People ARE getting dumber (14 I.Q. points dumber)

[ClockworkPenguin]

i'm in the 'genius' category as i've scored over a 132

An IQ of 132 isn't even past the 99th percentile, who considers that to be genius-level?

Just being a pedant, but I think IQ in theory follows a bell shaped distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 10. A quick google reveals that 3 standard deviation above the mean puts you at the 99.7th percentile.

Still not genius level I agree, but it is (ideally- there is plenty of evidence that actual IQ tests don't really fit the ideal) above 99%.

 

[gavinmcinns]

People use to pay to watch a man sneeze, we now have an interactive video game where you experience the life of an immigrant who is forced into a life of crime.
Even the "crap" of our generation is way more complex and thought out than the stuff that passed for "mind blowing" in the 50s.


The Flynn effect has nothing to do with altering the tests to get results, it had to do with them STANDARDIZING the IQ tests because they would normally increase the difficulty every year. When they stopped increasing the difficulty they realized the average scores went up every year.
This has been well researched, you can find actual documented evidence of this, not just "You want proof? LOOK AT TV!" which seems to be your go-to argument here.

See the Flynn effect wasn't just observed in IQ tests but also specialty tests such as military tests. Fact is that every generation, on average, gets a bit smarter than the last. I know that doesn't fit in with "your view" but your view, as you have made very clear in your statement, is based on what you have seen and nothing more.

Everything you have seen with your own eyes are things you have experienced in your own lifetime and your own generation. If you did a bit of research on the things that went on in this world (hell just this country alone) during, say, the the thirties, you might not be so quick to say that we are getting dumber.

Remember the last time we burned someone because we thought they might be magic? Yeah neither do I. You know how the media likes to latch onto a story about a person possibly killing someone? You know how people complain that it's a "witch hunt" all the time? Yeah that term used to refer to the act of searching through a person's personal life and belongings for any "evidence" that they have magic powers and need to be burned. Yeah it was just a way to get land from widows but the fact that people so easily believed it should tell you something about the difference in general intelligence.

To me the Flynn effect shouldn't even have a name because its so obvious. If you make a test and never change it, no shit, people will learn the answers and do better over time.

Testing reaction times seems to me to be a much better way of quantifying general intelligence, admittedly not perfect or even that close. If i take two random numbers and ask someone to multiply, divide, and subtract them with whatever method they want, the first person to do so correctly is clearly better at arithmetic. Similarly, a person who can speak on a wide array of topics cogently and promptly is a more intelligent person than someone who can't.

 

[Rowan93]

i'm in the 'genius' category as i've scored over a 132

An IQ of 132 isn't even past the 99th percentile, who considers that to be genius-level?

Just being a pedant, but I think IQ in theory follows a bell shaped distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 10. A quick google reveals that 3 standard deviation above the mean puts you at the 99.7th percentile.

Still not genius level I agree, but it is (ideally- there is plenty of evidence that actual IQ tests don't really fit the ideal) above 99%.

The standard deviation isn't 10, it's 15, so 132 is only two standard deviations above the mean and is about the 98.4th percentile.

 

[Rowan93]

To me the Flynn effect shouldn't even have a name because its so obvious. If you make a test and never change it, no shit, people will learn the answers and do better over time.

These aren't the same people taking the test each time, you know.

 

[gavinmcinns]

I think you already pointed out what's wrong with this viewpoint of quality right there in the bolded part. This means that Twilight is very high quality, so by your standards people are consuming high-quality media these days after all.

No, I'm talking about the most important measure of quality, the quality of a film that makes you more curious, open, as opposed to more cloistered and xenophobic

> Implying that no significant number of people read anymore
> Implying there are, in fact, fewer literary geniuses
> Implying that enjoying TV inherently leads to laziness
> Implying that laziness is somehow equal to "stupidity"

That's a lot of unsubstantiated claims in just a few sentences, and there's a lot of unnecessary derisiveness. I've pointed this out before, but I think it's worth mentioning again: for somebody who's so convinced you've got the facts on your hand, you're sure resorting to a lot of cheap distractions and shortcuts. Or to put it another way: Stop being rude. If you really are the smartest person in the room, you shouldn't have to go around telling everybody else how dumb they are.

