lower pitch. So I’m gonna say you’re wrong, and I’m the smarterest bye bye XoXo
Yeah I’m not giving that much credence to an article that uses the pop term “brain rot” while trying to make a scientific statement.
There isn’t any reason to suggest that human intellect has been harmed, the publication counters — but in “both potential and execution,” our intelligence is definitely on the downturn.
Sounds like they’re trying to glean something from an article that doesn’t support their premise.
If we’re looking for a cause for people falling into propaganda and supporting self destructive policies, it’s has nothing to do with intellect. It has to do with a perceived sense of vulnerability. People do insane shit when they feel vulnerable. It’s why cults exist.
gleaned from benchmarking tests that track cognitive skills in teens and young adults
The study didn’t measure “individual people are getting dumber over time”, but “people in their late teens and early 20s are dumber than in years past”, although the former COULD be a cause of the latter.
Whether this is a biological issue due to COVID, or a generational one due to educational disruptions caused by COVID, or something else entirely not tied to COVID is unclear. Although this article and others sure WANT to blame COVID.
I believe that my personal decline came from the social isolation and predation that I experienced in 2018 due to a rise in bigotry and intersexism accompanying the backlash to Trump. When I have had brief stints of being allowed to resume social interactions, my cognitive skills have rebounded. Unfortunately, our society has become so bigoted that it’s genuinely hard to find ways to socialize.
In other words, I believe that the problem is social, and that we need to seriously address our society’s social issues and be willing to start taking and giving criticism again. I’m trying my best, but other people have gotten cold and crazy and it’s hard to get anyone to be willing to be remotely friendly or willing to admit that they are destroying the social fabric of their own communities.
As someone ostracized at the beginning of this trend and forced to watch from the outside, it’s been heartbreaking as I’ve struggled to convince others to let me back in to society.
Define community. I genuinely want to know because I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of a community that wasn’t on reference to online forums.
When you pay rent to your landlord and are exploited by your job to afford it… that is the community everyone thinks is so great.
Dont worry about getting to know your neighbors. Rents going up end of your lease and you have to move yet again to find someplace you can afford. No point. But hey, the houses of the neighbors you never met increased in value. Thank you for your community service.
We never were civilized. At least we stopped pretending.
What the fuck? Are you serious? You don’t know what community is outside of the internet?
…Yeah? At least I don’t think I do. English is my second language so maybe I’m missing some nuance here, but no I have never heard of a “community” IRL.
A community to me is just members of something like an online forum or a subreddit or subscribers of a content creato… Though the last one is a stretch, since they don’t talk to each other usually. I’m not that young either, I remember being on IRC back in the day and I’d call that a community.
People I know IRL are disparate acquaintances and friends and friends of friends, none of them know each other or share anything in common or any desire to know anyone, I met them on dating apps mostly and through people I met on dating apps, so I don’t think that’s a “community”.
People at work are coworkers, prisoners of wage slavery assigned to the same cell so that’s not it. Neighbours are just people forced to cohabit nearby due to finite amounts of land, you’re usually either enemies with them or on friendly terms, but you wouldn’t speak to them unless there was something you needed, so that’s not community.
Most of the time I hear “community” it’s a dogwhistle meant to make something sound more polite than “people” so e.g. “LGBTQ community” - there is no such thing, it’s just people, but no one would read articles saying “LGBTQ people fight for rights” because that sounds too sad, so they say “community” or e.g. “migrant community”. It’s a euphemism.
Interesting. Well, community is a common word lol
It’s usually used to refer, non-specifically, to people that live around you. You’ll see it in places like “community gardens” or “community centers”. The usage on the Internet is pretty recent, linguistically, obviously lol
See that’s counter-intuitive to me because doesn’t it usually imply some level of knowledge of the people or at least something you have in common?
I don’t know them, I’ve never seen any of them more than once, I’ve never spoken to or been spoken to by them anywhere I lived, because people IRL generally keep to themselves and just talking to random strangers is pretty weird all in all.
With your usage of the word “community” in “community centre” i just figured it’s an extremely old timey generic way to generically refer to a settlement, including cities, towns, residential areas/neighbourhoods, districts, zones, boroughs, areas and other localities that’s fallen out of use.
In that case I’m not sure how I’m meant to interpret @AnIndefiniteArticle’s usage of the word, because I don’t know how someone can destroy the social fabric of random collections of actual strangers on the street lol, there isn’t any, they’re just randoms on about their day.
This is what catastrophically losing a class war with the rich and weirdly refusing to talk about it looks like.
Your intelligence is fine, you are beaten down is the problem.
Micro-plastics has been my theory.
Is there any evidence to suggest micro plastics are causing issues? My conspiracy is microplastics are simply being pushed as the latest scapegoat for society’s issues. It’s an attempt to distract us and redirect us from rising up against the oligarchs who are destroying our society.
Or… lack of education? Declining quality of education? Micro plastic is a major problem, but to think it’s the #1 cause of people being stupid is, well, pretty stupid.
It might be the micro-plastics in me making the assumption.
Never stated it to be the #1 cause, that was your assumption.
Why would you mention it then?
I remember looking at old assignments from my dad’s high school in a developing country and being shocked at what they were expecting these teenagers to do.
At least in America, most of the time you can download an app that does the work for you now. Zero critical thought needed.
