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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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @12:36PM (2 children)
With even crapier music they keep overcoming themselves every time. This dumb music influences all the young, who in previous generations have had better stimulating music that made their brains to develop to higher standards. Nowadays they have no more this privilege and the sistematic exposure tomainstream crappy music make their intelligence stagnate.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday October 24 2018, @02:26PM (1 child)
Try listening to classical music. That is, music from before 1997.
When did Reality TV become a thing?
When did Cable TV stop doing documentaries and new content and become nothing but reruns and marathons or reruns?
When did video game consoles start becoming popular?
When did news stop being about facts and start being about entertainment?
(Several of the above items demonstrate my axiom that: advertising destroys everything it ever touches)
Now we have anti vaxxers. Chemtrails. Homeopathy. FoxNews. Trump. The Deep State. Sovereign Idiots. Etc.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday October 25 2018, @09:07PM
>chemtrails
OT but I picked situations that make a difference in temperature extremely unlikely to explain the persistence of some chemtrails.
Think never seeing intermediate chemtrails. They either disappear when the plane is still around, or they persist for hours and hours.
Think two planes, same part of the sky, same time, same apparent dimensions and speed, so there can't be much of a difference in height, upper one short trail, lower one trail through all the fucking sky. A colder lower layer, an warmer upper layer, no apparent interference or wind.
Think the implausible excuse of an increased air traffic, as I am 20 miles from an airport and had seen planes since the 70s. Chemtrails, as seen in first person and in photos of trusted origin, look like a thing of this millennium.
Think a chemtrail with a small hole (engine problems? LOL! or maybe a corridor of warmer air that doesn't minimally affect the nearby cold air?)
I don't care whether you believe my observations, but please refrain countering with the retarded argument that conspiracies need everybody on board (people will mind their own business especially when career or wage is on the line).
Account abandoned.