And you still have yet to address the sketchiness of the sources of information you've already provided. What proof do you have the results weren't selective, as psychological studies so often were during that time? Just how similar were the IQ tests of those days, and how comparable to today's techniques and understanding of intelligence are they? And when did we ever decide that IQ was even a reliable and an absolute measure of intelligence? You keep on piling more onto this house, but I'm still not convinced you've got your foundation poured right.

Fact, youth read less than they used to, and the shit they read is more useless than it used to be.
It's impossible to know how many geniuses there are, but what is fact is that they are no longer appreciated as they were. Instead we elevate people like stephanie meyer to the level where I know her name, and that is discouraging.
Watching TV does lead to laziness.
I never said laziness = stupidity, but it does lead to stupidity. Laziness of thought, I should clarify. As soon as you settle into a single view of the world and stop asking questions about life and quit learning new things, you become a stupid backwards less than worthless dead weight on society.

 

[gavinmcinns]

And for the 99.99% of human history when no one could read, and the ONLY entertainment was 'physical comedy' from killing animals and some limited form of dance and oral tradition accompanied by crude musical instruments incapable of playing anything cerebral?

This is line of reasoning requires that the middle class of Western Europe experienced an explosion of IQ growth on account of the printing industry.

Just because cavemen at one point didn't know how to make fire doesn't make them dumb. Yea, if you plucked one out and threw him into society today then he'd be less intelligent than almost everyone, but that isn't the proper way of looking at it. What I look for is growth in human curiosity and advancement. The fact that they went from not having fire to consistently having fire, not having a wheel to being able to transport 1000 lb carcasses shows a monumental leap in both categories. from 1900 to 1970, we went from manned flight to manned space flight, not to mention all kinds of other important discoveries. Then we got idiots like our worst president Reagan and a total capture of our government by moneyed interests and the extreme conservative wing on their payroll.

I'm not saying people were always smarter and more intelligent, but rather that we are currently in a period of intellectual regression, as we were in medieval times because of things like christianity and Islam (the main offenders). Still they are a driving force for killing curiosity (I mean just look at this trailer for the new christian propaganda film http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90PWFEeRApA), but you can add Narcissism of the dumb to that list.

 

[gavinmcinns]

I don't think people are getting dumber.
I do think that these bullshit idols and heroes the media tries to shovel down our and our kids's throats are a lot dumber then they used to be.

This mass media thing... I don't think it's healthy. I think people need to stop worrying about Myley Cyrus or Justin Bieber or fuckers like them, stop thinking about empty-headed, non creative celebrities and focus on what is going on in your own life.
There are plenty of people in our own lives that deserve our attention, don't waste it on these icons the media has created.

You know, young kids see the celebrity lifestyle and think it's great, and what's worse they think they should live like that too, not knowing you can be so much happier if you focus on people instead of bullshit thinks like lifestyle, style, brands and all that shit.
That fucking shit never made anybody happy. Now when you buy a car or a jacket or something way more expensive then it's worth, and you get that warm feeling inside of you?
Yeah that is not happiness, it's only temporary and goes away real quick, and then your life is shit again because you put idols and things in front of the people who really matter.

...

I got off topic for a while there.
So in summary: I don't think people are getting dumber, but I do think whatever the fuck passes for culture that these media conglomerates are shoving up our asses is getting really fucking stupid.

But don't you think these media conglomerates are reacting to the intellectual landscape? If people didn't eat this stuff up they wouldn't make it. And it becomes a vicious cycle of people consuming insubstantial fluff, influencing the young people around them into liking pop culture nonsense and glorifying stupidity. I guarantee you more little girls want to be a drunken idiot slut that parties all night, gets wasted morning, and shows up 20 hours late to a movie set where they are filming the absolute dumbest film possible, than want to become the next M. Curie or Amelia Earheart.

