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Yep, AOL used to have a bad rep. Not so bad these days, still kind of quirky though (technically). And yep, the Trash 80.
As an engineer, continuing education came "built in." Technology develops too fast to have a job without continually educating yourself, although I've always been that way in many subject areas, particularly psychology. I'm so interested in psych that is what I picked to minor in at college.
BTW I worked in the 70s in the defense industry. I got to play with a $25,000 US Army GPS unit. At the time and thinking about my camping I wished that were available to civilians, knew it would never happen. Now we all have GPS in our phones. — A few years later I used to play backgammon at lunch with some engineers who were developing Arpanet. I wasn't quite sure what it was. What it turned out to be about 20 years later is what we call the Internet.
I think that information seeking and self educating are qualities that intelligent people share. Those of less intelligence seek other venues for entertainment. I think it's telling that in my streaming TV plan I got to pick 10 channels, and I picked things like History channel, Discovery channel, etc. And broadcast TV? ROFL. Talk about lowest common denominator!
Bottom-tier-IQ people probably are being weeded out. But maybe the 120+ IQ percentage of the population is shrinking. I can come up with several reasons.
Higher-IQ people wait longer to start families, perhaps partly involuntarily due to various goals of theirs, and (unless very rich) have smaller families.
Furthermore, as independently noted by Lovehound, lousy in utero conditions - more likely among pregnant women with poor judgment - stunt IQ, in effect magnifying the reproductive differential.
I think it is quite possible that the higher IQ population may be decreasing because they tend to be more affluent and we all know that lower classes are growing while higher classes are shrinking. This is also due to a demographic shift.
The IQ scores are periodically adjusted so that 100 is the mean average, and that 80 and 120 are one SD (standard deviation, math term) away from 100. 60 and 140 would be two SDs.
So IQ isn't changing but intelligence may be changing.
Yes, people are getting dumber for a variety of reasons. Some big ones in America in particular:
1) Education and enrichment aren't sexy to the average person yet they pursued those things because they used to be required for the average person to obtain a modicum of comfort or to achieve their goals. Now you can just fart on the internet and become an overnight sensation or start a nonsense business that makes you a millionaire before you hit puberty. Neither requires you to be smart.
2) There are more things to detract from learning (like social media) and to skirt around learning (like looking up answers online instead of working things out) or to avoid applying what you've learned (like using an app to perform even the simplest calculation) or avoid expressing what you've learned (like using an essay service instead of writing your own papers).
3) There are more things to detract from the fact that you are, in fact, dumb, like being wealthy or successful or having gone to a prestigious school and all of the rhetoric that convinces people you're probably not dumb if you managed those things so there's no one holding you accountable for being as dumb as you actually are.
4) Skewed priorities where people spend more time thinking about things that aren't worth thinking about (e.g. can a drunk person build a pillow fort faster than a high person?) than thinking about things that will actually challenge their minds.
5) Reliance on technology without understanding how said technology works and therefore becoming a slave to it to the point that ingenuity, which is one of many components of broad intelligence, is nearly non-existent.
6) A $hitty information age that values quantity of knowledge over quality of knowledge and a $hitty education system that gives kids information but doesn't instill the ability to think in ways that foster true intelligence rather than mindless regurgitation, which is incidentally why people who are "walking encyclopedias" are usually the dumbest people I've ever met in my life.
7) Quality of life being so $hitty that people are spending all of their time working with little to no time to enrich themselves intellectually because who cares about being smart when your stomach is empty?
8) People thinking it's funny and quirky to be dumb and wear it like a badge of honor just like people think it's entertaining to be trolls because lolz.
9) People thinking that intelligence and IQ are the same thing and still continuing to bring IQ into the discussion when most traditional methods of measuring IQ have long since been proven antiquated and incomplete characterizations of what actually constitutes intelligence or how it's defined.
10) So many people being dumber that the bar for what counts as dumb has been raised, normalizing what used to be seen as borderline dunce-level stupidity, further obscuring how rampant true stupidity is and subsequently failing to inspire anyone to do anything about it. Idiocracy, here we come!
Bottom-tier-IQ people probably are being weeded out. But maybe the 120+ IQ percentage of the population is shrinking. I can come up with several reasons.
Higher-IQ people wait longer to start families, perhaps partly involuntarily due to various goals of theirs, and (unless very rich) have smaller families.
Furthermore, as independently noted by Lovehound, lousy in utero conditions - more likely among pregnant women with poor judgment - stunt IQ, in effect magnifying the reproductive differential.
This nails it.
Among the "more intelligent" people I grew up with (I'm 32 now), most didn't have their first child until their late 20s, at least. The less intelligent people had children younger, and often more children in total.
8) People thinking it's funny and quirky to be dumb and wear it like a badge of honor just like people think it's entertaining to be trolls because lolz.
You gave me a good business idea. I should have some "I'm With Stupid" t-shirts printed, only the arrow points UP!
I could make a fortune off of stupid people.
Another idea for a t-shirt: "Stupid And Proud Of It!"
technology is making people stupid, instead of researching something all they have to do is google it, so they know the answer without knowing why.
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