So... Alright - Are we Getting Dumber?

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

This week Geoff uses an experience at the theme park to discuss the question ""are we getting dumber?"" The answer might confuse you. Sponsored by Katos Coffee http://katoskoffee.com Code SOALRIGHT , Shady Rays http://shadyrays.com Code ALRIGHT , Caldera + Lab http://calderalab.com Code ALRIGHT Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, I feel like I should preface this episode by saying I was in a really, really good mood last Sunday. Nothing was bothering me, nothing was annoying me. It was a perfect Sunday, it was a perfect weekend. My fiancé and I went down to this place about 90 minutes south of Austin in a little town called New Braunfels called Schlitterbahn. It's a little German town. That's why the name Schlitterbahn. And it is or was the largest outdoor water park in America, maybe the world for a while there. I'm not sure. Records are made to be broken and they tend to be. But I know that they've held a few throughout the course of their history. I know, for instance, I believe once at one point in time, they had the only uphill water ride or water slide that has like jets that shoot you up.

And boy, do they, too. I wrote it's called the Master Blaster. And what they don't tell you is that Master Blast's about six liters of water straight up your asshole. It is, uh, whew, it's quite a ride, let me tell you. I enjoyed the hell out of it. But I'll say this. If you're looking to get an enema on the cheap, ride the Master Blaster. Anyway, so I go there with my with my fiancee and some of her friends from work and it found out it was the last day of the year i didn't even intend to go on the last day of the year it just turned out that it was which is kind of a kind of a lovely thing it's

like celebrating the end of summer even though the high in austin today is 99 and it's going to be at least in the 90s uh from here until i guess the sun explodes i don't know i i don't think it's going to be at least in the 90s from here until I guess the sun explodes. I don't know. I don't think it's ever going to dip. So it doesn't feel like summer's over in Texas at all. And I'm sure Schlitterbahn could probably get away with being open for at least another two or three weeks. I imagine it probably has less to do with their ability to pull people in and more to do with the fact that most of their employees are probably high school and college students and they have to get back to class. And so when summer's over, they probably lose a significant portion of their worker pool.

But then again, I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. So maybe not. Although I do imagine there's probably a lot of maintenance. Like I remember when Emily and I went up to Mackinac Island in northern Michigan where where I proposed to her by the port-a-potty and the lovely view of the rock and everything there. It was I think the last weekend they were open as well, and they were shutting that place down for the winter because, you know, they get we're going to get two weeks of cold weather and maybe one freeze, maybe two freezes if we're super unlucky. They're going to get like a mountain of snow. The river is going to freeze around them. You can actually you can actually snowmobile from the mainland to Mackinac Island. They have like they set up a little area where it's frozen enough every year and they like line it with

Christmas trees. So you know how to go. And then a lot of people will snowmobile back and forth. Also, deer migrate back and forth that way. I found out. Anyway, because it was the last weekend and we were taking tours and stuff, people were they were explaining to us, you know, I had lots of questions for people that live there and work there about what that means. And apparently when the tourist season ends and Mackinac Island closes down pretty much from that day until they open back up again, they are just busting their ass fixing stuff, fixing everything that broke throughout the year that they weren't able to get to, doing all the maintenance they need to do on all of the things around the island, repainting, re-rooving, you know, fixing plumbing issues, winterizing,

getting everything ready. And I guess from the people I talked to and just from the conversations I heard, there's always more work to do over the winter than can be done by the time it's time to open up for a new season. Right. And so I assume at Schlitterbahn, it's probably a similar thing. They probably have to go and clean and scrub and bleach and wash everything, which I imagine takes forever, and then do a lot of maintenance. They probably have to get professionals in to come and stress test all the metal and the jointing and all of that to make sure that the place is safe. And then if they want to do any upgrades or add any new attractions and what have you, I assume that this is probably the time they do it. So we're all done with Schlitterbahn until, I don't know, spring,

but they're probably very, very busy as of the day after they closed getting ready for the next year. That doesn't have anything to do with anything, though. I was in a great mood because we were having a great day. And you know how sometimes you have those days where

