Human Intelligence Sharply Declining

Technology, specifically short form social media content, has got to be the biggest driver here.

Heavy metal exposure

Sugar

The proliferation of food additives being used that are known to dramatically lower IQ

The gelding of our education system by morons who favor religious dogma over scientific fact

Criminally underfunded schools thanks to political leaders who see investing in future generations as budget waste

Failure to teach children critical thinking skills before exposing them to technology that makes it simpler for them

Being constantly bombarded and overstimulated every waking moment by media

Being chronically overworked and underrested

Climate change

Take your pick. The answer is "probably, yes."

Heavy metal exposure
🤘😠🤘
Everything you said makes sense...except heavy metal exposure. Unless you mean lead or something...
- I know the phrase is ambiguous but from context they clearly meant actual metal.
- And mercury. And other heavy metals. They’re not just neurotoxic but biocumulative so even small exposures over a long time can add up to a lifetime of problems

idiocracy intro?

(IE the theory it pushed was in short, smart people do family planning, try to wait for everything to be perfect... and forget to get around to having kids).

Meanwhile on the less intelligent spectrum. Shit I'm pregnant again!!!... Oh and I got the girl in the trailer next door pregnant.

Or for a real world example... look at Lauren Boebert, the 35 year old grandmother in congress.

Yes absolutely (and i was afraid to say it out loud).
But now, we have also to explain why it did not so much apply in the past millennias ... or tens of past millenias. (again, i am afraid to say it ... don't want a shitstorm)
- if you got married before 2000 and had a decent job. especially if both did. having kids seemed like a thing to do. past 2000 anyone smart had to contend that the world of their kids adulthood did not seem like it would be great.
  
  Yes, i agree, and many other lemmy users said similar things about : "why it does apply recently" ...
  Yet, it's more interesting to look at why in the past centuries or millennias there was quite a strong selection pressure favoring intelligence.
  During those past times, life for humans was much more competitive, so that any major deficiencies, including in intelligence, physical strength, mental strength or whatever important survival characteristics, meant death.
  Similarly, in any living species, would it be plants, animal or other, if you remove survival pressures, you rapidly, in just a few generations, diverge into completely different life forms.
  Since selection pressures have drastically decreased in many rich countries, for maybe 50 to 100 years now, their populations are on this unsustainable path (in my educated opinion).
  Comments from other users were close to what i am saying here, but never so bluntly.
  P.S. : @otp@sh.itjust.works this comment is of the type for which i would expect to be, as you said : "regularly get called out on".
  
  Some selection pressure seems to be returning. anti mask (during a pandemic), anti vax, homeopathy. some folks seem to want to or have their kids die early.
  
  Such a nightmare... i suppose we can describe this as :
  (hypothesis #1) : Stupidity increasing up to a breaking point where it's no longer sustainable and kids start to die again.
  (h #2) : this increase in stupidity is not necessarily genetic ... it can be from other (social ...) causes.
  (h #3) : selection pressure can also act on social behaviors.
  Disclaimer : i'm not working in this field : this has no scientific value.
  
  Measles outbreaks are coming back, lol
  
  "lol" ... ok, laughing to avoid crying.
  
  Well, I'm not seeing anyone calling you out yet. But maybe you made it sound more racist before, or something? Lol
  
  Up to this point, i have read most comments inside this post and race or racism was nowhere mention. Yet there have been studies to measure its influence on intelligence ... humm ... is that a topic that you wish to develop here ? Why ? Do you believe it is useful ? Or do you agree with me that it is a waste of our time ?
  
  Lol ok, yeah, that's probably what it was.
  You might want to look into some studies done on those studies -- there are IQ tests that historically (and sometimes presently) had culturally-ingrained aspects to their questions that made it hard for minorities and newcomers to answer properly. E.g., IQ tests with questions about baseball that assume the test-taker knows how many innings are in a game, how many outs/balls/strikes to get a player out, etc.
  Wikipedia seems to have a lot to say on it, including some of the criticisms.
  But generally speaking you're probably looking at what's mostly a correlation, not a direct causation.
  
  Bad questions, so, useless IQ tests ... all this quite a bit sad, yes.
- The massive lowering of the bar of "good enough to stay alive". Life expectancy was consistantly in the 30s up until the 1870s. Simply having kids was life threatening... doing so while malnourished even more so.
  Natural selection favors traits that increase the odds of having offspring, as well as those that avoid death before having offspring. Avoiding death is a lot easier than it used to be.
  
  For what it's worth the average life expectancy was 30-something. That didn't mean that everyone, or even the mostly everyone, just dropped dead at 30.
  It did, however, involve an awful lot of people dying in childhood. Often due to diseases that these days we've almost stamped out, but now antivax morons are working hard on bringing back!
  
  Yeah, I at least assumed that was understood with just "expectancy", obviously people live longer than expectations, and some die unexpectedly young. Key point is if you were given a mission where you must become a baby, and carry on life until you have 6 kids reach the age of 18. But you could chose what time to be born in (but not pick location, class or race), the lowest difficulty mode of that game would almost certainly be after 1950s... and prior to the 1800s would be viewed as very hard mode.
  
