Comment by DeathArrow
3 hours ago
My theory is that people's skills are getting worse. Attention spans are diminishing, memory is shrinking. People age and retire, new less skilled generations are replacing them. There are studies about declining IQ in the last decades. Probably mobile phones and social media are to blame.
We see the signs with Amazon and Cloudflare going down, Windows Update breaking stuff. But the worse is yet to come, and I am thinking about airport traffic control, nuclear power plants, surgeons...
> There are studies about declining IQ in the last decades. Probably mobile phones and social media are to blame.
It is much more nuanced than that.
The long-term rise (Flynn Effect) of IQs in the 20th century is widely believed to be driven by environmental factors more than genetics.
Plateau / decline is context-dependent: The reversal or slowdown isn’t universal, like you suggest. It seems more pronounced in certain countries or cohorts.
Cognitive abilities are diversifying: As people specialize more (education, careers, lifestyles), the structure of intelligence (how different cognitive skills relate) might be changing.