Human stupidity

[overgrowthegovt]

This has been seriously getting me down lately, and I'm curious as to your perspectives on this topic, and how severe you think this social illness is.

From what I've been observing, a depressing amount of people are content to live their termite lives in unquestioning intellectual sterility, devouring reality TV (and any other empty distraction), cultural and governmental propaganda, etc. They assert their values to you in a self-assured display of pedantry, values that have been hammered into them from the cradle and never examined. It seems everyone was either raised by a conservative fool or a liberal fool, with no capacity to look at things as they are, undiluted by some ideological piss filter. General knowledge, grammatical savvy, aesthetic appreciation...all these seem to be on the severe decline. Oh, and let's not forget 90% of the population's addiction to conspicuous consumption of useless status symbols.

My food for debate here is...shouldn't humans be smarter than this? I recognize not everybody's going to be Rimbaud, but I really think people could be educated in critical thinking, propaganda resistence, applied philosophy, etc. if only mainstream institutions weren't so reliant on the comatose mentality for their very survival.

overgrowthegovt Reviewed by overgrowthegovt on 05-19-2009. Human stupidity This has been seriously getting me down lately, and I'm curious as to your perspectives on this topic, and how severe you think this social illness is. From what I've been observing, a depressing amount of people are content to live their termite lives in unquestioning intellectual sterility, devouring reality TV (and any other empty distraction), cultural and governmental propaganda, etc. They assert their values to you in a self-assured display of pedantry, values that have been hammered Rating: 5

[bhouncy]

I heard and read that the IQ average is increasing by three points every ten years.

[Purple Banana]

overgrow- While I appreciate your eloquence in addressing the subject of the decline of human intelligence, I think you're making way too many generalizations, based on buzz language by media outlets, open and unfounded statements, and just being vague in general. To the contrary, I don't believe human intelligence is on the decline; simply basing your argument off reality television, government propaganda, and completely unfounded statistics (conspicuous consumption? 90% That's hardly statistically measurable) and assuming most of the youth/young adult population follow what their parents have followed.

From personal observation, your logic is unsound... With each passing generation, scientific and technological discovery is exploding at an exponential rate; more kids are attending colleges- I know college does not necessarily make one smart, but the actively pursuing education is definitely a good indicator. I understand this is just a single example, but when I went to high school, the token "nerds" didn't just earn good grades, but many people in the more popular crowd actually did better on exams. Vast majority of the cliquish girls not only made it through college very well, but are attending pharm school, law school, med school... Many of the bitter and inherently intelligent people from high school are living in crappy apartments, working two jobs, trudging their way through life filled with misplaced resentment. They should be the ones in college, but they spent more energy on cynicism than studying.

You can't determine someone's intelligence by their social behavior, what they watch on TV, what their consumption habits are... It's backwards thinking. What really confused me was your phrase:

Oh, and let's not forget 90% of the population's addiction to conspicuous consumption of useless status symbols.

I'm not sure what you mean by this... By status symbols, do you imply fast cars, boats, nice houses? If so, then the 90% figure and the term addiction would render it a kind of moot point... If 90% of people purchase things which incite their status, then the term status symbol would become invalid. What is inherently wrong with buying quality if you indeed have worked hard enough for the money?

My mom worked 16 hour shifts as a nurse opposite of my dad, who worked 12 hour shifts as a coal powerplant operator to raise all six of us into healthy, functioning, and intelligent adults. Through these times, my parents learned a hell of a lot about savings and financial methods, so we've always had a comfortable home and the occasional vacation. My mom also pursued education like a fiend while working full time, accumulating four Masters and two bachelors degrees. She also watches Survivor and American Idol. My parents have 100% absolutely perfect credit. Based on your above presumption, is it morally wrong for my mom to own a Miata, or my dad to own a boat?

As far as your suggested trend in IQ, bhouncy, it wouldn't surprise me. However, traditional IQ tests, much like SATs/ACTs are generally falling out of favor in the sense that the tests are too objective, and don't show the actual spectrum of intelligence; Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences has come into favor the past decade, as it determines and measures what KIND of intelligence you predominately posses.

General knowledge, grammatical savvy, aesthetic appreciation...all these seem to be on the severe decline.

