What are worrying signs that society's intelligence is slipping?
What are worrying signs that society's intelligence is slipping?
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.
“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. => 🚽
A person is smart. People are dumb.
Isolate a person and he or she is smart in already some area. Hey a group together and they start feeding off of each other’s dumbness, compounding it
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.
The internet is a support group for morons.
I’m stealing this.