you just wake up on the wrong side of the bed or something irks you early on, and then you're just in kind of a frumpy mood the rest of the day. So everybody you interact with that's not in your immediate circle of trust and love is an idiot. And you just see you can only see the dumb in people around you and everybody agitates you and gets on your nerves. Maybe it's just me, but I bet more than I bet most people have days like that where it's just like something got under your skin early on. And then for the rest of the day, you just felt prickly towards everybody else. And you could only see the stupid in front of you. Right. I bring that up to say once again, to reinforce that this is not what was going on that Sunday. I was in a great mood, but throughout the course of the day, and I was amused for most of it, I just couldn't help but notice how fucking dumb everybody around me was. I'm like in every capacity, people trying to

navigate finding and using a bathroom, people trying to figure out how to order a hot dog. By the way, I will order a hot dog. If I see a hot dog, I order a hot dog. My expectations of hot dogs in the wild are never very great. You understand what you're getting into when you get a hot dog. There are great hot dogs and there are great places for hot dogs. But typically, if you go to a water park or a theme park or what have you, and you get a hot dog, it's not going to be it's not going to be like an S tier hot dog, right? It's it's probably going to be a middling hot dog at best. The hot dog I had Sunday was fantastic, like kudos to the Schlitterbaum cook and crew because they made a

really, really good all beef hot dog. And they had they had good sides and stuff, too. I was able to build a pretty fucking solid hot dog. But in the process of buying that hot dog and a soda, I had to watch people navigate buying shit like hot dogs or elephant ears or funnel cakes or something as simple as a soda. And you just watch people make a simple transaction and you think, like, how can it be this hard for them? How can this process be this confusing in 2023? How rare is it that a person buys a hamburger and a soda from somebody across from them at a counter? Like, I feel like most of us have figured that part of it out by now.

So it's shocking when you see it in public and you go like, wow, they're really struggling with this, you know? And you think that's weird. And then the next person in front of you struggles and then the next person and then you then one person does OK. But then you watch them not be able to figure out how to get the soda they want and have to ask for help, which is really bizarre when it's just like, you know, push in for ice. There's the four sodas. Which one did you you wanted? You wanted Dr. Pepper. All right, just push in there. Yeah, until it's done. Okay, you got it. You're just watching people just really just be befuddled by the simplest stuff. And it's just, it's, and it continued throughout the day. I just watched, I just, I saw, it felt like everybody at Schlitterbahn was in a state of confusion. I was having a blast and I wasn't letting it get to me and I wasn't annoyed and I wasn't prickly in any way. I feel like I have to hammer that point home because I don't want to come across as overly negative. This is pure observation.

Then we drove the 90 miles or so home and I did start to get a little annoyed because everybody on the road was an idiot. They really were. I just see people cutting each other off, going slow in the fast lane, going fast in the slow lane, passing way too fast on the right. No turn signals existed on I-35 that day. Just people on their phones, swimming in and out of lanes, not paying attention. Just a plethora of nonsense. And so by the time I got home, I remember we were almost home and I looked at Emily

as I was driving and I said, is it just me or is is everybody fucking stupid today? And she kind of laughed and said, maybe that's your next podcast. So I looked it up. Are people getting dumber? The answer is depressing. So to determine if people are getting dumber or smarter or staying relatively the same, we need to look at the average IQ score. And then after we get through that, we're going to talk about what the fucking IQ score actually is. Forget the pressure to be crushing your workout on day one. Just start moving with the Peloton Bike, Bike Plus, Tread, Row, Guide, or App. There are thousands of classes and over 50 Peloton instructors ready to support you from the beginning. Remember, doing something is everything. Rent the Peloton Bike or Bike Plus today at onepeloton.ca slash bike slash rentals.

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Best Western made booking our family beach vacation a breeze. And it felt a little like... and it felt a little like... Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western so if at some point I assume it's in most countries

but at some point in America no I know it's in most countries because it was invented I believe in France and we'll talk a little bit about that in the history

but regardless most places around the world when you're a kid at some point in your life you have to take an IQ learn. And also, it's a score that you can lord over your friends if yours is higher and make fun of them for being dumb. The crazy thing is, is since they developed the IQ, which was, I think, since they developed the IQ, man, I sound like I'm not smart enough to take an IQ test. Since they developed the IQ test way back in 1904, a guy named Alfred Binet created the first IQ test. He did this because the French government asked him to help decide which students were

most likely to experience difficulty in schools. Like I said, they were trying to help understand the learning abilities of children to kind of help steer them in the best direction for their education. So essentially, the first version of the IQ test was created in the early 1900s, 1904. And then they continued to evolve it. It eventually was picked up by the United States military. And then they got involved because they were trying to assess the intelligence of prospective soldiers. I think so if they knew whether they should just be grunts like I was, or officers and gentlemen like the people that weren't me. And in the process of this, something called the Flynn effect was discovered. Flynn effect was discovered. The Flynn effect is the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the