I'm assuming these are all personal, local observations? How can you determine another person's general knowledge and aesthetic appreciation objectively? You can't. Simply because you don't observe people going to art shows, museums, lectures, etc. doesn't mean they have a lack of "general knowledge and aesthetic appreciation," both of which are extremely vague terms.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again. GRAMMAR. DOES. NOT. INDICATE. INTELLIGENCE. As a former English major, as well as someone who appreciates grammar, syntax, punctuation, etc. I can attest that lack of grammar, especially on the internet, does NOT determine the intelligence of the person. There are scads of people on this site, as well as people I talk with on AIM who don't use punctuation, capital letters, and (gasp!) end their sentences with prepositions. That does NOT make them less intelligent in any way, shape, or form.

I guess the point I'm trying to convey is that you can't make accurate broad generalizations about society. People can have advanced degrees and still be idiots, or they can be intelligent, thoughtful, and eat McDonald's and shop at Wal Mart. Humans are, like it or not, each highly individual beings that you cannot accurately judge without knowing more subjective material. Preconceived notions about a person usually turn out to be false- I've had it happen to me often, and it will continue to happen. People surprise me all the time.

[eddievanzant]

Only read a little bit of the most recent post but
You don't see a difference at all between people based on their tv viewing preferences? Different shows can appeal to different intelligence levels some appeal to many. Are Frazier family guy 24 CNN fox MTV and adult swim ok appealing to every level of intelligence? I think people who watch MTV are retarded. There, I said it.

Also, I thought the intelligence level of society was in fact decreasing. There are a million things that point to it, but I'm talking about how dumb people actually have more children. Isn't that correct?

[bhouncy]

Only read a little bit of the most recent post but
You don't see a difference at all between people based on their tv viewing preferences? Different shows can appeal to different intelligence levels some appeal to many. Are Frazier family guy 24 CNN fox MTV and adult swim ok appealing to every level of intelligence? I think people who watch MTV are retarded. There, I said it.

Also, I thought the intelligence level of society was in fact decreasing. There are a million things that point to it, but I'm talking about how dumb people actually have more children. Isn't that correct?

You've been watching too many movies.

The Flynn Effect - Flynn effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Purple Banana]

Only read a little bit of the most recent post but
You don't see a difference at all between people based on their tv viewing preferences? Different shows can appeal to different intelligence levels some appeal to many. Are Frazier family guy 24 CNN fox MTV and adult swim ok appealing to every level of intelligence? I think people who watch MTV are retarded. There, I said it.

Also, I thought the intelligence level of society was in fact decreasing. There are a million things that point to it, but I'm talking about how dumb people actually have more children. Isn't that correct?

I consider myself an intelligent, well-rounded person. I can't stand Frasier, I like The Office, How It's Made, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and I'm a sucker for traditional zoological documentaries. The only things I've ever watched on MTV were Daria and Beavis and Butthead.

Genetics do not have as strong of a role in intelligence factors as people believe- learning styles are more apt to be passed on; for example, my father was a very hands-on practical kind of guy, and a visual learner. My mother is an aural learner, and values logical textbook education over more traditional blue collar methods.

I learn best by experiencing, as well as combination aural and visual learning styles, but I am more intelligent in certain ways than my mother, as well as my father. It's very complex, you can't simply assume stupid people have stupid kids, or a lot of them. My parents are very intelligent, and I'm one of six children. It's also determined by the environment; you know, nature vs. nurture.

The point is, you can assume all people who watch Family Guy are nerds, stoners, and immature people. That may have merit, but remember that stoners can be intelligent people, nerds don't have to be intelligent, and immature people can accomplish great things.

Generalizations are the bane of intelligent thinking, because although averages, statistics, and graphs can show objective data, each person has completely unique traits which can either factor into the data, or completely negate it- it's all subjective when you come down to each individual.

[dmahny88]

So i didn't read the other posts but..here are my thoughts on yours. Id bring it down to a conversation on humans becoming civilized and when everything changed we end up becoming incapable of continuing our natural processes of evolution, natural selection, competition, success/fail. I mean, what is success? Get the JOB, get the bacon. If you were a caveman, what would it have been for you? Definitely something with real direct-competition of reward/benefit, fail/darwin says your not the strongest. It seems to me our capacity to do what we do and allow ourselves as a whole to be wrenched around and mind controlled by,and i love this:

