People ARE getting dumber (14 I.Q. points dumber)

[Paradoxrifts]

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/22/the-wisdom-of-the-ancients/

Already been analyzed and pretty well refuted. Turns out that yes, the upper class Victorian Academia WAS smarter than the average person today. That's... not really surprising, but this study does NOT show that the average Victorian was smarter.

So all I need to do in order to boost my IQ is to ruthlessly exploit my fellow man for profit so that I may live a live of leisure dedicated to the pursuit of the noble sciences?

 

[gavinmcinns]

HHHHHHFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMPEWPEWPEWPEW".

It was circular reasoning, a result of trying to explain simple ideas in a frustrated state. As you broaden the base, the base gets disproportionately larger than the zenith. As the middle class shrinks across the world, people in poverty represent a larger chunk of the pyramid pie. Those in poverty no longer have discretionary income, and therefore cant afford things like an education. Did you know that after the Great Recession Depression, 9 million jobs were destroyed after taking count (66% were medium to high paying)? And that in the recovery, less than 10% of those medium and high paying jobs came back, instead we got retail jobs and mcdonalds to fill the multi trillion dollar hole.

I don't know if you are refuting dysgenic fertility or not but it seems to me a sensible conclusion to reach and so I'll base my logic on it. You just dont see many phd's popping out babies so they can boost their government checks do you? In any case (this should be obvious), if you take the bottom 20% of the population (in income) of adults vs. the top 20% of earners, care to guess who is going to have more kids? Again this should be obvious. On a macro scale this leads to an accelerating gap in population between the rich and poor, the educated and uneducated, which takes away incentive to create intelligent entertainment like "Harsh Times" and instead creates incentive to make dumb entertainment like "The Avengers.", among more important consequences like the dumb-ening of the public school system.

I don't know who nisio issin is, but given your penchant for aesthetically pleasing and sharp sentences with a dash of smug talk (which I'd appreciate if you'd leave at the door), I'm inclined to think that this nisio character creates stuff that is at the very least worth looking at. As opposed to something like a tween fantasy novel, tell me which is the superior? Or is everything equal to everything? This is the really frustrating thing for me, when people insist that all entertainment is equal in value.

 

[Lilani]

No evidence? Look at what passes as entertainment. Shows, movies, games, all are moving toward the worthless bang bang twenty minute long action sequence/setpiece. I've haven't done any hard research, but come on, if you enjoy any of these mediums, you must've noticed the glut of crap that has been elevated into the mainstream. People used to lineup for hours to go see Doctor Zhivago or Gone with the Wind, now, neither of these movies are particularly mind blowing, but they were at least cerebral to an extent, and I'm talking about the mainstream here. Gaming had a period where it embraced the cerebral, partially because of technical limitations but the lion's share of the credit goes to the passionate, inspired minds of the early period who saw all the potential. At a point, population expansion lowers IQ. It just makes sense. As you broaden the base, you need more chattel to support the pyramid, it's not an opinion, empirically speaking you'd have to be blind not to see this trend in society. Not everyone can be a rocket scientist or a derivatives analyst or a ceo.

Another thing that bothers me, here: You harp on modern entertainment as being a sign of society's decline, yet during the time periods in which you seem to think more "enlightening" entertainment was produced, racism was upheld by the law, women were expected to either be chaste or barefoot in the kitchen with 6 kids, and the very thought of a gay person was simply unquestionable. The values and social commentaries in those classic films are downright archaic when you get down to it. Do you know what the first major film was in the US? The Birth of a Nation.

Made by Charlie Chaplin's good friend D.W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation tells a history of the KKK as adapted from a book, and features many heartwarming scenes, such as a white woman throwing herself off a cliff because a black man told her he loved her. That's what passed for "entertainment" in those days. As you can imagine, the source material was a bit biased. But again, it was the first what you might call a "blockbuster" in the US, and toured for a very long time selling out pretty much everywhere it went (because back then there weren't really theaters, they just toured the films around, usually with vaudeville shows).

