Human Intelligence Sharply Declining

For what it's worth the average life expectancy was 30-something. That didn't mean that everyone, or even the mostly everyone, just dropped dead at 30.

It did, however, involve an awful lot of people dying in childhood. Often due to diseases that these days we've almost stamped out, but now antivax morons are working hard on bringing back!

Yes. Thanks for stating these hard facts.

Because i agree with this, i encourage you to push this idea further to its conclusion.

i did it often enough. Now someone else did it for me and I'm very happy they did.

P.S. : Often it's not my ideas but the harsh direct way i express them 😆

Yes, i agree, and many other lemmy users said similar things about : "why it does apply recently" ...
Yet, it's more interesting to look at why in the past centuries or millennias there was quite a strong selection pressure favoring intelligence.
During those past times, life for humans was much more competitive, so that any major deficiencies, including in intelligence, physical strength, mental strength or whatever important survival characteristics, meant death.
Similarly, in any living species, would it be plants, animal or other, if you remove survival pressures, you rapidly, in just a few generations, diverge into completely different life forms.
Since selection pressures have drastically decreased in many rich countries, for maybe 50 to 100 years now, their populations are on this unsustainable path (in my educated opinion).
Comments from other users were close to what i am saying here, but never so bluntly.

P.S. : @otp@sh.itjust.works this comment is of the type for which i would expect to be, as you said : "regularly get called out on".

Every building before like 1978 has lead paint, but people forget that so does the land around them. I live in an area with older homes and we’re frequently warned not to grow vegetables within 10' of the house because the soil is too likely lead contaminated from peeling or stripping exterior paint over the years

Lead paint is encapsulated and not going to enter your body. Which houses have lead pipes? Even the houses I've lived in over 100 years old have all had complete copper plumbing.

So for quick context the reason why it's present in foods specifically plants is because the plants naturally leach it up.

Good tricks 😁
(Yet on my keyboard, "space" and "LineFeed" are way quicker to type.)

ok. You mean i type : "goal ?"
instead of "goal?"
... well this is because i have poor eyesight ... and i want to see the "?" clearly.

::: spoiler also ...
9876

• 123
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... again I don't like it because there is an unused line just before the first bullet point which I don't like. :::

the kneejerk reaction that the statement always gets is annoying.

I agree with everything you said, but I'm going to point out something. If there is a common kneejerk reaction to some particular topic, there's probably a reason for that. You yourself said its annoying? I suppose its predictable then. If you can predict that people are going to react in some way, you can write with more explanation to clarify that you aren't actually supporting something like eugenics. The poster I'm responding to did not do this.

I took this lack of explanation as support (which, on reflection, might be leaping to conclusions). The overall tone of the comment is rather judgemental.

The commenter is also wrong; IQ hasn't been "drifting towards the bottom", the average IQ increases every year. Its why they have to constantly adjust the tests, because 100 is meant to be an average score by design. This is primarily why I chose to respond to him. He's not saying " which is why we should invest in family planning" or "we should invest in children's education", he's making an untrue statement, and then pretending that this will cause some sort of feedback loop. Dumb people making more dumb people.

IQ is not some absolute quantitative metric of intelligence. The people who treat it like it is... I find that a lot of them are pushing some sort of angle or simply don't understand it.

Im not going to write some big long podt, just two things:

1. people, on average, are not getting dumber. Anything you noticed observationally about dumb people having more children does not seem to have any effect on the world. Human nutrition has improved vastly over the past 100 years, as has education, etc.

2. IQ increases every year. I don't think this is evidence people are getting smarter because I think IQ is a poor measure of intelligence. I'm pointing this out to you because your statement about "IQ drifting toward the bottom'" is factually untrue.

If one believes the accuracy of film’s central premise—that the dumb are reproducing at a higher rate than the smart, which will lower the world’s intelligence until idiocy reigns supreme—it’s only natural to want to stop that from happening. From there, it’s not at all that great a leap to begin believing that maybe there should be some kind of policy only allowing intelligent people to reproduce—in other words, sterilize the dumb.

This is just the author asserting their own absurd leaps in logic as the intended message behind the movie, which it clearly isn't.

A 2015 Pew study looked at how many kids that women with postgraduate degrees have given birth to over the past half-century. In 1994, 30 percent of women with a master’s degree or higher were childless, a number that’s since dropped to 22 percent. In 1976, 10 percent of said women had one child, while in 2014 that numbers up to 18 percent; those with two kids rose even more dramatically, from 22 to 35 percent.

The author draws the wrong conclusion from this data. Just because women with degrees are having more kids now than in the past doesn't mean that women without degrees haven't always had more kids than women with degrees. It's very telling that they never bring those numbers up.

If you automatically assumed that intelligence having a hereditary component to it meant that I was trying to say that all dumb people's children were also dumb 100% of the time, you might not be as smart as you think.

It is simpler than all that. Elite parents send their children to elite schools and universities. Their children then learn how the world works and are equipped with the skills to engage with the people running things.

The lower classes do not value education in this fashion. Their children do not have parents at home who understand how the world works or how our society is organized. Even if those children are smart or gifted they have no idea how to learn the skills they need or how to properly use their gifted abilities.

Solving for X is easy. X is always DMX, because X is gonna give it to you. Though I will agree solving for X has become a lot harder since DMX passed away.

At my college you could basically tell your teacher you're depressed and get a passing grade regardless of your work.

Cheating is against the rules and you shouldn’t do it