diluted by some ideological piss filter

and the media, and the government, seems like a problem spurred from a population of people with few normal and natural darwinistic checks and balances. And thats HOW IT REALLY IS so why can't it be fixed in the way that humans so ingeniously fix anything? Its FUNDAMENTALS; fix our schools or solve the problem from a perspective of the people. I concur completely with you on that but its fixing what we know to be wrong in a way of looking at the fundamentals again i.e. like changing the best way to present children with a learning environment where great wisdom can come from(teach em AND philosophize with them).
So when i see a social illness i just this of when social interaction weren't ill and i think thats when the man brought home the bacon when he ACTUALLY went out, grabbed a spear, and hunted down, killed, cooked, and devoured..the bacon:rasta: ah bacon, delicious..
But we're still ingenious, so what's wrong with us that we can't have a society with still such a large amount of stupidity that goes along with success. It needs to end. No doubt but i think its just about making it happen soon enough, too many god damned bunch of squirrel lickin dumb knuts.:cursing::rasta::rasta:

[Coelho]

This has been seriously getting me down lately, and I'm curious as to your perspectives on this topic, and how severe you think this social illness is.

From what I've been observing, a depressing amount of people are content to live their termite lives in unquestioning intellectual sterility, devouring reality TV (and any other empty distraction), cultural and governmental propaganda, etc. They assert their values to you in a self-assured display of pedantry, values that have been hammered into them from the cradle and never examined. It seems everyone was either raised by a conservative fool or a liberal fool, with no capacity to look at things as they are, undiluted by some ideological piss filter. General knowledge, grammatical savvy, aesthetic appreciation...all these seem to be on the severe decline. Oh, and let's not forget 90% of the population's addiction to conspicuous consumption of useless status symbols.

My food for debate here is...shouldn't humans be smarter than this? I recognize not everybody's going to be Rimbaud, but I really think people could be educated in critical thinking, propaganda resistence, applied philosophy, etc. if only mainstream institutions weren't so reliant on the comatose mentality for their very survival.

I think in the todays human society people MUST be this dumb, or the society would just collapse down... the society we live today is SO absurd that only dumb people can live into it (and like it and agree with it and spend their entire lives working for the benefit of it)... thats why the "system" (media+government+enforcement+etc) needs to keep people being this dumb.
And more the society grows, dumber it must keep its citizens...

Or, maybe its just you that is getting more intelligent, and so from your own viewpoint the rest of mankind is getting (relatively) dumber... there happened something similar to this with me when i started to smoke and started to see everything with different eyes...

[overgrowthegovt]

overgrow- While I appreciate your eloquence in addressing the subject of the decline of human intelligence, I think you're making way too many generalizations, based on buzz language by media outlets, open and unfounded statements, and just being vague in general. To the contrary, I don't believe human intelligence is on the decline; simply basing your argument off reality television, government propaganda, and completely unfounded statistics (conspicuous consumption? 90% That's hardly statistically measurable) and assuming most of the youth/young adult population follow what their parents have followed.

From personal observation, your logic is unsound... With each passing generation, scientific and technological discovery is exploding at an exponential rate; more kids are attending colleges- I know college does not necessarily make one smart, but the actively pursuing education is definitely a good indicator. I understand this is just a single example, but when I went to high school, the token "nerds" didn't just earn good grades, but many people in the more popular crowd actually did better on exams. Vast majority of the cliquish girls not only made it through college very well, but are attending pharm school, law school, med school... Many of the bitter and inherently intelligent people from high school are living in crappy apartments, working two jobs, trudging their way through life filled with misplaced resentment. They should be the ones in college, but they spent more energy on cynicism than studying.

You can't determine someone's intelligence by their social behavior, what they watch on TV, what their consumption habits are... It's backwards thinking. What really confused me was your phrase:



I'm not sure what you mean by this... By status symbols, do you imply fast cars, boats, nice houses? If so, then the 90% figure and the term addiction would render it a kind of moot point... If 90% of people purchase things which incite their status, then the term status symbol would become invalid. What is inherently wrong with buying quality if you indeed have worked hard enough for the money?

My mom worked 16 hour shifts as a nurse opposite of my dad, who worked 12 hour shifts as a coal powerplant operator to raise all six of us into healthy, functioning, and intelligent adults. Through these times, my parents learned a hell of a lot about savings and financial methods, so we've always had a comfortable home and the occasional vacation. My mom also pursued education like a fiend while working full time, accumulating four Masters and two bachelors degrees. She also watches Survivor and American Idol. My parents have 100% absolutely perfect credit. Based on your above presumption, is it morally wrong for my mom to own a Miata, or my dad to own a boat?

