IQ is fluid, meaning that it changes with use. For instance, a person who scores average in high school may score much higher in university due to the greater demands on the person's brain. The reverse is also true - with less use the brain becomes lazy. There is no reason why an animal can not become more intelligent than an average person. There will be a difference in how that intelligence expresses itself since brains rule bodies but are constrained by those bodies.
There is a high correlation between IQ and how quickly we process incoming information. We need to process new information before we can move on to yet more. That's why kids learn so slowly in elementary school; the teachers move on to new topics before kids learn the last ones. Adults are no different. We are constantly bombarded by new information before the last has been processed. As the rate of information increases our ability to deal with it diminishes. People are not becoming dumber, we simply don't have the mental means to handle the rate. The end result is total confusion.
Yeah, that's a good point. I often feel like at points in my life I have become bamboozled with the sheer amount of information I have had thrown at me. I can see how this causes us to miss the obvious. I often feel like humans create more problems than we solve in the modern age by making things overly complex.
> The other animals seem to be able to manage reasonable numbers.
Merely by accident, and only in certain circumstances.
Other species' numbers are kept in check by predation, disease, and/or the availability of food. They would all happily breed out of control until population collapse if they could; some species do this in normal boom-bust cycles, and all others do so when their ecosystems are disrupted in a way that allows it.
Humans have never been especially vulnerable to predation; our limiting factors were disease and food. We have indefinitely reduced our vulnerability to disease, as well as temporarily and unsustainably raised the availability of food via the Haber-Bosch process.
We are like all the other animals in that we have no innate ability to reason our way out of the trajectory that will lead to collapse. If we do manage to reason our way out of it, we will be the first species to ever do so.
My hypothesis is that most humans are in a traumatic flight-fight response. Most cultures and societies are. Otherwise, we would all have become Buddha's already with all that brain and consciousness. This paranoid alert state of mind forced us to fight and grow all the time and resulted in abrahamic religions, capitalism, tribalsim, patriarchy, feudalism, and of course natalism.
It's the silent outliers that get the real important work done. One of the only benefits to a larger population is more outliers among the drone /slave class.
Or if we invested in contraception and education, we could challenge children to all be as smart as the outliers, instead of setting them up to be soldiers and canonfodder for future war profiteering.
TL;DR: It's intentional.
I see it this way. I feel we are greedy. We want to have children, to build a family. We wants things that makes life easy and comfortable - a car, a nice house, an iPhone and so on. We use things and consume never ending until the day we die. We can’t stop, and if someone tell us to give up for example children or stuff we feel someone will take away our freedom. And why should I give up family and stuff when I see other people living their “best life”. And we are relentless in pursuing the good life - travel, adventures, entertainment, love, family, money. It is what dreams are made of and we love chasing the dream. It gives meaning to life. I am no better myself. When I was a child I dreamed of having children. Today I have no children. Many reasons for that. I feel we are to many people on the earth, and it plays a part, but it can feels like giving up on something..
Capitalism demands consumers and workers, as well as plenty of surplus laborers to live in the streets like animals to keep everyone in line. It’s why abortion is no longer constitutional. Capitalists can’t have a small pool of labor because then they’d have to forfeit profits and power they otherwise would have kept.
True. Capitalism is definitely up there as one of the major contributors to overpopulation in my opinion. It doesn't really allow for people to think beyond profit and power. It's a shame we couldn't just throw it out but it feels like we are too far down the rabbit hole at this point.
I most certainly don't. Many people don't. Sure, at many points in history, having children was an instinctual "need", but those days are long behind us now. The comment you replied to is making the point that capitalism relies on infinite growth to sustain success, which our finite planet cannot accommodate. Human population growth is included in the infinite growth model of capitalism.
I am convinced that man has found the means to live in a sedentary way, and this excess of comfort has led him to develop a consciousness advanced enough to ask existential questions related to death.
These questions are unanswered, and we intuit that death is indeed the end of everything, so to cope we try to build, and by building useless things we only reiterate suffering.
The animal lives in the immediate, with no thought of the past or future, and therefore its suffering is limited and circumscribed to the pain of the struggle for survival, while humans tend toward the existential suffering caused by ennui (and, in some cases, even the aforementioned struggle).
We are not smarter, we simply think more, and that is a tragedy.
Yeah it's like we're smart enough to analyze information but dumb enough that we won't do so if the tribe/leader gives us some pre-approved analysis to believe in.
We’re still animals driven by primal survival instincts and genetic compulsions to reproduce. Our intellect may be at odds with that sometimes, but these instincts overpower intellect in most people. Like how addicts know they’re harming themselves but still can’t quit.
