LogFAQs > #962802607

Unbridled9 posted...

It's probably not a matter of intelligence honestly.

However, the average human WISDOM has, almost certainly dropped.

It's more than just the difference between "knowledge" and "common sense", though. We've kind of proven that the more we invent devices that "remember" things for us or "think" for us, the less capable our brains become at replicating the same processes. The human brain is lazy - if it doesn't have to do something, it doesn't want to do it.

The invention and proliferation of written language actively weakened our ability to memorize and accurately transmit information via oral tradition. Calculators tend to weaken our ability to do math in our own heads. People today have a much harder time remembering phone numbers than people 50 years ago did. And so on.

The Internet has effectively placed the sum total of human knowledge at everyone's fingertips, but at the same time weakened our ability to recall information over time. Worse, because there's no real filter on that data to separate fact from fiction, our ability to detect the signal/noise ratio of all the information pouring into our brains is greatly limited (ie, we're exposed to so much information so often, we've kind of lost the ability to evaluate and fact-check it effectively, meaning a lot of what we think we know is potentially wrong anyway).

People today like to think they're "smart" (and definitely smarter than everyone else who's ever lived in the past), but a larger collection of data is about the only thing we have going for us . Our sum total of accumulated knowledge is absolutely greater, but our ability to remember and process it is likely much more impaired than our ancient ancestors.

So if you definite intelligence as "knowing things", we probably are smarter. But if you define it as being better able to process information, we probably aren't.