Idiocracy keeps becoming truer and truer every year.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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The FT source seems to be behind a paywall, and this article seems to be jumping between a bunch of possibly unrelated issues (focusing on young adult cognitive decline but looking at whole population reading rates and numeracy ability).
There's also no real proof that high intelligence is actually a productive evolutionary trait.
We're juuuuuuuuust smart enough to grow like a cancerous parasite and are getting close to killing our sickly host organism.
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I wouldn't worry about it .... it wasn't that high to begin with
I always remind my friends when we have political debates about so many things ... we aren't that many steps away from the cave we emerged from 100,000 years ago
Causes :
long covid ?
micro plastics ?
screen time ?
sedentarism ?
fast food ?
lack of sleep ?
other ?
Heavy metal exposure
Sugar
The proliferation of food additives being used that are known to dramatically lower IQ
The gelding of our education system by morons who favor religious dogma over scientific fact
Criminally underfunded schools thanks to political leaders who see investing in future generations as budget waste
Failure to teach children critical thinking skills before exposing them to technology that makes it simpler for them
Being constantly bombarded and overstimulated every waking moment by media
Being chronically overworked and underrested
Climate change
Take your pick. The answer is "probably, yes."
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idiocracy intro?
(IE the theory it pushed was in short, smart people do family planning, try to wait for everything to be perfect... and forget to get around to having kids).
Meanwhile on the less intelligent spectrum. Shit I'm pregnant again!!!... Oh and I got the girl in the trailer next door pregnant.
Or for a real world example... look at Lauren Boebert, the 35 year old grandmother in congress.
Yes absolutely (and i was afraid to say it out loud).
But now, we have also to explain why it did not so much apply in the past millennias ... or tens of past millenias. (again, i am afraid to say it ... don't want a shitstorm)
Part of the answer is that mortality rates were far higher 150 years ago. A couple might have 5 children but only 2 survive to adulthood.
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If you have an idea that you regularly get called out on, you should probably say it and be willing to truly listen to what people are saying about it...lol
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 😆
The massive lowering of the bar of "good enough to stay alive". Life expectancy was consistantly in the 30s up until the 1870s. Simply having kids was life threatening... doing so while malnourished even more so.
Natural selection favors traits that increase the odds of having offspring, as well as those that avoid death before having offspring. Avoiding death is a lot easier than it used to be.
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!
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Yes. Thanks for stating these hard facts.
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All this and more!
Right after this message from our sponsors.
Why not the aggregate of all of these?
Why are you putting a space after your punctuation?
i agree that some aggregate of all of these, and to various degrees, and differently for different people, would apply. Also, i did not say more so to let the discussion open.
Now, about text formatting in here :
.
i wanted one line for each items
yet I didn't want it in 2 lines/items
see examples here :
line # 1(no spaces + one line feed) line # 2
line # 1(no spaces + 2 line feed)
line # 2
So, the only way to get the formatting i wanted is to have two spaces at the end of each lines followed by one line feed.
For future reference, you can add a \ at the end of your sentence.
So you can accomplish this.
And then this.
But don’t put one on the last listed sentence, or it will look like this.\
Good tricks 😁
(Yet on my keyboard, "space" and "LineFeed" are way quicker to type.)
Not quite sure what that means. I’m on iOS, but whatever works!
I meant between your last letter and the punctuation marks. Not the spacing of the lines. Use an asterisk for lists if that's your goal?
- like so.
ok. You mean i type : "goal ?"
instead of "goal?"
... well this is because i have poor eyesight ... and i want to see the "?" clearly.
also ...
9876
- 123
- 456
... again I don't like it because there is an unused line just before the first bullet point which I don't like.
Don't forget lead.
Lead was a much bigger problem in the 1970 when it was in road vehicles fuels. But now its only use in some small plane fuels. There is also much less use of lead paint and lead in water pipe systems.
N.B. : Study in that article is about decline from 2010 until today in 15-year-olds.
Meanwhile, it's presently in many other sources like chocolate and spices. It's part of the soup, it's not doing us any favors, but it's far from the sole causative factor.
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I remember still having to ask for unleaded gas, and that was in the '90s. Plenty of houses still have lead paint and lead pipes. Sure it was more of a problem in the 70s, but it didn't go away after that.
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I’ve heard the climate crisis isn’t helping. More carbon dioxide in the air, the less we think good.
Can't tell if joke or ... gestures vaguely at post
This is one I feel is getting largely overlooked.
Present day atmosphere is about 400 or 450 PPM compare this to :
CO~2~ poisoning (Hypercapnia) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercapnia
→ Physiological effects :
A high arterial partial pressure of carbon dioxide ( Pa CO~2~ ) causes changes in brain activity that adversely affect both fine muscular control and reasoning. EEG changes denoting minor narcotic effects can be detected for expired gas end tidal partial pressure of carbon dioxide (...) increase from ((53,000 PPM)) to approximately (...) (66,000 PPM = 0.066 atm). The diver does not necessarily notice these effects.
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