News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Causes :
long covid ?
micro plastics ?
screen time ?
sedentarism ?
fast food ?
lack of sleep ?
other ?
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."
Everything you said makes sense...except heavy metal exposure. Unless you mean lead or something...
🤘😠🤘
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)
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.
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.
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
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...
It's social media and political manipulation.
All this and more!
Right after this message from our sponsors.
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.
Now, about text formatting in here :
.i wanted one line for each items
yet I didn't want it in 2 lines/items
see examples here :
line # 1(no spaces + one line feed) line # 2
line # 1(no spaces + 2 line feed)
line # 2
So, the only way to get the formatting i wanted is to have two spaces at the end of each lines followed by one line feed.
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?
ok. You mean i type : "goal ?"
instead of "goal?"
... well this is because i have poor eyesight ... and i want to see the "?" clearly.
also ...
9876... again I don't like it because there is an unused line just before the first bullet point which I don't like.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.