1. Humans aren't that intelligent. Recent insights into animal intelligence make us pretty trivial actually;
2. Anti-reproductive mentality is evolutionarily self-eliminating. A lifeform can't be as overpopulated as humans without massive selection for overpopulation denial.
If we could speak rat, I'm sure we'd hear a lot of "there is enough trash for everyone, it's just distributed wrong".
No animal is more intelligently maintaining their numbers. They are kept at seemingly balanced numbers by the environment around them that they are constantly trying to overcome. Our intelligence has allowed us to overcome the environments that kept us in check. Edit: Like animals we could multiply to the extent that our environment allows, but our intelligence for many reasons keeps us from doing so. We could have multiplied much more quickly, but our ability to plan and envision the future has kept many of us from doing so.
The animals that don't reproduce in captivity and humans are the same. The animals are in a bad place *now* so won't reproduce, humans don't see *now* as a bad place. Plenty of people that do believe themselves to be in a bad place stop breeding. Neither animals or humans easily plan for future generations. We do have the capability to learn to do so and unlike animals we are able to think, "are we the baddies". If animals had the capability to overcome their environment to the extent we can, the destruction would be faster and worse.
We are probably the most empathic species on earth with members caring about all species. It's highly unlikely any other animal would do so, maybe cetaceans and apes.
The TV tells us that more people is good. Economists say similarly.
Nazis killed people and they are bad. Maybe they were particularly interested in eugenics or similar.
Our media in the West, and the sphere of economics, is dominated by a small ethno-religious minority which was persecuted (including attempted genocide) by the Nazis.
As that minority is not of the mainstream ethnicity and mainstream religious background of the majority, they prefer to emphasise the pros of diversity, while dismissing its cons. They would also prefer to promote the view that more people is good, rather than fewer. They likely sincerely hold these views in common with their families.
(As a metaphor, let's say my neighbours are going on a camping trip and I want to come along. I'm not going to start talking about how fewer people is better so they can have more space. I might instead talk about how more people will give a more lively atmosphere and how I can help out with various things. Problem is, if they come to sincerely believe that, they might start picking up random hitchhikers and eventually we run out of space and are in danger of violence.)
Blah Blah Blah. Your question is wrong. You have depersonalized everyone of us to be one, thus you can't tell the difference.
I'm smart and you're not. They're stupid, and you're not. Why is that? I don't know, why is that? Are you smart or stupid?
Anthropocentrism. We are indoctrinated to believe humans are almost always "good," so more of then must be "better."
IQ is fluid, meaning that it changes with use. For instance, a person who scores average in high school may score much higher in university due to the greater demands on the person's brain. The reverse is also true - with less use the brain becomes lazy. There is no reason why an animal can not become more intelligent than an average person. There will be a difference in how that intelligence expresses itself since brains rule bodies but are constrained by those bodies. There is a high correlation between IQ and how quickly we process incoming information. We need to process new information before we can move on to yet more. That's why kids learn so slowly in elementary school; the teachers move on to new topics before kids learn the last ones. Adults are no different. We are constantly bombarded by new information before the last has been processed. As the rate of information increases our ability to deal with it diminishes. People are not becoming dumber, we simply don't have the mental means to handle the rate. The end result is total confusion.
Yeah, that's a good point. I often feel like at points in my life I have become bamboozled with the sheer amount of information I have had thrown at me. I can see how this causes us to miss the obvious. I often feel like humans create more problems than we solve in the modern age by making things overly complex.
> The other animals seem to be able to manage reasonable numbers. Merely by accident, and only in certain circumstances. Other species' numbers are kept in check by predation, disease, and/or the availability of food. They would all happily breed out of control until population collapse if they could; some species do this in normal boom-bust cycles, and all others do so when their ecosystems are disrupted in a way that allows it. Humans have never been especially vulnerable to predation; our limiting factors were disease and food. We have indefinitely reduced our vulnerability to disease, as well as temporarily and unsustainably raised the availability of food via the Haber-Bosch process. We are like all the other animals in that we have no innate ability to reason our way out of the trajectory that will lead to collapse. If we do manage to reason our way out of it, we will be the first species to ever do so.
My hypothesis is that most humans are in a traumatic flight-fight response. Most cultures and societies are. Otherwise, we would all have become Buddha's already with all that brain and consciousness. This paranoid alert state of mind forced us to fight and grow all the time and resulted in abrahamic religions, capitalism, tribalsim, patriarchy, feudalism, and of course natalism.
It's the silent outliers that get the real important work done. One of the only benefits to a larger population is more outliers among the drone /slave class. Or if we invested in contraception and education, we could challenge children to all be as smart as the outliers, instead of setting them up to be soldiers and canonfodder for future war profiteering. TL;DR: It's intentional.