  Yes. Thanks for stating these hard facts.
- Part of the answer is that mortality rates were far higher 150 years ago. A couple might have 5 children but only 2 survive to adulthood.
  
  Because i agree with this, i encourage you to push this idea further to its conclusion.
- If you have an idea that you regularly get called out on, you should probably say it and be willing to truly listen to what people are saying about it...lol
  
  i did it often enough. Now someone else did it for me and I'm very happy they did.
  P.S. : Often it's not my ideas but the harsh direct way i express them 😆

Don't forget lead.

Lead was a much bigger problem in the 1970 when it was in road vehicles fuels. But now its only use in some small plane fuels. There is also much less use of lead paint and lead in water pipe systems.
N.B. : Study in that article is about decline from 2010 until today in 15-year-olds.
- I remember still having to ask for unleaded gas, and that was in the '90s. Plenty of houses still have lead paint and lead pipes. Sure it was more of a problem in the 70s, but it didn't go away after that.
  
  Every building before like 1978 has lead paint, but people forget that so does the land around them. I live in an area with older homes and we’re frequently warned not to grow vegetables within 10' of the house because the soil is too likely lead contaminated from peeling or stripping exterior paint over the years
  
  It's definitely worth having your soil tested before growing anything you plan to ingest in an urban environment.
  
  Lead paint is encapsulated and not going to enter your body. Which houses have lead pipes? Even the houses I've lived in over 100 years old have all had complete copper plumbing.
  
  https://www.nrdc.org/resources/lead-pipes-are-widespread-and-used-every-state
  
  Lead paint is not going to enter my body, but that’s because I very rarely put unknown things in my mouth. Toddlers operate differently
  
  If you’re in a contaminated area, you’re contaminated. Hopefully not enough to make a difference if you don’t eat paint chips.
  But smaller chips are part of the dust that gets everywhere.
  Chips and stripped paint is part of the soil that may be pulled up into any vegetables grown in that soil.
  heavy metals bioaccumulate so even small exposures over enough time can add up to a problem
  it’s not just lead, mercury is notorious for bioaccumulating up the food chains for many seafoods
  
  Most schools do. And Trump just axed the program trying to replace them all.
- Meanwhile, it's presently in many other sources like chocolate and spices. It's part of the soup, it's not doing us any favors, but it's far from the sole causative factor.
  
  So for quick context the reason why it's present in foods specifically plants is because the plants naturally leach it up.
  
  So the quality of soil is most important...

All this and more!

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It's social media and political manipulation.

Why not the aggregate of all of these?

Why are you putting a space after your punctuation?

i agree that some aggregate of all of these, and to various degrees, and differently for different people, would apply. Also, i did not say more so to let the discussion open.
- For future reference, you can add a \ at the end of your sentence.
  So you can accomplish this.
  \ And then this.
  \ But don’t put one on the last listed sentence, or it will look like this.\
  
  Good tricks 😁
  (Yet on my keyboard, "space" and "LineFeed" are way quicker to type.)
  
  Not quite sure what that means. I’m on iOS, but whatever works!
- I meant between your last letter and the punctuation marks. Not the spacing of the lines. Use an asterisk for lists if that's your goal?
  like so.
  
  ok. You mean i type : "goal ?"
  instead of "goal?"
  ... well this is because i have poor eyesight ... and i want to see the "?" clearly.

Short form content like those found on reddit and here on Lemmy have retrained my brain, I'm sure of it. I'm actively trying to fight it, by forcing myself to read full articles, scroll more slowly and try to engage more fully rather than just endlessly scrolling for the next dopamine hit.

It's easy to justify this behavior because "I'm just getting my news and staying informed" and while partially true it comes at the cost of the medium it's provided by. Screen "reading" has definitely changed our brains for the worse and most people have no clue its even happened.

So far I'm liking lemmy more because there is a lot less per post. I find I'm enjoying each thread more fully. It's like I'm not endless scrolling because I can't. I've actually read more articles in the day since I've joined than in my last 3 months on reddit.

In my personal observations less intelligent people tend to have more children.
Therefore population IQ drifts towards bottom.

I suspect that's because they do not fully understand all their future struggles and fates of their children in the world, fucked up by climate crisis and resource scarcity.

