why are people so dumb? theories?

I don't how collective IQs fall, but we've all seen it in action on a large scale and small. Like if you're with your friends and you do something really stupid to impress your friends, which you'd never do if you were on your own? So I don't know why entire nations get collectively stupid at election time or in times of crisis, but we all start clucking over trivialities and ignoring the big issues.

You know how everyone says stuff like "So what if the oceans are dying, I'm all steamed up about [idiotic headline controversy that will be forgotten next week]!"?

That is my primary function.😜

That's why I call "smartphones" stupidphones. They don't make the users any smarter; the opposite is occurring as more and more people become overdependent on these ridiculous electronic gadgets. Some can't perform simple tasks without implementing some silly "phone app." They have to carry the stupid things everywhere.

They are dumbing themselves down and the sad part about it is they are doing this voluntarily.

Exactly... (I don't think they're 'eye candy' - but I also haven't looked - don't want my soul corrupted).

I'm about to post a nice thing I found.. Authors from the 1960s writing letters to each other (over "In Cold Blood) and about to read some Thomas Wolfe letters

Even when I played basketball, I always wanted to play those older and bigger than me. Same with intelligence -- keep reaching.

I also notice when I talk to my siblings, they say the word "like" so much that even I begin to say it.. I have to tell them to stop.

It's more than that. Reading a book or listening to a story actively engages the imagination. The child has to imagine the scenes in their mind. But television provides the images as well as the story so it is a passive medium. In a real sense it shuts down the imaginative part of the process.

You're welcome. Some users don't like the subject matter of my posts and I have received those types of responses. I'm not trying to be a troll... I'm just concerned about the direction our society is headed. And like you said, we don't seem to be moving forward. Our society is regressing.

ok, having read through your response and the other responses here, i understand where you're coming from now.

i guess i'd still say i kinda reject the premise, in that i'm not sure all those things you listed above can be applied to most or even many people, or at least more people than they did in the recent past. it feels more like cynicism and a sort of reflexive bias that things are always devolving and getting worse and worse and worse, even if they aren't. it's the same sort of bias that leads people to believe that people are poorer and the state of the world is getting worse for the poorest when the opposite is true. not to take us off on that tangent - it was just an analogy that popped into my head.

i'm simply not sure that people are by any measure less thoughtful or less critical. the ongoing increase in iq - the flynn effect - suggests that a lot of the influences of modern life, with more educated people, more connectivity with the world, better nutrition has resulted in increasingly intelligent populations.

i think it's all too easy to look at people arguing in twitter or staring at their phones and adopt a 'get off my lawn' contempt, and maybe that's right sometimes. but my retort would be what about all the great minds that are on twitter that we all have access to, what about all the incredible podcasts and endless data that we're all carrying around in our pockets that we can access at any moment.

my feeling is that in the years i've been alive, in most ways people have improved in real ways. there's more consideration of racial issues. i can absolutely tell you that the way people in my city used to talk about indigenous folks 30 years ago was brutal. they were barely viewed as human. that's changed a lot. and i think there are all kinds of ways that i could name where people are more thoughtful, more respectful, just better.

i think it's all too easy to sneer at stupidphones or whatever. condescension and contempt always seems like a smart position, because it seems to appeal to an innate human bias to thinking things are atrophying. but i'm not convinced at all that those positions reflect the world with any real accuracy, and i think the exact opposite is much more likely to be true.