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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) by mcgrew on Wednesday October 24 2018, @02:21PM (4 children)
On the contrary, there is far more to know now than there was when I was your age. The most complex thing most people did was drive a car. Today today everything is computerized and far more complex.
That said, it does seem like people are getting dumber.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday October 24 2018, @03:27PM (1 child)
You need to know a lot and think a lot to thrive, but not to just live.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @06:12PM
You need to know a lot and drink a lot to thrive, but not to just live.
There, FTFY.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Thursday October 25 2018, @02:54AM (1 child)
I've found that most people barely know how to operate a computer or a smartphone. With that said, they can also barely operate a car.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday October 28 2018, @01:21PM
There have always been bad drivers. As to the phone, phones used to be simple and computers used to be complicated. Now that's reversed. TVs had two knobs, channel and volume. Now they're computerized with two dozen or more buttons on the remote control, which didn't use to exist except on the most expensive TVs, and they only had three or four buttons (and no batteries).
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org