world over the 20th century. It is essentially an effect that shows that IQ scores have been rising essentially since they started performing IQ tests at a pretty even and straight line. I think it's a few points per decade. Every decade we get better. I don't want to say smarter, but we get better at taking IQ tests, right? And like I said, that has been a constant thing, basically through the entirety of IQ testing until recently. If you Google, are we getting dumber? There are a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of articles in a lot of scientific magazines and some not so scientific magazines that point to the fact that we are in the middle of what's called a reverse Flynn effect. The opposite is happening. As an example, American IQ points over the last century,

over the 1900s, they rose about 30 points. And I think that's largely true for other countries as well, not just the United States. This is a pretty standardized thing across the world. So according to researchers from Northwestern University and I think the University of Oregon, they surveyed about 400,000 Americans between 2006 and 2018 and examined their cognitive ability and discovered a drop,

a pretty general drop. It wasn't uniform, but it was pretty general. And they discovered signs of decline. And it's not just that study. There are studies all over the world. There's been studies in Europe as well that have determined that these trends are similar in France, Finland, and all German-speaking countries. Which is crazy because basically the Flynn effect went up and then it didn't really plateau even. It went up to a point.

We hit that point. And then it just started really plateau even it went up to a point we hit that point and then it just started to kind of go the other direction and that's what they're calling the reverse Flynn effect and the fear is that all of the intelligence gains from the 20th century are going to be wiped out in the 21st century which is really depressing I think one place, one difference I noticed is that there was a study between 1962 and 1991 of 750,000 Norwegian men, and their Flynn effect continued until about 1975. And then their IQ started to decline steeply from 1975 on and have continued to. They're losing about seven IQ points a generation right now. I'm not sure what we're losing in America, but I think it's pretty similar.

So what does that mean? Does it mean we're getting dumber? And by the way, what is an average IQ score? I can tell you. The average, it was a rhetorical question because I know the answer. The average IQ score is between 85 and 115. And then with scores above that

indicating higher intelligence and scores below that indicating higher intelligence and scores below that indicating below average intelligence respectively the standard deviation of an iq score is set at 15 which means that around 68 percent of the people will have an iq score between 85 and 115 and dropping so does that mean we're dumber? Does that mean that every person that I saw having trouble navigating, ordering a hamburger and a soda or following the rules of the road, are they dumber?

Because starting in 1932, when they started to measure this stuff, we were kidding. Our IQ tests were going through the roof. So what's to blame? There's a lot of people out there trying to figure it out. And

for instance, they've been looking at dysgenic fertility, which is a phrase I'd never heard before. But it essentially says that less intelligent people tend to have more children than intelligent people and thus will bring down the average. But according to a 2018 study in Norway, IQ scores were dropping within families, not

just throughout society. So throw that out the window. It also shows there's also there's also studies and data showing that children and grandchildren of high IQ Americans are seeing their scores regress as well toward the national mean. There's another there's other theories that like the explosion of low skilled jobs facilitated, I guess, a lessening of cognitive of a need for cognitive ability, which sounds ridiculous to me because some of the best jobs I've had in my life were low skilled jobs. And I loved them because they allowed me the freedom to fuck around in my head while I was doing some sort of a menial task that didn't require my full attention. I actually thought that those kinds of jobs encouraged me to think because I was daydreaming and I was planning and I was scheming and I was just using my brain to think about stuff because it wasn't actively engaged in making fried chicken at

Sidney's Fried Chicken where I worked. Or fixing a Bosch hammer drill because I knew how to do that with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back. A lot of people point to, you know, quality of education dipping, which I'd have difficulty defending, especially considering younger Americans' IQs are following more dramatically than older American IQs. There's also a big concern that we have made food less nutritious, and therefore we're starving our brains. But another big one here that all kind of lines up is screens, it's cell phones, that all kind of lines up is screens, it's cell phones, it's laptops, it's Netflix, it's the fact that our eyes are glued to a screen 24 hours a day, and that is changing something in our brains. It's also reducing our need or desire to memorize things. Why would you memorize any fact when you know you have the entirety of the history of Earth on your phone?

