Man, this is some boomer ass question. People have been saying every is getting dumber for millennia, and it’s never really been true

broadly gestures at everything

It's a false premise. What happened is that the internet allowed all the village idiots, who were previously contained and ridiculed in their own villages, to connect with each other and become more confident in their idiocy. The internet is a support group for morons.

Rightward politics correlates with low intelligence.

Making a lemmy post to ask an open ended opinion question and then getting hostile with people in the comments over their answers.

A person is smart. People are dumb.

Isolate a person and he or she is smart in atleast some area. Get a group together and they start feeding off of each other's dumbness, compounding it.

With the introduction of the Internet, people are now able to feed off each other's dumbness at astounding rates. Algorithms herd them together to accelerate the trend. You and I are not immune to this, though understanding and acknowledging it helps.

I wonder if the first human parents or grandparents ever went "Why little Grug not smart like us? Why Grug put nut and seed into hole in ground and not eat like us? Tribe is doomed!"

I don’t agree with this statement. I think “intelligence”, however you define that, has fit pretty cleanly to a Gaussian distribution since the dawn of man. If anything, I think advances in nutrition, preventative healthcare, and access to information has driven pretty significant negative skew. I don’t have anything to back up this claim, but my guess would be that median intelligence has actually increased - it just may not seem as such since the population continues to rise, so the raw number of dummies seems overwhelming.

But hey, who I am to define what’s smart? Maybe an inflatable hot tub, 30 rack of Busch, RAM 1500 on an 84 month note, zero turn mower, DirecTV with Fox News and the funds to pay for it all is the real secret to a happy life. I’m just someone blabbing about nothing with a bunch of Reddit exiles.

“Society” has never been intelligent in my opinion.

Some groups of human being can have collective intelligence, but usually it is time limited ⌚ and the merchands💵 do not like that. => 🚽

People saying mortified when they mean horrified.

It's not. Better worry about intelligent and malicious people

I doubt the actual intelligence our brains are capable of has ever declined, but what does worry me is everyone's complete reliance on various technological luxuries that the average person would not be capable of surviving without if it ever came to that.

There are none. People always think the next generation is lazy, weak, umotivated, immoral, and dumb. You're just jaded and not original.

Npc streams on tik tok

Reddits remaining moderators. :)