Thursday, May 23, 2013

We are getting dumber!

A Mind The Gap article.

Our resident cynical pessimist blogster found this cute Huffington Post article about how research suggests that humans are getting dumber while our technology is getting smarter.

Read the Huff Post article and then come back here.

Just a few weeks back, the K-landnews railed against the "Useless IQ", and we stick with it.

In that post, we said that society is by the average and for the average. The evolutionary concept encapsulated in this, on the surface, comedic statement is  that we believe that good old darwinism works on the human intelligence bell curve by chopping off some of the ends -- both ends.

Which leaves the average firmly in charge of the world.

Not being totally devoid of optimism, we think that we may slowly, very slowly, and possibly too slowly to avoid the new dark ages, move a bit towards the "higher", generally "better" end of the bell curve.

There is one aspect sorely missing in the Huff Post article: sheer numbers.

Even if we assume that the quoted research is not a bunch of baloney, the huge increase in the human population over the time period advanced by the boffins means that the absolute number of very intelligent people has become very big indeed.

Which is why we have readers for this blog. Pander, pander.

And even most of the oh so intelligent Victorian era smart people were still a bunch of racist, exploiting, socially retarded fellow humans.

There.



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