Serious question: Is everybody getting stupid?

Short answer, yes.
Long answer, yes but not quite.

 

I've seen that 3rd video and the funniest part is he says they're right even though they were dead wrong.

For reference I am a "Young" millennial.

I'm thinking on one hand, the optimism in me says that these people were being cherry picked to create a narrative that people are getting dumber and we're turning into Idiocracy. The other believes that this is a long time coming. I mean think about it:

Schools only have ever given a crap about grades and numbers and brainwashed students into believing that if you fail, you're stupid and not worth teaching. Instead of realizing that everyone learns things differently and cultivating students learning style to fit the lesson, they teach it one way and if they don't get it, they're SOL.

Another thing is that schools are trying to pump out workers who can't think for themselves and have for longer than you or I have been alive. Why should they know who won the civil war when it doesn't apply to a job at a McDonalds or Walmart? Why should they know geography, when most won't leave their town/cities in their life? Even basic math which I value isn't that useful to the average gen-Z person when they have cards and calculators on their phones. Why think at all when there's a device that does all the thinking for you? Schools have not prepared for such a leap in technology and it shows.

During Covid, I was still with my ex-wife and her brother (18) was just starting college and I would hear countless times where he said he didn't even bother learning over Zoom and watched anime instead. I think Covid has really accelerated this dumbing down. For 2 years, learning came to a halt and the gap just grew bigger until we have people in these videos who just have no knowledge and how to use that knowledge to better themselves beyond the short term pleasures of social media, drugs, porn and their phones.

I could write so much more about this, but I'll end up writing a book. Not that any Gen-Zer would read it. Unless it was condensed into a 30-sec tik tok.

 

I'm going to play devil's advocate here and say that there have always been uncultured borderline retarded people around, and that they outnumber the opposite.

It's just modern technology and social media that it's helping us highlight something that have always been, and will keep being.

That said, as member of the previous generation, I feel like youngsters nowadays are way more stupid than how we were, but I have the odd feeling that is a recurrent complaint in every generation.

 

Correct. I agree with you.

 

You are actually true but you know what is the difference between past and now? That people 100-200 years mostly of the people was expected to stay in farms, etc...now everyone (mostly) in western countries have roghts to education...even if you get brainwashed by the school to obey to your state and politicians, praise materialism and monkey theory...from school it is expected to you to be able to do basic things like writings, read, get a culture, be civilized, ecc... (donˋt take me as an example. Iˋm just a kentucky farmer now in Salem, i didnˋt learned to write and read till 18+ this is the reason my english is shit). If we suppose that entropy fabula is true now everyone should be a genius

 

If everybody is every person does it includes us?

 

Might be true in some part of the west as all your links are about them but i cannot imagine this to be true in the non western world as literacy has been steadily increasing there especially asia and east asia in particular where they recently outperformed western students on schools test.

Plus these seems to be cherry picked shitty students or maybe being put on the spot impaired their thinking.

 

I think you have a point. As for the question itself I don't think the answer is straightforward.

In my old church, many women either studied at university or graduated with degrees except the Pastors Wife because she didn't have the intellect to do it. I think it's fair to say some would think of the Pastor's Wife as being stupid for not being able to study or graduate from university. But she was able to manage her household a whole lot better than the women who were at university. So in that regard, you could say she was more intelligent than the women at university. I think we all have different talents and you can't be good at everything. Everyone you meet probably knows something you don't know and you know something they don't know.

Also if you look at it from a historical perspective you could say we are smarter than those who were alive in the past. For a long time, the way you dealt with cuts was by amputation because they didn't know how to treat cuts properly. Plasters weren't invented until the 1800s and in the grand scheme of things that wasn't a long time ago. More people have been alive without plasters than those who have. I think nowadays no one is going to think amputating is the right thing to do when you have a cut. That is just one of many historical examples of people not knowing what we know. Having said that I don't it's fair to say they were stupid for doing amputations. They were doing what they thought was best and probably knew things that many of don't know. I think one thing they probably were better at than us was being able to cope with death since they would have experienced a lot of it. And of course, you have ancient wisdom such as Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and the Book of Proverbs that we all can learn from.

 

funny things socrates i think predicted the same thing would happen with books as people no longer had to rely on their memory.

You know there might be some truth to this however, people here talk mainly about the difference in generations but it has been noticed that tamed animals tend to be less intelligent and independent than their wilds counterpart with a smaller brain to boot and humans have been domesticating themselves for thousands of year since they became sedentary and their brains also reduced in size. what these animals lost in problem solving or thinking on their feet they usually made up in emotional intelligence instead, something that is i believe essential for modern humans civilization. today only perhaps hunters and special soldiers would be able to make it in the wild on their own, in the time of hunter gatherers by the time you hit 20s you have the equivalent of a college education, an intimate knowledge of every aspect of your environment, being able to read tracks and the weather, if you didn't and were lacking in intelligence or fitness you probably would die quickly and have no chance to spread your genes. There is not this same kind of pressure today, you just have to know how to follow instructions well plus the average person might understand what a high speed train is but he neither truly know how it works nor can he make one on his own, all these talk about iq increasing or decreasing is mostly related to knowledge which is not intelligence(and how can a psychologist determine the intelligence of a high level physicist anyways?) after all it is unlikely that humans today are more intelligent than they were 500 years ago, evolution is not that fast i think. There is not any actual study on this but it is the trend in the animal kingdom, and technology perhaps does not help as it purpose is to make everything easier or less demanding than what has shaped the human body and mind thus far.

 

I didn't mention technology in my post but I agree. Maybe people aren't stupid, they just have a shorter attention span due to technology. Sports like baseball and cricket aren't popular anymore due to how long they take and there are plans to make football games shorter because young people don't watch full games. Also on social media many people only read the headline of a news story and don't bother reading the full article. What's worse is TikTok is the most popular social media app and that revolves around short videos.

 

where do get that baby boomers worked harder than now? It is generally agreed that in the west there has been a steady decrease in work hours since the victorian era but even then that was mostly hard labor which has mainly shifted to automation since and everything has become more expensive.

In their days you can make yourself a good home and a family with just a high school diploma which is worthless today and requirement for jobs keeps increasing, soon you will need a phd just to get an average income, that will be the fate of the genz*.Plus education was cheaper then.

try this "The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future - And Why They Should Give It Back"

facebook is still the most popular social media app and most users of tiktok are in china yet people there work more than in the US this is true for both adults and children, i am sure few americans kids today would willingly chose to take the gaokao, many chineses parent actually fled west so that their kids wouldn't have to take it.

 

Looking it up it appears that you are right. I'm sure I heard it was the most popular on some tech podcast but I think I may have got mixed up. From what I looked up TikTok is the fastest growing app and is more popular with young people. My impression is Meta feels threatened by it. You have them heavily promoting Reels on Facebook/Instagram and there was that story that broke about Meta spreading that fake news story about TikToc encouraging teens to be disruptive at school.

It also differs from country to country in the West. Apparently Americans are driven the hardest in the job market and Western European countries in the EU have the best work-life balance.