And you know what else is funny? Back when Gone with the Wind was playing, there were people who were harping on that as a sign of society's degradation. They thought it was a sign things were really going to hell, because it had the word "damn" in it. Oh my! I think I'm going to swoon!

I think it's really odd you think what entertainment is consumed is a greater measuring stick for how intelligent and enlightened society is rather than looking at how actually intelligent and enlightened society is.

 

[ClockworkPenguin]

HHHHHHFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMPEWPEWPEWPEW".

It was circular reasoning, a result of trying to explain simple ideas in a frustrated state. As you broaden the base, the base gets disproportionately larger than the zenith. As the middle class shrinks across the world, people in poverty represent a larger chunk of the pyramid pie. Those in poverty no longer have discretionary income, and therefore cant afford things like an education. Did you know that after the Great Recession Depression, 9 million jobs were destroyed after taking count (66% were medium to high paying)? And that in the recovery, less than 10% of those medium and high paying jobs came back, instead we got retail jobs and mcdonalds to fill the multi trillion dollar hole.

I don't know if you are refuting dysgenic fertility or not but it seems to me a sensible conclusion to reach and so I'll base my logic on it. You just dont see many phd's popping out babies so they can boost their government checks do you? In any case (this should be obvious), if you take the bottom 20% of the population (in income) of adults vs. the top 20% of earners, care to guess who is going to have more kids? Again this should be obvious. On a macro scale this leads to an accelerating gap in population between the rich and poor, the educated and uneducated, which takes away incentive to create intelligent entertainment like "Harsh Times" and instead creates incentive to make dumb entertainment like "The Avengers.", among more important consequences like the dumb-ening of the public school system.

I don't know who nisio issin is, but given your penchant for aesthetically pleasing and sharp sentences with a dash of smug talk (which I'd appreciate if you'd leave at the door), I'm inclined to think that this nisio character creates stuff that is at the very least worth looking at. As opposed to something like a tween fantasy novel, tell me which is the superior? Or is everything equal to everything? This is the really frustrating thing for me, when people insist that all entertainment is equal in value.

The problem with this is that it assumes a wholly meritocratic system and ignores that enviromental factors have or can have greater impact on IQ than genetic factors. ie, many people who are poor may still be pretty smart, or at least have the potential to be smart had they received the right nurturing.

Furthermore, from an economical standpoint, more poor people doesn't tend to result in more stuff marketed at the poor, quite the opposite. As wealth is concentrated into fewer hands, those hands get increasingly pandered to.

(As an aside, whilst the chattering classes love to talk about people 'popping out babies for a govt. check' the maths has been done, and it doesn't work. It is much more likely that very poor people drink and fuck more because those are cheap ways of passing time, they have sod all to occupy themselves with and they can't afford entertainment)

 

[Lilani]

Why not? There a many sorts of questions that pop up again and again in IQ tests. You just keep practising until you can do them all. You won't get any smarter, but you'll get that 170+ IQ score eventually.

Because you want to seem to tread IQ as some sort of absolute and objective measure for a person's potential of intelligence. And given such a flexible nature, that rather distorts your reason for being here. Along with posting a study which cites evidence taken more than 100 years ago (from a time in which scientific studies outside of the hard sciences was absolutely fraught with selective and skewed results), you've gone out of your way to insert your own feelings of superiority above modern society, and all to prove that people in the past were "smarter" than they are now.

Anyway, the reason this isn't helpful for you is because it doesn't prove people are dumber or less enlightened. So people nearly 100 years ago were watching Gone with the Wind? Yeah, they were also enacting Separate but Equal in the south and having gay sex was illegal. So people these days have a slower reaction time than people from the Victorian era? Well at least we aren't beating wives for being disobedient to their husbands or forcing Bibles down the throats of people in foreign lands anymore. If that's what being "dumber" is, then count me in. From the way you've put it at this point, it seems our "stupidity" epidemic could be solved with a bit of cardio and a regular trips to a batting cage.

