Over the last 100 years, our technology and sciences has boomed, making outstanding improvements in so many areas. We have made a network of communication that is worldwide and is practically instantaneous for making contact with others. We have robotic manufacturing that can produce millions of a single product in a single day, we have computers that can generate songs within hours without recording anything, and we can make programs that calculate and predict things like the weather and future outcomes.
However, one has to ask: Why does it seem as though we are getting more stupid? With music, if you took an artist from 100-200 years ago, and brought them to our time, most probably they would make every single Number 1 artist out there look like an idiot.In science, most of the calculations that scientists claim to make are done by computers, all we do is have an idea and put in the necessary values. In Art, so many people claim to be “Artistic Genius” but really, the splash a bit of paint on a white canvas and call it “abstract”. Average IQ scores are decreasing worldwide, and school systems are having to keep lowering the standard for passing at educational facilities. So this leads me to ask, are we getting dumber?
I had a theory about why the world seems to be like this. We have more people!
Stupid people have access to a network that allows them to spread their stupidity. Think about it. only about 20-10% of the population have the necessary mind to be able to advance in things like Science,Maths. Biology, Physical Science,Music, Art, etc. that means 80-90% of the world agree on the same things and have the same basic understanding. That would mean that people in that percentile, who get off the ground, would be boosted to the top of that food chain quickly, thanks to the world wide web, social media, and the limited thinking that popularity makes you a better human being.
My point is, the majority of this world is not as smart as the people who advance it, which means a lot of stupidity the people express will be taken for granted as the normal way to go about the day. And so, that thinking is fortified when people use the web to become popular, and spread it.
What do you think?
Friends of Yelshir 
A lot of things make up intelligence, and not all of them are to be found or quantified in IQ tests. One of the beauties of our species is that the way our society and culture is structured, not everyone has to excel at everything. We specialize. We’re able to find the one thing that we do well and focus all our attention on that one small thing, yet still have it fit into the larger sweep of our culture.
How much skill does it take to break a rock? Not a whole lot, as it turns out. Chimpanzees have learned that art from their human keepers. In the wild, Chimpanzees have little use for rock breaking, yet in captivity, when interacting with humans in environments where rocks are to be found and other rocky surfaces are available, they learn to do it. Does it take a lot of smarts to strike a rock against another rock or a similarly hard surface to break it? No, but look at a cut diamond on a ring and realize that it’s what happens when you learn to break rocks and take it to it’s logical conclusion.
My own art is the relatively modest art of knitting. Is it complicated? In essence, no. It’s just taking a length of something pliable, making loops of it on a stick and manipulating it so that you pull a loop of the material through an existing lop so that it can’t close on itself and repeating the process in a consistent matter. As a study in fractal dimensions, it becomes a matter of determining the Hausdorf-Besicovich fractional dimension of a one dimensional object twisting on itself to form a stable two dimensional object, or in some cases, even a three dimensional object. From a different perspective, it’s a study in the topology of one dimensional objects.
Now, does Grandma knitting a pair of socks know a lot about fractional dimensions or deterministic chaos? No, but she’s performing an exercise in it just the same. How do I, a person with a relatively high IQ know about the fractional dimensions of a knitted object? That’s where it gets a little complicated. I spent twenty years studying the mathematics behind fractal geometry, something that’s certainly a highly abstruse avocation, and at other times, I paid attention to some ladies of very limited mental accomplishments who nevertheless had learned this rather modest skill and put the two of them together, not because I’m all that smart myself, but because I had the imagination and flexibility of mind to think about one while doing the other.
Douglas Hofstadter, who happens to be both a gifted author and an expert in the field of artificial intelligence, calls this phenomenon “slippage”, and he considers it to be critical to all intelligence. It’s the ability to take something from one area of science and see the connection to a completely different area of endeavor. Will it help the world if someone knows the Hausdorf-Besicovich fractional dimension of a knitter sweater? Most likely not, but that same awareness can be applied to fractal folding in colonies of M. Tuberculosis grown on solid media in a microbiology laboratory which can then be used to determine their oxygen needs and the mechanisms by which their growth patterns optimize the ability of that colony to exchange gases with it’s environment. August Kekule was a gifted chemist long before, in his frustration at working out the reactivity of the benzene molecule, he had a dream about monkeys holding onto one another by their tails in a circle, that led him to finally determine the structure of benzene. It’s “slippage” and I don’t know if you have to be smart to have a mind that does that kind of slipping, or if it’s a different kind of property that we still don’t know a lot about.
All kinds of skills and qualities make up human culture, and intelligence is only one of them.
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