Is Idiocracy coming for real?


It didn't really go into detail about what parts have shrunk. It may be the primitive sides.

With the advent of growing size, I think it may be the parts set in motion by do-no-think-yourself religiousness. That certainly had its time in the sun.

On an earlier scale with a growing society you don't need each and every one to fend for themselves alone, otoh that allows specialization.

But there has been a need for leaders to help development, and I think those have been found among the people who are naturally able, but not aggressive.

Aggression is something that solves itself, if there is no longer a need, there is no longer a climate for aggression. That is however looking at the bigger picture, and not accounting for automated, and especially nuclear weapons.

Devastating losses on both sides is something new to modern warfare I think, but it pans out with civilian losses.

If you subscribe to the theory that we are all just carriers of our genes, and act on behalf of them, we are in for interesting times. How long since your genes were put to the test on such a broad front? Just about everything changes. Wielding an axe used to be lots of professions, today its only semi-useful at best.

Edit: The wiki link (which i didnt check sources to) seemed to rule out nutritional value, and at the same time acknowledge it. If the people born after the time of crisis truly are smarter, couldn't this all be down to biological effect of crisis on parents, both before and after?

Also I seem to remember seeing something about first-borns being intellectually superior to their later born siblings, that would describe difference in the situation in densely populated modern areas vs agricultural rural areas quite well.

Observationally elder siblings are mentally different from their younger brothers and sisters, but its kinda easy to say that while they are for the most part growing up in the same household at the same time.

Guess we need a control-group of siblings adopted into similar homes in similar environments. That, or you stir the pot long enough to develop some clues that can reliably predict the future.
 
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i_don_t_care_bear_by_curteichelberge_d416pgi.png
 
As the articles touch on, you can't evaluate intelligence solely based on brain size, something people stopped trying to do ages ago (and for example was for a long time used to wrongly claim women are less intelligent than men) For a rather exaggerated example, my pet rats are roughly as intelligent as cats or dogs but have much smaller brains. This is largely due to them also having much smaller bodies. The surface area and general interconnects of the brain also play a large role.
 
So what you're saying is since men are on average larger than women, women have a smaller brain than men. Got it.
 
DaMummy said:
So what you're saying is since men are on average larger than women, women have a smaller brain than men. Got it.
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No, in fact you don't have to make such an assumption when it's easy to measure the sizes of people's brains post-mortem, and such measurements have consistently found men to have, on average, larger brains than women. It has also been found that men are not, on average, more intelligent than women, and that yes, part of the reason for the larger average brain size is due to, on average, having larger bodies.
 
The question isn't "is it coming?", but "why is it taking everyone so long to see that this is how it usually is?"  The most intelligent, or even those that may be the best leaders, have rarely been the ones running things.

I didn't bother with the links because I don't care, and things won't change much.
 
"IF PHONES ARE SO SMART TODAY, WHY DO THEY GET THINNER AND THINNER?"

zomg
 
I think because there are many more people on the planet, than at any other time in history, that we tend to notice the dimwits in our midst more often. The media spotlights these sorts to further this false impression of humanity's disintegration, but the ratio of bright to dim probably hasn't changed much.  
 
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TrashyMG said:
Normally I would post this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines


but, I think it may not apply here.
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I think it does, at least in my country.

Imho the intelligence here is still rising every generation (I just ignore the silly habits as far as possible).

The demands on mental capabilities are always rising and the performance is adjusting a bit all the time the people shutting down usually do this because they don't see any sense in it, because teachers and family usually have no interest in explaining the sense of all the effort and often they don't know themselves and only tell what they are paid for.

The thing with dumb people making more children isn't a problem imho since they are usually unguided and therefore free enough to develop in any direction, very religious people making way more children is a problem though in my book but not because of intelligence, rather for other reasons.

Moral decline is a completely different topic and not bound to intelligence in any way.

What I find interesting is, that the brain seems to have grown at some point in human history and there must have been a reason for that, if it's shrinking now because versatility isn't as important at the moment and specialisation is, we may all become overspecialized and unable to adapt to changes ourselves anymore, like this alien race in "01011001".
 
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