If people are really dumber, then why are we living so much better? Why are we living so much longer? Why do people have more rights and freedoms than they used to? Why have some diseases which plagued the Victorian era basically ceased to exist? Why are we no longer under the impression that sickness is caused by demons? Why is most of the world richer than it used to be? Why is information so much more accessible? Why are more people than ever literate? Why are more people than ever educated to at least some basic level? Even if this drop in intelligence is real, you're going to have to prove this has somehow been a detriment to society. Because from where I'm standing, we are doing a LOT better than we were in the Victorian era, hell even since the 1940s.

 

[Dr. Cakey]

HHHHHHFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMPEWPEWPEWPEW".

It was circular reasoning, a result of trying to explain simple ideas in a frustrated state. As you broaden the base, the base gets disproportionately larger than the zenith. As the middle class shrinks across the world, people in poverty represent a larger chunk of the pyramid pie.

But the middle class is expanding...

Those in poverty no longer have discretionary income, and therefore cant afford things like an education.

Which is why God invented liberals [citation needed], who invented compulsory public education [citation needed].

Did you know that after the Great Recession Depression, 9 million jobs were destroyed after taking count (66% were medium to high paying)? And that in the recovery, less than 10% of those medium and high paying jobs came back, instead we got retail jobs and mcdonalds to fill the multi trillion dollar hole.

I think you're talking about the switch from an industrial-based economy to a service-based one and you just don't know it.

I don't know if you are refuting dysgenic fertility or not but it seems to me a sensible conclusion to reach and so I'll base my logic on it. You just dont see many phd's popping out babies so they can boost their government checks do you?

No, I prefer to not to hang out in hospitals watching babies being born.

Oh, that's not what you meant.

In any case (this should be obvious), if you take the bottom 20% of the population (in income) of adults vs. the top 20% of earners, care to guess who is going to have more kids? Again this should be obvious.

Okay, time for another exciting edition of XKCD Explained! I'm not sure why xkcd needs explaining, because even though it's intelligent and multi-layered, Randall's about as subtle as Ayn Rand. Nonetheless, xkcd #603: Idiocracy, explained.

The thing I love about this strip is that it is you. Literally, point for point, Cueball (that's the guy on the left, without the baseball cap) says exactly what you've been saying. The first three panels concern the current subtopic. Yes, lower wage-earners tend to have more children than higher wage-earners. But this isn't exactly a new thing. The only difference between past and present is that the number of children everyone has has gone down. Unless you consider having three kids to be at the limits of human ability.

On a macro scale this leads to an accelerating gap in population between the rich and poor, the educated and uneducated, which takes away incentive to create intelligent entertainment like "Harsh Times" and instead creates incentive to make dumb entertainment like "The Avengers.", among more important consequences like the dumb-ening of the public school system.

Now we'll gather up our skirts and take a hop-skip right over panel four directly to panel five. There you are again, compressed into a tiny sentence fragment: "But look at how popular -". Do me a favor and take a gander at this [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films#High-grossing_films_by_year]. Wikipedia's done all the work for you. Just make sure to keep your Nostalgia Glasses off (well, they wouldn't be nostalgia glasses, since I assume you weren't alive in 1920, but you know what I mean). Unless you intend to tell me that the gutted corpse of what was once Mary Shelley's Frankenstein novel is more intelligent than, say (and forgive me for choosing this example), The Dark Knight.

I don't know who nisio issin is, but given your penchant for aesthetically pleasing and sharp sentences with a dash of smug talk (which I'd appreciate if you'd leave at the door), I'm inclined to think that this nisio character creates stuff that is at the very least worth looking at. As opposed to something like a tween fantasy novel, tell me which is the superior? Or is everything equal to everything? This is the really frustrating thing for me, when people insist that all entertainment is equal in value.

I'm sorry, the smugness is a package deal: it comes with the medium. If you want me to be polite and conciliatory, you'll need to talk to me face-to-face. If you're familiar with the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory, you'll understand.

Don't worry, I'm not one of those "everything is equal" people. I also struggle to convince myself that the quality of art can be measured objectively, which is of course dumb and stupid and wrong, but it's something I want to believe.

