Are People Getting Smarter or Dumber?
- Thread starter Julianking93
- Start date
Recommended Videos
''And that is precisely what I find so amusing: the slow circling of the drain, by a once promising species...
...The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you're emotionally detached from it.
And please, don't confuse my point of view with cynicism. The real cynics are the ones who tell you that everything is going to be alright.
The human game was up a long time ago when the high priests and traders took over.
I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity and I ROOT for it's destruction.'' - George Carlin
After a while, you stop caring about humanity as a whole and just want to see the fuckers finally die so that, maybe, the universe can start all over.
...The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you're emotionally detached from it.
And please, don't confuse my point of view with cynicism. The real cynics are the ones who tell you that everything is going to be alright.
The human game was up a long time ago when the high priests and traders took over.
I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity and I ROOT for it's destruction.'' - George Carlin
After a while, you stop caring about humanity as a whole and just want to see the fuckers finally die so that, maybe, the universe can start all over.
I'd say about as stupid as they have always been, but with some skills with technology simply because that technology is simple to use these days. And because of that technology having an emphasis on sharing with people across large areas of space... I would say you hear about more stupid people than you would normally
Im going with dumber. Every woman that seems to hit on me over this date site has been a mother to some poor child with a wanker for a father and expecting me to care for it, or smokes....heavily. (My friend insisted I try it because she found her BF of 2 years with it. Failing to forget: Im a guy, not a woman)
amongst other things of course.
amongst other things of course.
i don't think humans are gettting dumber persay. Rather i believe people are getting used to being ignorant and having being told what to do and thus wanting to remain in that said ignorance. this combined with the fact that humans especially the americans (no offense u.s. residents) are getting fater and lazier because of huge amounts of job loss means symptoms similar to stupidity. now people find out the truth about the world and refuse to change and act like they are ignorant, they are walking mounds of stupidity.
Smarter. I know it's fun to poke holes at our own society through some masochistic human urge to claim ourselves as 'shit', but we're getting smarter. We understand more, since technology and sciences move along all the time. While there's no denying there are always going to be less intelligent people than average or lower-intelligence people, you have to remember the big-cheese of intelligence a hundred years ago will be built upon by the super-intellects of today.
Humans don't get dumber, or we'd be have started throwing spears at goats by now. No, we'll only get smarter as we learn more about the world we live in.
Humans don't get dumber, or we'd be have started throwing spears at goats by now. No, we'll only get smarter as we learn more about the world we live in.
We all get subjected to some degree of media training, just through watching tv and other advances in mass media, so the average person sounds more intelligent nowadays. Stupid people dominate air time only because many viewers like a good laugh and normal situations aren't interesting enough.
Formal education itself is also become better on the whole than before (maybe exclude the last 2 decades) and information is widely available, so a kid doesn't need to be very bright to be both a smart ass and knowledgeable on many subjects.
Natural selection has been eliminated however and the only solace we got is evolution being a very slow proces, so it may take a very long while before every useful trait has been bred out of the human race. In the meantime we can enjoy our technological and cultural advances.
Formal education itself is also become better on the whole than before (maybe exclude the last 2 decades) and information is widely available, so a kid doesn't need to be very bright to be both a smart ass and knowledgeable on many subjects.
Natural selection has been eliminated however and the only solace we got is evolution being a very slow proces, so it may take a very long while before every useful trait has been bred out of the human race. In the meantime we can enjoy our technological and cultural advances.
Smarter. The smarter one gets, the more one realizes what he doesn't know, i.e as we get smarter, we more and more see the extent of our dumbness. My theory is that this doesn't limit itself to one person, but is also true for groups, and for the world. Since we know more and more about everything, both because we have more information and because we can comprehend it better, we also know more about the (lack of) intelligence we all (in the world, as the full collection of peoples) have. So while we may *think* the world gets dumber, the opposite is true.
For every 1 intelligent person, their are 3 idiot.
Its hard to say in today's culture everything is made simple for the masses, but with the education system becoming better for the children can they not become smarter...Its a difficult question to answer, and one I can not.
Its hard to say in today's culture everything is made simple for the masses, but with the education system becoming better for the children can they not become smarter...Its a difficult question to answer, and one I can not.
Dumber, and will be continuing the trend until the few people who think they're clever stop making everything easier, more user friendly, more obvious.
e.g. the coffee cups say they're hot now. Apparently someone out there sells cold coffee? No, its because some dumb old lady spilled it in her lap and almost won the most ridiculous lawsuit ever.