This is the plot to a fictional movie. Intelligence is a factor of many things, and most of those factors are not genetic.
Your observation seems close to the opinions of old school eugenicists. "The wrong people are having children".
- The problem with eugenics is proposed solutions, or criteria based of prejudice.
  I claim it’s both fine and correct to state that the wrong people have too many children. You’re the wrong people if you have more children than you can adequately care for, to raise sufficiently for them to have a successful life. You’re the wrong people if you have children you’re not prepared for or otherwise can’t commit to raising or don’t have the ability to raise.
  It’s wrong, eugenics, when
  it’s prejudicial such as based on race, culture, religion
  you’re judging another person’s worth, their rights on that worth, or their opportunities on their worth
  you take it to an extreme, such as only the wealthy should have children.
  you prescribe a solution that imposes your will on other people, or worse, legal or medical intervention
  
  \ Better answers include
  better education helps people make better choices
  better medical care helps people know their choice will succeed
  better safety nets help each child succeed even when their parents made a poor choice or had unexpected life events
  better childcare options help give the parents a chance to succeed with trying to earn a living while raising a child
- The intro to Idiocracy doesn't actually mention genetics.
  Smart people value intelligence and people who value intelligence will raise their children as such.
  Parents who don't value intelligence don't raise their kids with intelligence in mind.
  Public schools aren't actually about education. They're about job training and obedience, so they wont fill the gaps the parents are leaving.
- it is not genetic, it is environmental. Children of parents with less intelligence will not be raised to be intelligent. They might be lucky/resilience and try to get the most support outside the house, but it is much harder to accomplish, and often is even met with harassment at home, due to the rest of the family being insecure about their own lack of intelligence. And that is only if they rebel, which is not necessarily true as they will not only lack easy access to basic knowledge about the world/science, but will also not be introduced to the importance of learning about it from their closest figures of authority. Escaping that cycle it is even harder if the family is facing economic hardship, which is true for most modern families in general. It really isn’t that hard to figure that out, the kneejerk reaction that the statement always gets is annoying.
  
  the kneejerk reaction that the statement always gets is annoying.
  I agree with everything you said, but I'm going to point out something. If there is a common kneejerk reaction to some particular topic, there's probably a reason for that. You yourself said its annoying? I suppose its predictable then. If you can predict that people are going to react in some way, you can write with more explanation to clarify that you aren't actually supporting something like eugenics. The poster I'm responding to did not do this.
  I took this lack of explanation as support (which, on reflection, might be leaping to conclusions). The overall tone of the comment is rather judgemental.
  The commenter is also wrong; IQ hasn't been "drifting towards the bottom", the average IQ increases every year. Its why they have to constantly adjust the tests, because 100 is meant to be an average score by design. This is primarily why I chose to respond to him. He's not saying " which is why we should invest in family planning" or "we should invest in children's education", he's making an untrue statement, and then pretending that this will cause some sort of feedback loop. Dumb people making more dumb people.
  IQ is not some absolute quantitative metric of intelligence. The people who treat it like it is... I find that a lot of them are pushing some sort of angle or simply don't understand it.
  
  yes that makes sense, thank you for explaining.
- Intelligence is a factor of many things, and most of those factors are not genetic.
  You are very vague...
  
  Im not going to write some big long podt, just two things:
  people, on average, are not getting dumber. Anything you noticed observationally about dumb people having more children does not seem to have any effect on the world. Human nutrition has improved vastly over the past 100 years, as has education, etc.
  IQ increases every year. I don't think this is evidence people are getting smarter because I think IQ is a poor measure of intelligence. I'm pointing this out to you because your statement about "IQ drifting toward the bottom'" is factually untrue.
  
  IQ drifting toward the bottom'" is factually untrue
  So, this post is wrong?
  
  Sorry, I thought this was in another thread that was actually talking about IQ. I've clicked through too many articles.
  This article doesn't mention IQ at all, even though your response does. IQ isn't an absolute quantitative measure for intelligence even though many people conflate them - this is probably why the article doesn't mention it.
  I'd dig into the Financial Times article that this Neoscope article is about but it's pay-walled. The neoscope article makes some case for intelligence declining (I don't have time to read those citations right now), but I'd point out this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with less intelligent parents having children. It could be evidence that the material conditions for us ordinary citizens is declining as a whole (I think we would both agree on that point). Cost of living is up, people are working longer. Long COVID probably has something to do with it, and stress.
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism

All of these and more. Did you know our carbon emissions are changing the ratio of oxygen in the atmosphere as a whole? Guess which species is known to get dumber when oxygen deprived. Don't worry about the warming ocean's increasing acidity, it just makes the ocean a more difficult habitat for the phytoplankton that make 65%of the oxygen in the atmosphere.

I'm sure our normalcy bias will protect us or maybe the invisible space monkey will save his favorite primates if we can commit a few more hate crimes in his name.

That was already discussed in this post :
https://lemmy.world/post/26948801/15738537
::: spoiler copy pasted what i wrote : Present day atmosphere is about 400 or 450 PPM compare this to :
CO₂ poisoning (Hypercapnia) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercapnia
→ Physiological effects :
A high arterial partial pressure of carbon dioxide ( Pa CO₂ ) causes changes in brain activity that adversely affect both fine muscular control and reasoning. EEG changes denoting minor narcotic effects can be detected for expired gas end tidal partial pressure of carbon dioxide (...) increase from ((53,000 PPM)) to approximately (...) (66,000 PPM = 0.066 atm). The diver does not necessarily notice these effects. :::

dependency on AI can be another

The decline of American intelligence has been ongoing since before AI
Yes it is possible ... but this factor is difficult to measure, as it may go both ways, depending on motivation to learn new things and if that AI is a good teacher or ... is giving ready-made (and bad) answers without helping to go further.