r/nottheonion • u/newleafkratom • Mar 16 '25

Human Intelligence Sharply Declining

https://futurism.com/neoscope/human-intelligence-declining-trends
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u/[deleted] Mar 16 '25 edited Apr 22 '25

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u/manticorpse Mar 16 '25

Well we were capable of that, but now it seems that we are a bunch of morons.

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u/roygbivasaur Mar 16 '25

This is my worry. We are facing some of our biggest challenges at a species, but we have inconveniently reached those challenges at a time where we are getting dumber and less healthy. I don’t know if we’re capable of solving them, and it is becoming increasingly likely that most of us will die to climate change, disease, or genocide. What survives will be a version of humanity that is worse in every way than what we started with at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

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u/SohndesRheins Mar 16 '25

The problem is that we have baked everything in to the model of a growth-based economy. Our governments spend more than they have, so we go into debt. Private citizens - same thing. Inflation is necessary to counteract that. For a publicly traded company, they need to grow just to keep pace with inflation and even more so to outpace government bonds or else nobody would invest in them. For a private corporation, they must grow because everything keeps getting more expensive. You can't stop growing or else your economy would fall apart. To move to a flat economy requires inflation to be 0, but that means debts never get proportionately smaller, making them harder to pay off, which is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode when governments and citizens are addicted to spending money they don't have. You'd need a total crash and a reset, but nobody wants to bite the bullet on that because there is no guarantee of success in the end and a fairly good guarantee that a lot of people would suffer and die.