Like you said, kids no longer idolize the people in their own lives. Back in the day kids would say " I idolize my Dad, he works hard", nowadays you are more likely to hear "I idolize Alex Rodriguez cuz he hits the ball far". And then these kids become terrible parents and the dumbening of America continues. Watch out other countries.

 

[Lilani]

No, I'm talking about the most important measure of quality, the quality of a film that makes you more curious, open, as opposed to more cloistered and xenophobic.

Didn't I mention Birth of a Nation earlier? You know, the first blockbuster film in American history being a love letter to the KKK? And how is early film an early example of work that isn't cloistered or xenophobic? Do you know what the first big sound film was? The Jazz Singer--featuring white people in blackface, because while they wanted stereotypical black jazz performers, they didn't feel it was "decent" to show real black people on screen. Most forms of media up until about the 70s when they really tried to start turning things around were INCREDIBLY prone to being racist, sexist, xenophobic, ethnocentric, and generally unenlightened. If you think media today is cloistered and xenophobic, you need to learn about early film history. It's a hoot.

One of my favorites was another of D.W. Griffith's: Broken Blossoms [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1NbA_eO7Es], or "The Yellow Man and the Girl." It was made in 1919, and it's the story of a HIGHLY stereotypical Chinese man (played by a white actor, of course--can't have any REAL asians in our films!) who falls in love with a white girl, but when the girl is beaten to death by her dad for loving him back, he commits suicide. To be fair, the father is played out to be the villain, but the way the Chinese characters are portrayed are at best stereotypical and at worst caricatured and patronizing. The tragedy D.W. Griffith had in mind to portray was the tragedy that the man the girl loved was Chinese, not that the loving couple couldn't escape the father in time.

However, even though this tripe was highly popular in its day with adults, that wasn't what kids were enjoying in the theater. When kids went to the theater, they went to see much more enlightened stuff.


And even after sound came into play Hollywood movies were still made with the white male in mind. Casablanca really pissed me off--I took it as the story of a woman who makes a choice about who she wants to be with, but is overruled by the jackass of a "man" who's decided it's his job to make sure she doesn't make the wrong choice with her fickle girly feelings. Hell there's a line in there where she literally says "Think for me, I can't think anymore." SO. ENLIGHTENED.

Seriously, just stop. You're only making this easy for me. At any point you could have pointed out that how socially progressive a person is does not necessarily affect how intelligent they are (Galileo probably was just as sexist as everybody else we know in that era--we just don't hold it against him because he never wrote extensively about it). But no, you've gone further down the rabbit hole and are now trying to argue that media TODAY is more cloistered and xenophobic than it was back then. Today's media certainly still has problems, but at least we aren't afraid to show black people on screen, and they're given roles other than being a caricatured African savage.

Fact, youth read less than they used to, and the shit they read is more useless than it used to be.
It's impossible to know how many geniuses there are, but what is fact is that they are no longer appreciated as they were. Instead we elevate people like stephanie meyer to the level where I know her name, and that is discouraging.
Watching TV does lead to laziness.
I never said laziness = stupidity, but it does lead to stupidity. Laziness of thought, I should clarify. As soon as you settle into a single view of the world and stop asking questions about life and quit learning new things, you become a stupid backwards less than worthless dead weight on society.

"Youth read less than they used to?" As opposed to when? You mean the Victorian era, where only the rich could read things such as books and higher literature and being "literate" was being able to sign your name? And what were they reading back then, exactly? I'm certain even in the early 20th century children weren't reading the works of Charles Dickens. They were reading comic books and other media that catered to them. If you really think kids in the past were reading Shakespeare and Dickens in their spare time, you truly have no grasp on history or perspective. Just because those things existed doesn't mean that's what kids were reading and watching, just as just because we have A Brief History of the Time and Cloud Atlas doesn't mean kids or even the general population are enlightening themselves with them.