I'm a strong proponent of just taking the safety labels off of everything. Eventually the idiot population would thin itself out.
e.g. the coffee cups say they're hot now. Apparently someone out there sells cold coffee? No, its because some dumb old lady spilled it in her lap and almost won the most ridiculous lawsuit ever.
I'm a strong proponent of just taking the safety labels off of everything. Eventually the idiot population would thin itself out.
"Getting dumber"? Dumber than what, exactly? Dumber than humanity was in the 19th century, when the vast majority of people educated their children in coal mines and factories, where they'd be spending the rest of their lives? Dumber than humanity was in the 20th century, where it was decades before academic education at the high-school grade was anything but a priviledge, and women and black people faced discriminatory policies that limited their progress through the academic system, policies that only began to change in the second half of the century?
Or dumber than ten, twenty, thirty years ago, when you were young, and people were good, and you grew up listening to your parents and grandparents talking about "how much better everything used to be", before this sudden wave of moral and mental decay that seems to have settled in amongst the unwashed masses. Back when blacks were inferior and homosexuality was a disease, and teenage rebellion was a glorious statement of the new era, and not just children being disrespectful. And there weren't these students and young adults who ran wild getting drunk simply to have a good time, because in the good old days people swarmed the pubs and bars at the end of the working week because it's the only way to forget that they had to go back to work in the morning, where they worked their dangerous jobs for unreasonable hours for a pitiful wage.
Because people who almost invariably have the ability to read, to write, to work with simple mathematics, who can use computers and video phones and devices that were unimaginable twenty years ago are just getting dumber. Because people who have the chance at an education, regardless of social or economic background, where they can learn about the science of the universe and what it means, because E=MC[sup]2[/sup] is common knowledge, and they can think about people and think about the world in terms of hard fact or mysterious spirituality because it's what they believe in, and not just because they'd be beaten if they didn't say their prayers, are just getting dumber.
No. People are people. This will not change over a few decades. This will not change over a few centuries. A species will not become any more or less intelligent over so few generations. What can change is society, and what we consider to be "basic knowledge"; people will move with the times, but humans will stay the same.
Correlating evidence: people are clearly still as arrogant as ever, if this thread is anything to go by.
Or dumber than ten, twenty, thirty years ago, when you were young, and people were good, and you grew up listening to your parents and grandparents talking about "how much better everything used to be", before this sudden wave of moral and mental decay that seems to have settled in amongst the unwashed masses. Back when blacks were inferior and homosexuality was a disease, and teenage rebellion was a glorious statement of the new era, and not just children being disrespectful. And there weren't these students and young adults who ran wild getting drunk simply to have a good time, because in the good old days people swarmed the pubs and bars at the end of the working week because it's the only way to forget that they had to go back to work in the morning, where they worked their dangerous jobs for unreasonable hours for a pitiful wage.
Because people who almost invariably have the ability to read, to write, to work with simple mathematics, who can use computers and video phones and devices that were unimaginable twenty years ago are just getting dumber. Because people who have the chance at an education, regardless of social or economic background, where they can learn about the science of the universe and what it means, because E=MC[sup]2[/sup] is common knowledge, and they can think about people and think about the world in terms of hard fact or mysterious spirituality because it's what they believe in, and not just because they'd be beaten if they didn't say their prayers, are just getting dumber.
No. People are people. This will not change over a few decades. This will not change over a few centuries. A species will not become any more or less intelligent over so few generations. What can change is society, and what we consider to be "basic knowledge"; people will move with the times, but humans will stay the same.
Correlating evidence: people are clearly still as arrogant as ever, if this thread is anything to go by.
"For every 1 intelligent person there are 3 idiots.Baldry said:
It's hard to say in today's culture: everything is made simple for the masses but with the education system becoming better for the children can they not become smarter?...It's a difficult question to answer, and one I cannot"
I'd say dumber
As far as book smart is concerned some people are getting smarter.
As far a common sense is concerned most people are lacking in that department.
Think about it when you have to put warning labels on a cup coffee saying "Warning Content May Be Hot," you know you have some world class geniuses out there burning themselves.
As far a common sense is concerned most people are lacking in that department.
Think about it when you have to put warning labels on a cup coffee saying "Warning Content May Be Hot," you know you have some world class geniuses out there burning themselves.