Its a lot of work but you have to constantly push. I am 42, but I read a few dozen books a year, I'm constantly learning new languages, new instruments, I write short stories for fun, do creative projects, and meditate. I still feel really sharp but I'm throwing down everyday.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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So, I've seen a lot of people who were extremely sharp as PhD students become blunted as soon as 9--5 starts.
A lot of decline among adults can likely be traced back to increased cognitive load during working hours, which chips away at intelligence over time as folks burn out.
With kids it's harder to place, maybe it's walking the tightrope that is modern social interactions?
Bored people can now tune into (source of entertainment) instead of learning.
I don't think the capacity for intelligence has dropped significantly, rather we as a society dedicate our time differently.
Summary The article describes a decline in human intelligence, particularly among young people. The decline is attributed to reducedk reading habits and the negative impact of excessive screen time on cognitive abilities.
I fucking believe it.
Idiocracy keeps becoming truer and truer every year.
Unfortunately, that movie's main message was about eugenics. I am not arguing that anti-intellectualism is not spreading like a cancer, but that movie is not the best thing to reference.
I don't think it ever actually promoted eugenics. It just explored the natural consequences of two facts in a comedic way:
- Intelligence has a hereditary component to it.
- Stupid people have more kids.
It never tries to push any eugenics-based agenda. It would have if they tried to say that dumb people shouldn't be allowed to have kids, but they never went anywhere near that.
Shit. I know shit's bad right now, with all that starving bullshit, and the dust storms, and we are running out of french fries and burrito coverings. But I got a solution.
Causes :
long covid ?
micro plastics ?
screen time ?
sedentarism ?
fast food ?
lack of sleep ?
other ?
It's social media and political manipulation.
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."
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)
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!
Yeah, I at least assumed that was understood with just "expectancy", obviously people live longer than expectations, and some die unexpectedly young. Key point is if you were given a mission where you must become a baby, and carry on life until you have 6 kids reach the age of 18. But you could chose what time to be born in (but not pick location, class or race), the lowest difficulty mode of that game would almost certainly be after 1950s... and prior to the 1800s would be viewed as very hard mode.
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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.
Because i agree with this, i encourage you to push this idea further to its conclusion.
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
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In my personal observations less intelligent people tend to have more children.
Therefore population IQ drifts towards bottom.
I suspect that's because they do not fully understand all their future struggles and fates of their children in the world, fucked up by climate crisis and resource scarcity.
This is the plot to a fictional movie. Intelligence is a factor of many things, and most of those factors are not genetic.
Your observation seems close to the opinions of old school eugenicists. "The wrong people are having children".
it is not genetic, it is environmental. Children of parents with less intelligence will not be raised to be intelligent. They might be lucky/resilience and try to get the most support outside the house, but it is much harder to accomplish, and often is even met with harassment at home, due to the rest of the family being insecure about their own lack of intelligence. And that is only if they rebel, which is not necessarily true as they will not only lack easy access to basic knowledge about the world/science, but will also not be introduced to the importance of learning about it from their closest figures of authority. Escaping that cycle it is even harder if the family is facing economic hardship, which is true for most modern families in general. It really isn’t that hard to figure that out, the kneejerk reaction that the statement always gets is annoying.
The intro to Idiocracy doesn't actually mention genetics.
Smart people value intelligence and people who value intelligence will raise their children as such.
Parents who don't value intelligence don't raise their kids with intelligence in mind.
Public schools aren't actually about education. They're about job training and obedience, so they wont fill the gaps the parents are leaving.
Intelligence is a factor of many things, and most of those factors are not genetic.
You are very vague...
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.
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.
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.
Lead paint is not going to enter my body, but that’s because I very rarely put unknown things in my mouth. Toddlers operate differently
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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!
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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.
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).
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
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.
Since humans have made many horrendous things we will easily agree on some things we would want to change in humanity. Yet, at some point, it's difficult to define exactly what would be better ... what would be more "productive" as you wrote.
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