And watching TV does lead to laziness? Prove it. Lyndon Johnson could watch six TVs at once and know what's going on in all of them, and he was the VP who replaced JFK after his assassination. Also, please prove that TV is inherently "settling into a single worldview." Last I checked, on a single TV you can learn about wildlife in Africa, learn how to cook a mean taco soup, watch an adaptation of a Shakespearian play, listen to a concert, hear news from all around the world, and see politicians and pundits debate and verbally duke it out with each other. You can observe a hundred different worldviews in just a few minutes.

 

[Rob Robson]

One look at today's American television and I think the conclusion in this report is understating the problems you're in. A similar study was done a while ago in Scandinavia and it seems we are seeing the opposite here. But Europe as a whole is in decline.

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

People in this thread think they know better than research peer reviewed by experts in the relevant fields? LOL

"EXPERTS"

Evidence found by doctors states that another possible explanation for the decline in average I.Q. is via blood transfusions They found that the blood not only carried a small amount of the person but it also carried the information that allowed them to think. They did a transfusion between two people, one was intellectually very advanced and the other was one person who was considerably lower on the I.Q. ladder. The recipients of the blood became confused over time and their ability to maintain their previous level of I.Q. was indeed noted to be in jeopardy.

My reaction to this as a biomedical student cannot be described with mere mortal words. Ill try and paint a picture of the disgust i feel toward the utter fantasy this total moron has created in attempt to call this trash "Biology". Perhaps the "expert" is only assuming people are becoming less intelligent because he is A TOTAL FUCKING MORON.

The initial test also tries to say "Reaction time = intelligence" with NO justification for making such a stupid claim. Fighter jet pilots are intelligent but according to this test they are the most intelligent people to ever live and ever will live. Cmon seriously this whole study the "expert" performed is fucking comically abysmal. The fact anyone honestly calling themselves a scientist could read that, a thing they had written, and not have their eyeballs explode in total fucking shame is a travesty. Ironically by creating a study so godawful I cringe just TRYING to read such stupid things like "Intelligence is transfered via blood" and "How fast you can move is your intelligence" the person has proved, at the very least, that the people who read this and didnt laugh until their spleens ruptured are pretty stupid.

Never believe someone because they are an "expert". Read some scientific studies! Learn to spot bullshit! It flows out of this one in freaking TORRENTS.

Logically the most intelligent people were the first ever humans. Well that is if doomsayers like the OP were right. Heres a game i invented for threads/people like the OP. I call it: "When did doomsaying become valid, give me the exact year". Lets go ladies and gentlemen.

Heres some quotes. Guess what MILLENIA they are from. You read right. Milenia. Guess what thousand of years someone said these. Hell guess what century. Cookie for correct answers:

What is happening to our young
people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They
ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions.
Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?"

Spoiler

354BC

"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on
frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond
words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and
respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise
[disrespectful] and impatient of restraint"

Spoiler

800AD

"The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of
today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for
parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as
if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is
foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest
and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress."

Spoiler

1274AD

Credit if you managed to guess them all

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

I just want to point out that one of the "sources" cited at the bottom of that page are this [http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/IQ/1950-2050/] page, which spends a moment talking about something called the "Flynn effect."

The Flynn effect is an undisputed yet enigmatic aspect of IQ testing. Shortly after the first IQ tests were standardised, it was observed that the scores of those taking them tended to rise from year to year, as much as 15 points (one standard deviation) per generation. To maintain a mean score of 100 for the population on which IQ tests were standardised, test makers were forced to make their tests increasingly difficult over the years. In other words, to get the same IQ score as your father, you must perform equally well on a substantially tougher test than he took.

If, for whatever reason, everybody were getting smarter, this would be wonderful news indeed. But a glance at the numbers shows that something very curious must be going on here. If IQ were, in fact, rising at a rate of 15 points per generation then, if the mean IQ of today is 100, that of our grandparents' generation would have been about 70?generally considered the threshold of mental retardation. Clearly, anybody who's spent time with their grandparents and other folks of that generation knows that's utter nonsense.