As far as your suggested trend in IQ, bhouncy, it wouldn't surprise me. However, traditional IQ tests, much like SATs/ACTs are generally falling out of favor in the sense that the tests are too objective, and don't show the actual spectrum of intelligence; Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences has come into favor the past decade, as it determines and measures what KIND of intelligence you predominately posses.

I'm assuming these are all personal, local observations? How can you determine another person's general knowledge and aesthetic appreciation objectively? You can't. Simply because you don't observe people going to art shows, museums, lectures, etc. doesn't mean they have a lack of "general knowledge and aesthetic appreciation," both of which are extremely vague terms.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again. GRAMMAR. DOES. NOT. INDICATE. INTELLIGENCE. As a former English major, as well as someone who appreciates grammar, syntax, punctuation, etc. I can attest that lack of grammar, especially on the internet, does NOT determine the intelligence of the person. There are scads of people on this site, as well as people I talk with on AIM who don't use punctuation, capital letters, and (gasp!) end their sentences with prepositions. That does NOT make them less intelligent in any way, shape, or form.

I guess the point I'm trying to convey is that you can't make accurate broad generalizations about society. People can have advanced degrees and still be idiots, or they can be intelligent, thoughtful, and eat McDonald's and shop at Wal Mart. Humans are, like it or not, each highly individual beings that you cannot accurately judge without knowing more subjective material. Preconceived notions about a person usually turn out to be false- I've had it happen to me often, and it will continue to happen. People surprise me all the time.

A few things I must say here:

1. Yes, we have new technological breakthroughs all the time, but I'm talking about a deeper understanding here, not the creation of higher-tech gizmos for people to shallowly distract themselves with, new means of accelerating the dehumanizing industrialism we've engaged in since the 1700s, or some bigger bomb. Most breakthroughs seem to consist of one of the above...that or better medicine, to fuel the overpopulation epidemic.

2. It is a common belief in our modern society that we cannot judge another person's intelligence, but I'm acquainted with a great many people who don't know words like "stifled" or "tyranny", are practically illiterate despite being educated for thirteen years, and who really don't know anything outside of their own tiny sphere of vacuity. University wasn't much better--nobody loved knowledge for its own sake, and they were all just after a degree for financial reasons.

3. As for aesthetic appreciation...I find it astonishing that some people could watch a sunrise, listen to a beautiful piece of music, read a poem by Keats, etc. and feel absolutely nothing. Yeah, I know beauty's in the eye of the beholder, but some eyes are more refined than others. I'm simply not going to buy into our age's egalitarian bullshit...genius and quality are in danger of vanishing from recognition in our era of blind subjectivity-lauding.

4. I know whether or not someone chooses to use perfect grammar on a forum doesn't indiciate intellect, but if someone has to, on an essay for example, and proves to be utterly ignorant of the structure of the language they've been speaking since birth?

5. Good point about the infinite variance of the individual...that I will acknowledge. I'm not negating human worth here or the individual capacity to transcend in a number of ways, I'm just saying that I wish more people were more intellectual, that poetry was more widely-read, that values were examined more, that arty films were more popular than American Idol, etc.

[overgrowthegovt]

I'd like to clarify something about TV preferences and how they relate to intelligence level....Purple Banana mentioned that her mother, whom she considers intelligent, watches Survivor and American Idol. So does mine...recognizing them as guilty pleasures that provide a little mindless entertainment for relaxation purposes. There's nothing wrong with that....what's troubling, though, is that many people I know are incapable of telling a guilty pleasure from true quality: our subjectivity-driven society is fast eradicating the vital distinction.

As for the ethics of material consumption....I suppose it's hard for me to accurately judge this one, since I take no pleasure at all in possessions that do not allow me to take in art in some form: books, films, music, etc. I believe these things enrich my soul, but what would I do with a watch that costs a couple thousand dollars, when a cheap one tells time just as well? That's one human value I just cannot understand...the only people who really benefit from such consumption are the companies who sell these goods.

Coelho: you make sense to me, man. You see and know things, and you're not afraid to criticize (a major modern phobia). Civilized society is indeed deeply and inherently insane, and the mental inertia of the masses is essential to its preservation.

Anyway, I suppose the purpose of this thread was to discuss how we can find hope in the face of this, how I and others can avoid a descent into despair. I sometimes think man has been doomed since people first became able to produce more food than they needed just for themselves, thus rendering slavery practical.