Nisio Isin - if I can be forgiven for combining my two favorite pastimes (talking about anime-related things for an unnecessarily long time and engaging in pretentious analysis) - is a Japanese light novel author. And since this is Japan and all, he tends to write under the broad category of fantasy. In other words, he writes tween fantasy novels. OH SHIT.

He's best known for writing the Zaregoto series ("Nonsense" series, the first two books of which were translated into English by Del Rey), Katanagatari ("Sword Story", which was adapted into an anime which you can buy for the low, low price of $100 from NIS America), and the Monogatari series (When you write a series called the "Story" series, I think you just win. Everything. They've been adapted into several anime, which are excessively priced, but are also handily streaming in a couple different places). Having just seen Pulp Fiction for the first time, I'd say he's very similar to Quentin Tarantino in a lot of ways, from his plastic treatment of time and reality, to his highly referential method of smashing pop culture together to make something new (it would not be at all odd to find a Niezche quote next to a Dragon Ball Z reference), to the fact that his stories are structured as almost nothing but a parade of crackling dialogue. To summarize in an even more pretentious manner, Nisio Isin's works are a reflection of the malaise of the generation, of Japan's 90's and 00's and 10's, a stew of a pop culture that has been wrapping further and further inward on itself, with the conclusion that everything is meaningless.

Hm, I just need a title page and a couple examples, and I've got a thesis paper.

CAPTCHA: root beer float

Don't tease me, captcha. I already had dinner.

 

[viranimus]

Imagine that. Someone suggests that people are now less intelligent than prior generations and people wail in offense at such an accusation.

Sometimes you simply have to quit using all the statistical gymnastics to convince yourself and others ,open your eyes, utilize simple observation, common sense, and quit ignoring the painfully obvious because you simply do not want to accept. It is not a pleasant thought but the more denial gets pushed around the longer it takes to be taken seriously and something actually gets done to correct it.

Just like for every junkie, the first step is admitting the problem.

 

[SOCIALCONSTRUCT]

If people are really dumber, then why are we living so much better?

I won't argue the movement of average intelligence in either direction but it is possible to imagine a hypothetical scenario with high living standards and falling intelligence. Living standards are a lagging indicator: you learn how to carve the spear and hunt in packs and then you get the boar not visa versa (or if you prefer Tony Montana... money, power, women). A society with falling intelligence wouldn't necessarily feel the sting of falling living standards because it would have an accumulated technological and economic legacy from prior generations. The civilizational equivalent of resting on laurels.

Ancient and medieval people had low living standards and there is a tendency to think of them as backwards but really consider any number of Medieval cathedrals or Eratosthenes making a pretty good estimate of the circumference of the earth.

 

[Moth_Monk]

People in this thread think they know better than research peer reviewed by experts in the relevant fields? LOL

 

[FoolKiller]

And I think it's overstated this: "Correlation doesn't imply causation". That is inaccurate, there are many many many many instances where correlation does imply causation, particularly when the correlation coefficient approaches 1.

Objection! (sorry, playing Phoenix Wright these days)

You're wrong though.

The problem is that the statement is always accurate, but the meaning of the word 'imply' is negotiable. Referring to wikipedia under the header for Usage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation#Usage), you can see that imply has a very specific meaning in the statistical community. This is where your mistake lies.

 

[Lilani]

I won't argue the movement of average intelligence in either direction but it is possible to imagine a hypothetical scenario with high living standards and falling intelligence. Living standards are a lagging indicator: you learn how to carve the spear and hunt in packs and then you get the boar not visa versa (or if you prefer Tony Montana... money, power, women). A society with falling intelligence wouldn't necessarily feel the sting of falling living standards because it would have an accumulated technological and economic legacy from prior generations. The civilizational equivalent of resting on laurels.

Ancient and medieval people had low living standards and there is a tendency to think of them as backwards but really consider any number of Medieval cathedrals or Eratosthenes making a pretty good estimate of the circumference of the earth.

