6d ago

Human Intelligence Sharply Declining

No, it's not just you — people really are, per a number of surveys, way less intelligent than they used to be.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20250316190341/https://futurism.com/neoscope/human-intelligence-declining-trends

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

Bad News @lemmy.ml

Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

1mo ago

Human Intelligence Sharply Declining

futurism.com /neoscope/human-intelligence-declining-trends

News @lemmy.world

General_Effort @lemmy.world

1mo ago

Human Intelligence Sharply Declining

futurism.com /neoscope/human-intelligence-declining-trends

34 comments

A bit sensationalized, but there is a solid evidence that students are doing worse in the US than a few years back. From what I've read, it's probably the year gap from COVID because data suggested the decline was steeply after that year and mostly impacted low income, rural, and communities of color who were most impacted by the shift to remote school.
This is an averages thing, though, as it's tied to other data that suggests absenteeism skyrocketed and never quite came back to pre-pandemic levels. A large group of people just not doing education is going to sink the scores.
Now, people citing biological reasons like long COVID and microplastics aren't necessarily wrong, but I haven't seen as much evidence of cognitive impacts. The reason I still give it some credit, though, is historically IQ goes up every generation (and then recalibrated since it's centered on 100) and a big part of that is physiological (e g. deleading gas, reducing air pollution), though access to information (radio, TV, internet) also contributes.
Interestingly enough, you'd think reliance on social media makes you dumb but we don't have evidence of that, it's mostly just really bad for teens mental health. We've always had stupid forms of entertainment.
- A lot of students just straight up couldn't do remote learning because they didn't have home internet or suitable computing and they got screwed. Attitudes towards sick days also changed and many parents still keep their kids home sick based on now expired COVID rules
  
  also, shabbling together school online over ~3 months isn't exactly.. smooth to say the least. Teachers can't pause a YouTube video without hunting for the triangle in the corner, much less operate a computer long enough to share and control a zoom call of 30 kids.
  I literally got a daily 0 for participation in a class where I clicked the "join call" button and was met with like 4 other kids, no teacher. For some reason there was a bug where there were just 2 different calls it would connect you to at random and all the teachers assumed it was kids being lazy and wouldn't listen to parents.
  Also the teachers had no idea what they were teaching either, they spent all the time learning how to 'recover the google when they clicked the minus button' so they couldn't learn about the English lesson.
  After a month I just switched to my states online classes instead of my highschool pitiful attempts. It went well for the rest of the year. Pretty easy because when you had to do phone calls the teachers were so overworked they'd like literally anything. For my physical education class I submitted a like 30min time for a mile, the teacher didn't say anything. Took an online class that wasn't offered at my school this year, it was definitely harder, but still pretty easy.
  
  Yup, hence why it impacted who I mentioned: low income, rural and people of color (who get bad Internet due to racial redlining). Good point regarding changed attitudes of sick days, though.
  
  Stay home if you're sick!

34 comments