I haven't read the whole thing, but I read this in particular because the first thing I wondered was how standardized were these tests in the first place. And while I don't know all the ins and outs of this "Flynn Effect," to me this says there is a LOT of uncertainty when it comes to pinning down human intelligence to an objective number. If they're having to tamper with their tests like this to account for strange fluctuations in results, that to me says the results weren't completely reliable to begin with.

Another two sources I found were The Daily Beast, the site run by Glenn Beck and his ilk of hyper-conservative loons, and another source which I shit you not is called:

"American Intelligence Compromised by Blood Transfusions
Librul news today"

Seriously, I copy and pasted that directly from the sources area, look for yourself. Needless to say these are not reliable sources for any sort of project that revolves around human intelligence. Also, given the way the sources aren't cited in any official academic format (hell, they aren't even in alphabetical order), I think it's safe to say this is NOT an official research project sponsored by the university. It looks like a student project hosted on the Hartford web site, something which is commonly done in universities these days as a way of turning in and presenting projects. I have no idea what this is, but if it's really any sort of academic venture it is a joke at best and I doubt they got good marks for it.

Here you go http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000470

Woodley is affiliated with 4 respected european universities.
This is not an isolated study. This is a serious research project. And while the flynn effect is an interesting insight into how the IQ tests are created and administered, it has no bearing on this study since they are testing reaction times. "Rather than comprehensive IQ test scores declining over time, researchers focused on declining reaction times?a metric that correlates with general intelligence" http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2013/05/26/think-fast-are-we-really-getting-dumber/.

That forbes article doesn't really enforce your point. It goes on to say that reaction speed is not necessarily a good metric for intelligence due to how changeable it is. So I don't think something that changes when we chew gum as the article states is a very good metric.

 

[broca]

I haven't read all the post before, so perhaps someone already said it, but the study is BS. Just by reading the abstract it becomes clear that the authors are either stupid or wanted to write a paper that gets media attention. So let's look at some statements to see why the whole thing is stupid:

suggests that these trends might be related to declining IQ

It is a scientific fact that IQ scores have risen since IQ testing was introduced. This is called the Flynn effect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect ) and everyone involved in intelligence research should know about it.

high-IQ people are more productive and more creative

No. People with high IQ are generally better at certain tasks (like complex problem solving), but there is also a lot of stuff (like any manual activity) that has zero relation to IQ. Also, as far as i know there is no strong link between intelligence and creativity (a concept that is even less well defined than intelligence and very hard to measure).

Using psychometric meta-analysis we computed the true correlation between simple reaction time and g, yielding a decline of − 1.16 IQ points per decade or − 13.35 IQ points since Victorian times.

Using a correlation between IQ and reaction time to justify making claims about IQ based on reaction times is not how science works (correlation unequal causation,...). While reaction times might be a part of the whole concept of intelligence, they most certainly are only a small part. So, stating that a difference in reaction time equals a difference in IQ is just wrong.

 

[gavinmcinns]

Is this study really only comparing reaction times? Because that really only gives you data on, well, reaction times, and I don't think the whole "correlation != causation"-thing needs to be repeated any more in this thread. I mean, sure, I am probably both smarter than and have better reaction times than a white-trash soccer mom that spends her entire day watching reality TV, but I am also a lot smarter than a lot of the people I'm practicing karate with, yet a lot of them have better reaction times than me.

Girls is drivel, as is most of breaking bad, the pacing in that show is really bad, but there are moments that elevate it to goodness. Back when pcs were dominant in the market, there were more roguelikes and strategy games.

And most of those were shitty knock-offs of the few good examples of the genre that we fondly remember today.

I mean, do you remember how many bad strategy games that popped up in the wake of Starcraft(or the port. UGGGHH the port), how many fucking horrible 3D platformers we saw as a result of Super Mario 64, or the metric shitload of awful fighting games that followed Tekken 3 or any of the big Street Fighter-releases? Or all the bad movie-games that were just as bad as, and often worse than, the movie games that are released today?
No?
In that case, you are either too young to remember it, or you've managed to suppress the memories of them.