You can prove anybody right or wrong at a bar with a few quick Google searches. And so why would you ever need to maintain, in 2023, why would you need to maintain and memorize and hold on to information when you're already holding on to it, it's just in your pocket? As an example, Ruth Karpinski, who is a psychologist in California who makes a career out of studying IQ, says we're all getting super lazy in our cognition because it's getting super easy to do everything. We're using Waze and Google Maps to get where we need to go. We're losing our whole sense of compass. I know that's true. I have given up on my sense of compass. I also, I don't try to go anywhere in a direct route. I like to meander. But I definitely don't retain that kind of information in the way that I used to. But it's crazy to think that if you gave an early 1900s IQ test

to a person of average intelligence in 2000, they would rate in the top 5% of cognitive ability from the early 1900s. So IQ rose that much over the last 100 years. It's crazy to think now that it's going in the other direction. I think I mentioned earlier that the average IQ rose about 30 points in the 1900s. So think about that. The average IQ is, you know, 100 is a good average for an IQ. And then we know that gifted starts at like 130. So right there, that everybody who was average with a 30% increase is now technically gifted. So it's the difference between an average IQ and a gifted one or a below average IQ and an average one, right? Which is what makes the decline so much more confusing. They think a lot of it also could be a result of the decline of mental health amongst young people,

which I think could definitely have an outsized importance in this and is something of supreme concern. There are also a lot of scientists who believe that emphasis on STEM subjects in schools might, which I think is awesome, by the way, I'm not criticizing that, the emphasis in STEM, but it devalues purely abstract thinking, and I think a lot of IQ tests prize abstract thinking, so it might just be that we're not emphasizing the kind of learning that IQ tests measure anymore. There's that possibility. There's also the possibility that we're just getting worse at taking tests, that we've had more than 100 years of taking tests and testing

and ranking, and people are just getting fucking sick of it, and they're deprioritizing it, and they're caring about it less and less. I can only speak anecdotally, but I know when I was a kid in the early, early, early 90s, the SAT and the ACT is what we took. There was so much emphasis on passing those tests. And you're basically your entire future hinged on how well you did on an SAT or an ACT. It was how you, at least as it was explained to us, it was the measurement of how you got into college. And it was really the only important figure we were told. And I just don't think that's the case anymore. And I don't see the same fervor through even my daughter's high school around testing and SATs.

I mean, it's important and everybody takes the SAT and people are still having study groups and all of that stuff. But it seems like the importance on the SAT itself and the score itself has been diminished to a degree. Even going on college visits and talking to schools that my daughter might go to, even they tell us like, yeah, the SAT is, I mean, it still matters, but it's less important than it used to be. And we make more concessions for lower SAT scores than we used to, because that's not really measuring what we're looking at and what we want to get out of these kids or help them get out of themselves, right? And so I think that there's something to be said for just test

fatigue in general, or maybe the IQ tests aren't measuring the way we're learning anymore. But I think it's probably mostly phones, if I'm being honest with you. I'd love to know what you think. Do you think people are getting dumber? I was going to take this on a whole rabbit hole of SATs, and I studied a bunch of the history of SATs. But even after getting through this, I think it might be a little dry. And I don't know what the point of it is. The reality is, there was a Flynn effect that sent IQ tests from the early 1900s, I think when they first started measuring from around 1930 until the year 2000, IQs globally rose about 30 points.

And since 2000, they've been lowering three to five points per decade. And something's doing it. It's probably not one thing. It's probably a combination of things. But maybe have a little patience and a little grace. And the next time you're in the checkout line at the grocery store and the person looks like they've never used self-checkout in their life and they're so fucking confused by how to weigh bananas

that they have to ask somebody to come over and help them. And then after that, they can't figure out how to pay and the employee has to come back and help them again. And you're thinking thinking it's 2023. We've been doing it this way for, I don't know, a decade now. Like how is this your first time in the grocery store? Is it did you come out of the mountain? Did you like like Spider Jerusalem in Transmetropolitan? Did you come down the mountain after being locked away Ted Kaczynski style in a cabin for the last 15 years and just discover this technology?

Or are people just so distracted by what's going on in their lives that they're not paying attention from day to day? I don't know. But the next time that person is in front of you at the grocery store, cut them some slack. They may not be an asshole. They may not be trying to waste your time. They might just be a little dumber than they used to be. And chances are, you are too. I know I am. All right.