The hubris of youth – Tim Pool’s Show

Well, fundamentally, you’re not wrong. It’s completely ignorant take to suggest we’re somehow smarter than men of a hundred years ago just because of the Internet – It might be one of the biggest depository’s of information ever conceived, but lots of insane misinformation gets uploaded too and that spreads faster because it’s easier to comprehend.

Though I think it’s also wrong to suggest the Internet is somehow responsible for overall cognitive decline – Average Western IQ peaked in the late 1800’s and has been on the decline ever since. If trends continue, than within the next one hundred years the average IQ will fall to match Latin America, the Middle-East or North Africa.

Welcome to societal collapse.

(Sources if you’re interested):

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7616-entering-a-dark-age-of-innovation/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289613000470?via%3Dihub

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by FallenOmegaStar.

I think it depends on whether we conflate ‘hyper-aware’ with ‘hyper-knowledgeable’.

In a sense, these two or so generations have immediate access to more information than any generations before them. They are bombarded with more negativity at once, they are simultaneously aware of more issues and more points of view at once, they are exposed to many more conflicting views at once before they shut themselves off in comforts of echo chambers and they’re more encouraged to point out the problems and mistakes of previous generations.

This doesn’t neccessarily translate to wisdom or knowledge, but I believe it does shape up how they respond to certain things, and it does show the generations before the internet really took off as potentially being ‘ignorant’ of the magnitude of problems and amount of them both worldwide and in any given country; thing is whether this lack of focus and amount of concerns is actually translating to making things better over time, which in my opinion often isn’t the case.