This goes for any other media as well. Go try to find some kiosk novels from 100 years ago, and you'll find that the only thing that has changed very much for them, is the amount of blatant racism you'll find in them.

I'd rather play any of the mario 64 clones over another dead space any day of the week. At least there were alternatives back then, nowadays it seems every shooter has to follow the same formula every, single, time. Even Rockstar seems to be falling back on formula, it seems like they didn't improve any of the mechanics from 4-red dead- 5, which is a bit disappointing.

 

[gavinmcinns]

You intentionally looked at the wrong study and responded to it, the one you looked at is not peer reviewed and isn't worth the kilobytes it is written on.

Also, reaction time doesn't have to mean twitch reflexes, reaction time can refer to the time it takes to answer a question.

Nonetheless I enjoyed your rage, as misdirected as it is.

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

You intentionally looked at the wrong study and responded to it, the one you looked at is not peer reviewed and isn't worth the kilobytes it is written on.

Thats quite an accusation Im happy to get angry at shitty science no matter where it is, the fact it might not be relevant to the rest of the point doesnt blunt my dislike for random bullshit under the guise of biology.

Did you play my game? What did you score

Dont try and defend the reaction time thing too much. Its a pretty poor metric to use for trying to test the raw intelligence of an entire generation. Intelligence is a very nebulous term. Reducing it to a single descrete number that can be measured on a stop watch is by definition going to be a blunt way of doing things.

Youre also not using terms that will make people of a scientific mind want to trust your ideas. Ive heard the "Ive had a good feeling i was right and FINALLY i found proof to support my originally unfounded notion!" before and it is a VERY poor starting point in science. I always remain distrustful of any view presented to me in that order. You never put the horse before the cart so to speak. Information informs your views. You dont SEEK information to justify a view you WANT to hold.

 

[gavinmcinns]

No, I'm talking about the most important measure of quality, the quality of a film that makes you more curious, open, as opposed to more cloistered and xenophobic.

Didn't I mention Birth of a Nation earlier? You know, the first blockbuster film in American history being a love letter to the KKK? And how is early film an early example of work that isn't cloistered or xenophobic? Do you know what the first big sound film was? The Jazz Singer--featuring white people in blackface, because while they wanted stereotypical black jazz performers, they didn't feel it was "decent" to show real black people on screen. Most forms of media up until about the 70s when they really tried to start turning things around were INCREDIBLY prone to being racist, sexist, xenophobic, ethnocentric, and generally unenlightened. If you think media today is cloistered and xenophobic, you need to learn about early film history. It's a hoot.

One of my favorites was another of D.W. Griffith's: Broken Blossoms [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1NbA_eO7Es], or "The Yellow Man and the Girl." It was made in 1919, and it's the story of a HIGHLY stereotypical Chinese man (played by a white actor, of course--can't have any REAL asians in our films!) who falls in love with a white girl, but when the girl is beaten to death by her dad for loving him back, he commits suicide. To be fair, the father is played out to be the villain, but the way the Chinese characters are portrayed are at best stereotypical and at worst caricatured and patronizing. The tragedy D.W. Griffith had in mind to portray was the tragedy that the man the girl loved was Chinese, not that the loving couple couldn't escape the father in time.

However, even though this tripe was highly popular in its day with adults, that wasn't what kids were enjoying in the theater. When kids went to the theater, they went to see much more enlightened stuff.


And even after sound came into play Hollywood movies were still made with the white male in mind. Casablanca really pissed me off--I took it as the story of a woman who makes a choice about who she wants to be with, but is overruled by the jackass of a "man" who's decided it's his job to make sure she doesn't make the wrong choice with her fickle girly feelings. Hell there's a line in there where she literally says "Think for me, I can't think anymore." SO. ENLIGHTENED.