I'll give you that, however I take it you don't agree with the OP's point either that somehow the media consumed during a society's leisure time is somehow an indicator of their intelligence (especially since the "quality" of said media can be so subjective in the first place). That's more or less what I was trying to disagree with, and got carried away with that, lol.

Imagine that. Someone suggests that people are now less intelligent than prior generations and people wail in offense at such an accusation.

Sometimes you simply have to quit using all the statistical gymnastics to convince yourself and others ,open your eyes, utilize simple observation, common sense, and quit ignoring the painfully obvious because you simply do not want to accept. It is not a pleasant thought but the more denial gets pushed around the longer it takes to be taken seriously and something actually gets done to correct it.

Just like for every junkie, the first step is admitting the problem.

Perhaps if it weren't so easy to poke holes in the sources of these statistics you had a point, but at this point all the evidence surrounding the OP's point is about as solid as a pudding puree. I also don't see how "utilizing simple observation" can help in this, considering simple observations can give no evidence of someone's intelligence. It would be easy to call the kid in class who is getting failing grades and always acts out is just not smart enough, but it's a well-known fact that if a child's studies are moving at much too slow a pace for them, they're prone to acting out because they're bored.

And even if this could so easily be observed, what exactly do we have to compare it to? The Victorian era? You mean that time when women and children were systematically beaten if they were out of line, when blood letting was a common treatment for migraines and the flu, and anybody who wasn't white and Christian was subhuman? Yes, what are we thinking, they've definitely got the upper hand when it comes to enlightenment, open-mindedness, and innovation.

 

[gavinmcinns]

But the middle class is expanding...

no, it isn't http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-09-12/business/35496368_1_income-inequality-median-household-income-middle-class

Which is why God invented liberals [citation needed], who invented compulsory public education [citation needed].

liberalism became such a huge influence in the country because people were having to repress more shit than a generation (boomers) were capable of repressing. And so we got the 60's

I think you're talking about the switch from an industrial-based economy to a service-based one and you just don't know it.

No, this is very recent data that has been compiled

The thing I love about this strip is that it is you. Literally, point for point, Cueball (that's the guy on the left, without the baseball cap) says exactly what you've been saying. The first three panels concern the current subtopic. Yes, lower wage-earners tend to have more children than higher wage-earners. But this isn't exactly a new thing. The only difference between past and present is that the number of children everyone has has gone down. Unless you consider having three kids to be at the limits of human ability.

The comic isn't very clever or insightful, it's two guys disagreeing and one of them is being a smug ass.

Now we'll gather up our skirts and take a hop-skip right over panel four directly to panel five. There you are again, compressed into a tiny sentence fragment: "But look at how popular -". Do me a favor and take a gander at this [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films#High-grossing_films_by_year]. Wikipedia's done all the work for you. Just make sure to keep your Nostalgia Glasses off (well, they wouldn't be nostalgia glasses, since I assume you weren't alive in 1920, but you know what I mean). Unless you intend to tell me that the gutted corpse of what was once Mary Shelley's Frankenstein novel is more intelligent than, say (and forgive me for choosing this example), The Dark Knight.

cherry picking will do you no good because I'm looking at broad trends here. I also happen to be unfamiliar with frankenstein.

I'm sorry, the smugness is a package deal: it comes with the medium. If you want me to be polite and conciliatory, you'll need to talk to me face-to-face. If you're familiar with the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory, you'll understand.
[/quoted] No, but from my own experience I know how enabling the internet is in making me the biggest dick i can be.

Don't worry, I'm not one of those "everything is equal" people. I also struggle to convince myself that the quality of art can be measured objectively, which is of course dumb and stupid and wrong, but it's something I want to believe.

It depends on what scale you are measuring it, people get confused and think I'm trying to quantify enjoyment and stack enjoyment blocks and see how high they go and then write it down on my clipboard or something. It certainly sounds like itd be possible if we stuck needles in some brains and did some experimenting, but to me those results would be auxiliary at best. No what interests me is the level of quality, and how quality entertainment fires up the brains of intellectuals, geniuses, and just curious people in general.

