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from the don't-care-I'm-getting-intelligenter dept.
In November, the European TV channel Arte aired an hourlong documentary, Demain, tous crétins?—Tomorrow, everyone’s an idiot?—on a topic that would seem to be of great importance. It starts with a London-based researcher, Edward Dutton, who has documented decades-long declines in average IQs across several Western countries, including France and Germany. “We are becoming stupider,” announces Dutton at the program’s start. “This is happening. It’s not going to go away, and we have to try to think about what we’re going to do about it.”
[...] It’s wrong to hint that scores on tests of memory and abstract thinking have been falling everywhere, and in a simple way. But at least in certain countries—notably in Northern Europe—the IQ drops seem very real. Using data from Finland, for example, where men are almost always drafted into military service, whereupon they’re tested for intelligence, Dutton showed that scores began to slide in 1997, a trend that has continued ever since. Similar trends have been documented using data from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. At some point in the mid-1990s, IQ scores in these countries tipped into decay, losing roughly one-fifth to one-quarter of a point per year. While there isn’t any sign of this effect on U.S. test results (a fact that surely bears on our indifference to the topic), researchers have found hints of something similar in Australia, France, Germany and the Netherlands.
Are we becoming dumber, as in losing cognitive function, or merely less-well read?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jimbrooking on Wednesday October 24 2018, @10:41AM (7 children)
Love to see correlations between falling IQ scores and time spent on social media.
(Score: 3, Touché) by isostatic on Wednesday October 24 2018, @11:26AM (5 children)
1997 was about the time Chips and Dips changed into Slashdot wasn't it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @01:06PM (4 children)
Well, Linux was just starting to catch on around that time... You think it's a virus?
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday October 24 2018, @02:10PM (2 children)
Why blame Linux? By about 1997 Microsoft was close to achieving world domination. By 1999 it looked like they might have computing locked up forever and under their thumb. That only software companies would exist at Microsoft's pleasure.
No wonder open source grew and took hold under the radar without the obvious commercial motive. People who wanted to build and use great software wouldn't be stopped.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @03:08PM (1 child)
:-) Fix your sarcasm detector... and let me know when you build your 'great software'... I kid I kid... I'm soaking in Linux right now
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday October 24 2018, @04:04PM
I think Linux itself would qualify as great software by just about any measure I can think of. How widely used. Economic value. Flexibility. Scalability. Commercial ecosystem.
There are numerous GUI desktop applications, that individually are great software. LibreOffice. Others are good or great to varying degrees. GIMP. Inkscape. WxMaxima. VLC. Blender. Video editors.
Then there are numerous (innumerable?) command line tools. Tmux / screen. SSH. Not to mention a lot of stuff the internet is built on. Apache. Bind. Nginx.
This is the tip of the iceberg. Once you start thinking about it. It's amazing really.
It was hopelessly permanently pegged by the output of my sarcasm generator.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday October 25 2018, @07:08AM
Correlation does not equal causation. But now that you mention it. When Linux first came out, 1991 if I recall correctly, the majority of Finnish youth were being sucked in by something called "Windows" that could run something called "video games". Now those of us interested in computer science and operating systems of course switched to this new "Linux" thing as quick as possible. But those others, well, they were drawn to the dark side, where rings of power and Bill Gates bound them, and they became stupid, as they no longer sought to understand the logic of the DirectX that made their gaming possible. And then, of course, all was lost. Ready Player One levels of stupidity ensued, and it is now that the Millennials have begun to realize what has been lost. There is hope for the future. A faint hope, but a hope nonetheless.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday October 24 2018, @02:11PM
I was going to say something similar, but about the Web in general. Wasn't it about 1997 that the general population began to realize the existence of them intarweb tubes?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.