Seriously, just stop. You're only making this easy for me. At any point you could have pointed out that how socially progressive a person is does not necessarily affect how intelligent they are (Galileo probably was just as sexist as everybody else we know in that era--we just don't hold it against him because he never wrote extensively about it). But no, you've gone further down the rabbit hole and are now trying to argue that media TODAY is more cloistered and xenophobic than it was back then. Today's media certainly still has problems, but at least we aren't afraid to show black people on screen, and they're given roles other than being a caricatured African savage.

Fact, youth read less than they used to, and the shit they read is more useless than it used to be.
It's impossible to know how many geniuses there are, but what is fact is that they are no longer appreciated as they were. Instead we elevate people like stephanie meyer to the level where I know her name, and that is discouraging.
Watching TV does lead to laziness.
I never said laziness = stupidity, but it does lead to stupidity. Laziness of thought, I should clarify. As soon as you settle into a single view of the world and stop asking questions about life and quit learning new things, you become a stupid backwards less than worthless dead weight on society.

"Youth read less than they used to?" As opposed to when? You mean the Victorian era, where only the rich could read things such as books and higher literature and being "literate" was being able to sign your name? And what were they reading back then, exactly? I'm certain even in the early 20th century children weren't reading the works of Charles Dickens. They were reading comic books and other media that catered to them. If you really think kids in the past were reading Shakespeare and Dickens in their spare time, you truly have no grasp on history or perspective. Just because those things existed doesn't mean that's what kids were reading and watching, just as just because we have A Brief History of the Time and Cloud Atlas doesn't mean kids or even the general population are enlightening themselves with them.

And watching TV does lead to laziness? Prove it. Lyndon Johnson could watch six TVs at once and know what's going on in all of them, and he was the VP who replaced JFK after his assassination. Also, please prove that TV is inherently "settling into a single worldview." Last I checked, on a single TV you can learn about wildlife in Africa, learn how to cook a mean taco soup, watch an adaptation of a Shakespearian play, listen to a concert, hear news from all around the world, and see politicians and pundits debate and verbally duke it out with each other. You can observe a hundred different worldviews in just a few minutes.

Lyndon Johnson was an epically subpar bag of shit, just like the majority of our presidents. I'm not saying 1900 was an intellectual utopia where racism and ignorance didn't exist, but rather that we were making progress, rather than regressing as we are now. Can you honestly tell me that cinema today is just as fresh and exciting as it was in the 60's? If you really think about it, everything goes through this cycle of boom and bust, including general intelligence. From my view, you are saying that intelligence in a population is static and will always be static, am I correct in this assumption?

I honestly don't know if xenophobia is on the decline, I have a hankering suspicion that it's on the uptick. Back then it was all out in the open so you could at least take a semi-accurate gauge of it, nowadays it's subtle and hidden.

The only reason blacks are treated with any respect in the media is because the white establishment shit their pants during the civil rights movement. Look at asian caricatures today, practically no presence in the media, and when they are there they serve only to make white people and black people look better. Even in GTA 5, Asians are depicted as weak and stupid.

 

[Phrozenflame500]

Fact, youth read less than they used to, and the shit they read is more useless than it used to be.

[citation needed] (although I wouldn't be surprised, books are entertainment, and now we have so much of that any single medium is no longer dominating)

It's impossible to know how many geniuses there are, but what is fact is that they are no longer appreciated as they were. Instead we elevate people like stephanie meyer to the level where I know her name, and that is discouraging.

Irrelevant. What people watch and are interested in is not scientific.

Watching TV does lead to laziness. I never said laziness = stupidity, but it does lead to stupidity.

[citation needed]

Laziness of thought, I should clarify.

So is this what you mean by intelligence? Because I'm pretty sure this is at best minimally related to IQ. Although if you could provide a test that would prove otherwise...

As soon as you settle into a single view of the world and stop asking questions about life and quit learning new things, you become a stupid backwards less than worthless dead weight on society.

Not entirely true, people like that are very useful for jobs that aren't politics or science related.

Also I'm pretty sure it's physically impossible to stop learning new things.

 

[SOCIALCONSTRUCT]

I'll give you that, however I take it you don't agree with the OP's point either that somehow the media consumed during a society's leisure time is somehow an indicator of their intelligence (especially since the "quality" of said media can be so subjective in the first place). That's more or less what I was trying to disagree with, and got carried away with that, lol.