Nisio Isin - if I can be forgiven for combining my two favorite pastimes (talking about anime-related things for an unnecessarily long time and engaging in pretentious analysis) - is a Japanese light novel author. And since this is Japan and all, he tends to write under the broad category of fantasy. In other words, he writes tween fantasy novels. OH SHIT.

He's best known for writing the Zaregoto series ("Nonsense" series, the first two books of which were translated into English by Del Rey), Katanagatari ("Sword Story", which was adapted into an anime which you can buy for the low, low price of $100 from NIS America), and the Monogatari series (When you write a series called the "Story" series, I think you just win. Everything. They've been adapted into several anime, which are excessively priced, but are also handily streaming in a couple different places). Having just seen Pulp Fiction for the first time, I'd say he's very similar to Quentin Tarantino in a lot of ways, from his plastic treatment of time and reality, to his highly referential method of smashing pop culture together to make something new (it would not be at all odd to find a Niezche quote next to a Dragon Ball Z reference), to the fact that his stories are structured as almost nothing but a parade of crackling dialogue. To summarize in an even more pretentious manner, Nisio Isin's works are a reflection of the malaise of the generation, of Japan's 90's and 00's and 10's, a stew of a pop culture that has been wrapping further and further inward on itself, with the conclusion that everything is meaningless.
.

Might check it out

 

[gavinmcinns]

Imagine that. Someone suggests that people are now less intelligent than prior generations and people wail in offense at such an accusation.

Sometimes you simply have to quit using all the statistical gymnastics to convince yourself and others ,open your eyes, utilize simple observation, common sense, and quit ignoring the painfully obvious because you simply do not want to accept. It is not a pleasant thought but the more denial gets pushed around the longer it takes to be taken seriously and something actually gets done to correct it.

Just like for every junkie, the first step is admitting the problem.

As Nietzsche said, sometimes people don't want their illusions destroyed. I had mine destroyed as a child so I no longer hold onto them as some people do. In a way I envy these people, and at the same time am repulsed by the thought of wading through life with eyes closed.

 

[gavinmcinns]

I'd like to see someone rebut in an intelligent way.

I would like to see you use intelligent grammar and punctuation; I suppose neither of us are going to get what we want.

I don't get it, there's nothing wrong with the grammar and punctuation in the text you quoted.

 

[gavinmcinns]

Do you really think that Girls is a mental step down from I Love Lucy? There have been smart TV shows in the past but really, now is the first time when idiocy hasn't overwhelmed the broadcasting schedule.

HEY! I'll have you know that The Flintstones and The Jetsons are bold and provocative documentaries about prehistoric man and the revolutionary technological advancements brought about by the nuclear age. Likewise I Love Lucy is dark and damning tale about the brutal soullessness of the entertainment industry, how it forever keeps aspiring immigrant entertainers from ever achieving success, and subsequently turns their home life into a living hell from which they cannot escape lest they face deportation. Further, Gilligan's Island is the tragic tale about a group of struggling shipwreck survivors who fight everyday with giving into their primal urges, and thus lose their last shred of humanity, by killing the one mentally challenged crew member who's disability time and time again prevents their salvation.

Leave it to Beaver was about a dystopian future where America had become so lost within lie of the American dream during the Red Scare that it became a totalitarian, white-supremacist, misogynistic, dictatorship where any signs of nonconformity were crushed under the iron heel of the US government.

The Honeymooners was about an abusive, alcoholic, racist husband who had completely and utterly broken the spirit of his wife while his neighbors turned a blind eye to it all.

The Brady Bunch was a bold feminist drama in support of abortion and birth control.

He-Man was an artistic exploration into America's fear of homosexuality and the AIDS pandemic.

Married with Children was about the ultimate death of the American dream and the castration of the patriarchy by the feminist movement.

Monty Python's Flying Circus was an in-depth and repeated examination of the British cultural psyche as their country became marginalized as a world power, the empire crumbled around them, and that their identity as a people was being shattered by internal, centuries old grudges.

