3d ago

Human Intelligence Sharply Declining

No, it's not just you — people really are, per a number of surveys, way less intelligent than they used to be.

3d ago

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This is strangely comforting. I mean, the alternative was that there was something specifically wrong with me and my perception.
- "am i paranoid? no, it's everyone else who is dumb!"
  and lo he was actually correct

My wild guess: It's the increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.
It's a well-known effect that increasing CO2 levels makes people dumber when it goes above 1000 ppm. When atmospheric CO2 goes from 200 ppm (last century) to 400 ppm (the current state) indoor CO2 levels can reach that 1000 ppm state that much quicker.
So yeah: Yet another reason to stop using fossil fuels.
- Maybe it's the micro plastics in our brains. So many fun things to think about.
- also a good reason to open the windows or even better, go outside.

Apparently, social media is worse than the 100 years of ambient lead everywhere.

This articles inflamatory title bothers me. The evidence purported is summed up well in the final paragraph: "There isn't any reason to suggest that human intellect has been harmed." There could be a useful argument here, but it seems the true point is to draw a click.

the National Endowment for the Arts found that just 37.6 percent of Americans said they'd read a novel or short story in the year prior — a share down from 41.5 percent in 2017 and 45.2 percent in 2012.
That's quite a drop. I def notice that reading is very polarized now, someone either reads like 30 or more books a year, or they read nothing.
The plummeting literacy rates is pretty scary too. Literally the richest country in world history and their literacy rates are worse than many dirt-poor countries, and getting worse.
- The US' literacy rates are worse than those of the USSR just a few years into its existence, having inherited a semi-feudal agrarian state.
  And US literacy rates are highly racialized, as poverty (including child poverty) is racialized and so is school funding, both directly by racist policies and segregation and indirectly by geographical funding models. In addition, the US has been slowly privatizing more and more of its education system, starving public schools of even more funding at the same time that it makes an increasing percentage of parents go through poverty and an increasing number of children take jobs.

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