Neither agreeing or disagreeing with the OP argument. If average intelligence were changing significantly I would have to imagine it would be reflected in our entertainment culture but I don't know how exactly or how to go about building a supporting argument to demonstrate it. For one, there have always been and likely will continue to be entertainment and art that will appeal to different audiences, high brow and low brow, etc (using low brow and high brow here as a shorthand here for intelligence which isn't the same thing, but you get my drift). For another, I haven't had cable for years, I just watch Netflix.

I will say very broadly that people have a bias towards novelty. They also tend to anachronistically weigh the morality of the past against whatever values are current. The technical aspects of film-making have advanced considerably and this can create the impression that we are making better movies. This is superficially true, I suppose it depends on your idea of "better". Perhaps since electronics get so much better so rapidly, we start to apply this thinking everywhere. There have been really great movies made over the last 10 years, but there have also been great films being made 50 years ago. I recently saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and it was as good as any recent movie.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Dont try and defend the reaction time thing too much. Its a pretty poor metric to use for trying to test the raw intelligence of an entire generation.

Especially as the first question to be asked would be 'time of what reactions?'. Even if the researchers had access to the RT results of all the aspects of 'processing speed' that modern IQ tests covered, those same aspects only represent a section of IQ tests... meaning there's an entire playground of potential confounds to throw at the researchers.

Not to mention that any researcher that tries to claim causation from a correlational study should be shot out of a cannon.

Intelligence is a very nebulous term.

It's a nebulous term because it represents a nebulous concept. Might as well be asking "What is 'up'?"

 

[EvilRoy]

[
Do you claim there is no difference in the quality of art?
You can study anything (and something that's bad and popular has a lot about it to study), but surely there's a difference in what a piece of entertainment can offer you?

Even if you don't think about it much, a good piece of art should teach you something, even if it's just making you see a new and different point of view.


And if you're blind and deaf you'd be better off reading a book.
That's about how you consume media; if you don't pay attention or can't appreciate something (because it's on a different language or you don't have enough knowledge on the subject or something.) it doesn't matter how good or insightful something is; you won't get much out of it.

Of course whether something can keep your attention is part of what makes something good. If something is confusing it might fail at storytelling. (Or you might not be the intended audience)

There's definitely a difference in what different entertainment can offer you, but I feel it tends to be in skill of presentation most of the time. Take Inception for instance. Really good movie, very well made, plenty of depth to go around, and at the end of the movie many people took some time to really ponder the nature of what is real and how you experience it. So all positives here. But if you never go any farther than sitting and thinking on the nature of reality for a while, what has Inception offered you that The Matrix or Overdrawn at the Memory Bank couldn't have? And that's the thing, I really feel Inception has way more to offer than either of those movies, but you'll never get to see most of what Inception has to offer if you only watch it casually a few times.

That's kind of what I was trying to get at with regards to my statements on needing to study entertainment to consider it an intellectual pursuit. I couldn't find it, but I had come across an image as part of an essay (or maybe a comic) discussing literature studied in highschool in the states that explained this really well. The idea is that if you take a book by Dickens and a book by King and put them side by side, there is going to be mountains more depth in Dickens than King (their words not mine). But the problem is over the course of the maybe two or three weeks - something like 15 hours of study - you would get to read and discuss the books, you likely wouldn't hear all King had to say in his novel, and you wouldn't even come close to everything Dickens was offering.

In this way King and Dickens are functionally the same in terms of depth to the casual reader. You might get the impression there is a ways deeper to go in the case of Dickens, but if you never get to the bottom of either then it doesn't matter if Kings pool is 5m deep and Dickens is 500, because you'll never know. They both have unique themes and ideas which are presented with different levels of elegance and technical skill which form very different experiences for the reader, but in terms of - I don't know, call it 'intellectual value' - they're essentially equivalent unless you're willing to put in the effort to plumb the full depths of each.