I enjoyed that. I actually think television from it's conception was an ill advised exploratory surgery into the mind of the american public. One that went horribly awry for humanity. I'd really like to see an alien do a documentary of modern humans. Some good came of it, like all the witty, intelligent stuff including documentaries. But even in that genre, 90% of it is swill.

 

[gavinmcinns]

...OP's point either that somehow the media consumed during a society's leisure time is somehow an indicator of their intelligence (especially since the "quality" of said media can be so subjective in the first place). That's more or less what I was trying to disagree with, and got carried away with that, lol.

Quality isn't inherently subjective, what is subjective is your perspective. Quality with respect to success in achieving a goal is clearly Objective. For example, if the goal was to educate, then if film A educates people more than film B, A is qualitatively, objectively better. If the goal was to misinform or make more fart noises, then maybe film B was qualitatively better in this respect. Now, in my opinion being informed is objectively better than being misinformed, but hey I guess that's just my opinion, right?

Perhaps if it weren't so easy to poke holes in the sources of these statistics you had a point, but at this point all the evidence surrounding the OP's point is about as solid as a pudding puree. I also don't see how "utilizing simple observation" can help in this, considering simple observations can give no evidence of someone's intelligence. It would be easy to call the kid in class who is getting failing grades and always acts out is just not smart enough, but it's a well-known fact that if a child's studies are moving at much too slow a pace for them, they're prone to acting out because they're bored.

And even if this could so easily be observed, what exactly do we have to compare it to? The Victorian era? You mean that time when women and children were systematically beaten if they were out of line, when blood letting was a common treatment for migraines and the flu, and anybody who wasn't white and Christian was subhuman? Yes, what are we thinking, they've definitely got the upper hand when it comes to enlightenment, open-mindedness, and innovation.

]
People didnt have tv so they read books. That is why we had significantly more science minded and literary geniuses during this time, and as time progresses we are finding them in short supply. T.v is passive, reading is active, passivity leads to laziness which leads to stupidity.

 

[bug_of_war]

dumber

Dumber isn't a real word. More dumb would be the proper way to say it. So I guess you are backing up the evidence well.

As for what your asking for evidence to counter what you posted, I'm just going to tell you to look at Lilani's post. It's not too far down the first page.

 

[kurokotetsu]

Imagine that. Someone suggests that people are now less intelligent than prior generations and people wail in offense at such an accusation.

Sometimes you simply have to quit using all the statistical gymnastics to convince yourself and others ,open your eyes, utilize simple observation, common sense, and quit ignoring the painfully obvious because you simply do not want to accept. It is not a pleasant thought but the more denial gets pushed around the longer it takes to be taken seriously and something actually gets done to correct it.

Just like for every junkie, the first step is admitting the problem.

Yeah, let's forget about the incredibly useful tool that has helped us far more in understanding the paterns of large populations, that helps us in medicine, in quality control, in advancing science, in transmittin information, in almost everything having to do with a lot of things, that shows good results, true, objective results and let's throw it away because what you can see around you is the only thing that matters, and your common sense is enough to understand the world. Yeah, go ahead and do that. You are always right, because your observations matter. PLease, if you disregard statistics, please don't use things that were based on statistical research for understanding, so quit your medicines, stop using the Internet, ignore all post industrial revlotution technology . Becuase statistics don't work.

What one has to hear. Statistics is what we use to understand these phenomena, and it works, even if you don't like it. At form what I see, this study isn't in strong statistical foundations, so yes, I will disregard what it has to say until it proves itself better.

Cpatcha: sin cos tan, even captcha understands the importance of matehmatics.

 

[gavinmcinns]

dumber

Dumber isn't a real word. More dumb would be the proper way to say it. So I guess you are backing up the evidence well.

As for what your asking for evidence to counter what you posted, I'm just going to tell you to look at Lilani's post. It's not too far down the first page.

If it's in the dictionary as a comparative adjective that's good enough for me. I'm curious as to what crazy stringent standard you have for words to be words.