• randomname01@feddit.nl
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    55
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    Man, this is some boomer ass question. People have been saying every is getting dumber for millennia, and it’s never really been true

  • WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Making a lemmy post to ask an open ended opinion question and then getting hostile with people in the comments over their answers.

  • IchNichtenLichten@server1.duluth.lol
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    14
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    It’s a false premise. What happened is that the internet allowed all the village idiots, who were previously contained and ridiculed in their own villages, to connect with each other and become more confident in their idiocy. The internet is a support group for morons.

      • maegul (he/they)
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        And I often wonder how many “actually smart” or at least “productively smart” people actually stay away from the internet either because they’ve got better things to do, intuit that it’s full of idiots, or are just busy and preoccupied with all the “smart” things they’re doing.

  • loathsome dongeater@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    While it would be nice if everyone was super smart, I feel points like “people are getting dumber” have been held at all points in time. It’s like that collage of clippings from American newspapers saying “nobody wants to work anymore” ever since the early 1900s.

    • soulifix@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      10
      ·
      1 year ago

      Any time you read or skim through anything right-wing, you swore that you were smarter before you began to.

      • OsakaWilson@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Look at an IQ map and political map of the US. The stupid and right wing maps are nearly identical.

        • watson387@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          By design. The more intelligent people are the less likely they are to vote for them.

    • blackbelt352@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      Eh people have been making the complaint that (insert new technology here) is ruining thenyout and making them less intelligent for milennia. Socrates complained that writing things down made people dumber because they don’t memorize their studies, people complained about the evils of printed books causing reading hysteria after the Guttenberg press was invented and seeing wider adoption, the radio was hogging kids attention away from their studies, television was interrupting family conversation time, the telephone was distracting teenagers from some other bs excuse, it’s complaints about new technology all the way down.

      All these new technologies did in the past was change how we interact and required new kinds of skills and intelligence to use. It takes a different kind of knowhow to make a good tiktok than it does to write a good book.

      Now if we want to talk about misuse of algorithmic suggestion and how that shapes thought, then absolutely, but that’s not an evil inherent to the technology, that’s people with power uing the tools they have at their disposal to harm others. People use books to spread bad messages, people use radio to spread bad ideology, people use television to harm and divide others.

  • DanglingFury@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    A person is smart. People are dumb.

    Isolate a person and he or she is smart in atleast some area. Get a group together and they start feeding off of each other’s dumbness, compounding it.

    With the introduction of the Internet, people are now able to feed off each other’s dumbness at astounding rates. Algorithms herd them together to accelerate the trend. You and I are not immune to this, though understanding and acknowledging it helps.

  • Archmage Azor@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    I wonder if the first human parents or grandparents ever went “Why little Grug not smart like us? Why Grug put nut and seed into hole in ground and not eat like us? Tribe is doomed!”

  • bricks@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    I don’t agree with this statement. I think “intelligence”, however you define that, has fit pretty cleanly to a Gaussian distribution since the dawn of man. If anything, I think advances in nutrition, preventative healthcare, and access to information has driven pretty significant negative skew. I don’t have anything to back up this claim, but my guess would be that median intelligence has actually increased - it just may not seem as such since the population continues to rise, so the raw number of dummies seems overwhelming.

    But hey, who I am to define what’s smart? Maybe an inflatable hot tub, 30 rack of Busch, RAM 1500 on an 84 month note, zero turn mower, DirecTV with Fox News and the funds to pay for it all is the real secret to a happy life. I’m just someone blabbing about nothing with a bunch of Reddit exiles.

  • xiao@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    “Society” has never been intelligent in my opinion.

    Some groups of human being can have collective intelligence, but usually it is time limited ⌚ and the merchands💵 do not like that. => 🚽

  • jerry@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    There are none. People always think the next generation is lazy, weak, umotivated, immoral, and dumb. You’re just jaded and not original.

  • Izzy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    I doubt the actual intelligence our brains are capable of has ever declined, but what does worry me is everyone’s complete reliance on various technological luxuries that the average person would not be capable of surviving without if it ever came to that.