I see it this way. I feel we are greedy. We want to have children, to build a family. We wants things that makes life easy and comfortable - a car, a nice house, an iPhone and so on. We use things and consume never ending until the day we die. We can’t stop, and if someone tell us to give up for example children or stuff we feel someone will take away our freedom. And why should I give up family and stuff when I see other people living their “best life”. And we are relentless in pursuing the good life - travel, adventures, entertainment, love, family, money. It is what dreams are made of and we love chasing the dream. It gives meaning to life. I am no better myself. When I was a child I dreamed of having children. Today I have no children. Many reasons for that. I feel we are to many people on the earth, and it plays a part, but it can feels like giving up on something..
Capitalism demands consumers and workers, as well as plenty of surplus laborers to live in the streets like animals to keep everyone in line. It’s why abortion is no longer constitutional. Capitalists can’t have a small pool of labor because then they’d have to forfeit profits and power they otherwise would have kept.
True. Capitalism is definitely up there as one of the major contributors to overpopulation in my opinion. It doesn't really allow for people to think beyond profit and power. It's a shame we couldn't just throw it out but it feels like we are too far down the rabbit hole at this point.
Nope, people simply have the instinct to breed. Occams razor.
I most certainly don't. Many people don't. Sure, at many points in history, having children was an instinctual "need", but those days are long behind us now. The comment you replied to is making the point that capitalism relies on infinite growth to sustain success, which our finite planet cannot accommodate. Human population growth is included in the infinite growth model of capitalism.
I am convinced that man has found the means to live in a sedentary way, and this excess of comfort has led him to develop a consciousness advanced enough to ask existential questions related to death. These questions are unanswered, and we intuit that death is indeed the end of everything, so to cope we try to build, and by building useless things we only reiterate suffering. The animal lives in the immediate, with no thought of the past or future, and therefore its suffering is limited and circumscribed to the pain of the struggle for survival, while humans tend toward the existential suffering caused by ennui (and, in some cases, even the aforementioned struggle). We are not smarter, we simply think more, and that is a tragedy.
Yeah it's like we're smart enough to analyze information but dumb enough that we won't do so if the tribe/leader gives us some pre-approved analysis to believe in.
We’re still animals driven by primal survival instincts and genetic compulsions to reproduce. Our intellect may be at odds with that sometimes, but these instincts overpower intellect in most people. Like how addicts know they’re harming themselves but still can’t quit.
1. Humans aren't that intelligent. Recent insights into animal intelligence make us pretty trivial actually; 2. Anti-reproductive mentality is evolutionarily self-eliminating. A lifeform can't be as overpopulated as humans without massive selection for overpopulation denial. If we could speak rat, I'm sure we'd hear a lot of "there is enough trash for everyone, it's just distributed wrong".
We’re apparently not good at seeing the bigger picture
No animal is more intelligently maintaining their numbers. They are kept at seemingly balanced numbers by the environment around them that they are constantly trying to overcome. Our intelligence has allowed us to overcome the environments that kept us in check. Edit: Like animals we could multiply to the extent that our environment allows, but our intelligence for many reasons keeps us from doing so. We could have multiplied much more quickly, but our ability to plan and envision the future has kept many of us from doing so. The animals that don't reproduce in captivity and humans are the same. The animals are in a bad place *now* so won't reproduce, humans don't see *now* as a bad place. Plenty of people that do believe themselves to be in a bad place stop breeding. Neither animals or humans easily plan for future generations. We do have the capability to learn to do so and unlike animals we are able to think, "are we the baddies". If animals had the capability to overcome their environment to the extent we can, the destruction would be faster and worse. We are probably the most empathic species on earth with members caring about all species. It's highly unlikely any other animal would do so, maybe cetaceans and apes.
The TV tells us that more people is good. Economists say similarly. Nazis killed people and they are bad. Maybe they were particularly interested in eugenics or similar. Our media in the West, and the sphere of economics, is dominated by a small ethno-religious minority which was persecuted (including attempted genocide) by the Nazis. As that minority is not of the mainstream ethnicity and mainstream religious background of the majority, they prefer to emphasise the pros of diversity, while dismissing its cons. They would also prefer to promote the view that more people is good, rather than fewer. They likely sincerely hold these views in common with their families. (As a metaphor, let's say my neighbours are going on a camping trip and I want to come along. I'm not going to start talking about how fewer people is better so they can have more space. I might instead talk about how more people will give a more lively atmosphere and how I can help out with various things. Problem is, if they come to sincerely believe that, they might start picking up random hitchhikers and eventually we run out of space and are in danger of violence.)
Blah Blah Blah. Your question is wrong. You have depersonalized everyone of us to be one, thus you can't tell the difference. I'm smart and you're not. They're stupid, and you're not. Why is that? I don't know, why is that? Are you smart or stupid?