This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Since this article is regarding USA, it's worse than that. We are living in the golden age of insanity.
Delusional religious people and sociopathic Nazis have taken over USA.
For the civilized world there are warning signs, but insanity is unlikely to take control.
The American Dream has given way to the American Schizophrenic Psychotic Episode.
We can only hope it stays just an episode.
It not only gave way, it actually paved the way.
Brainwashing about American individual freedom ideals, have become idolization of billionaire sociopaths as the ultimate expressions of individual freedom.
Worse than, say, the dark ages?
"Dark Ages" comes from Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars saying, "Thank God we're so smart. Those people were morons."
Also, it was after Rome really fell apart, darker times then the Empire certainly.
in a way i think yes. in the dark ages at least any insane cults and ideas couldn't spread far. if your village or castle happened to have dark ages version of ben shapiro then his words aren't going to go far (unless they infected the local ruler as well, and even then it'd still be contained within your area, or your country at worst). If you were on the receiving end of insanity you could always just kind of– pack up and move to another village, walk 30km away and you're like a new man! Worst case scenario find your way to a port, fuck off to another country - passports or border control did not exist, passage was often granted for free to those able bodied that joined the crew for the voyage.
obviously i'm romanticising here a bit, modern medicine and technology makes day to day life easier. but it also makes other things much harder. our privacy is going extinct at an alarming rate, freedom of movement across borders belongs to distant memories of our great grandparents, (unless you're french) your protests will be ignored and/or vilified, and if you dare care about other humans and speak up about it you can be labelled as a terrorist in some places
i do truly hope that those years of unrest aren't here to stay...
I’m starting to believe natural selection didn’t just get us to where we are, it kept us here.
The genetic variation in the human brain will lead to more and more good and bad variations generation after generation. Stupidity used to have deadly consequences, now it’s just poverty (or the White House).
Our society wants to be inclusive and accepting and liberating and safe, but what if that just doesn’t work with our current make? What if these mild deviations and mutations only progress forwards when the weak traits perish? We don’t have that mechanism anymore so weak and dangerous personality traits persist and continue to vote.
It’s a scary thought, but I can’t see anything wrong with the logic, especially observing how it’s taking hold across the globe.
There is a social media aspect to this. We have amplified the worst behaviors and reenforced them with monetary gains. We broke the incentive structure in America where being a doctor was the highest calling. The media is also incentivized to spew division, we've basically made money the greatest reward in society, and only award it to the worst people. Its a really effective way to skew the sociopathic tendencies of the masses.
Frankly, between blaming welfare and going for eugenics or blaming capitalism and going for socialism I'd much prefer the latter.
It is not genetic, USA is not an old enough country to have had any significant genetic evolution.
It is instead as Richard Dawkins has described Memetic.
Americans have a tradition of being extremely proud of being free, this feature has been advertised as the most significant thing about USA to Americans to a degree that is akin to brainwashing.
While freedom admittedly is a good thing, the way Americans praise it religiously has turned out to be toxic.
Because sociopathy is now seen as the ultimate expression of individual freedom, so sociopathy is widely admired as a virtue.
This combined with how sociopathy is often rewarded economically, because exploiting people and grabbing all the money for yourself is considered being smart, and the #2 thing religiously praised in USA is money that also reward sociopathic behavior.
This is all about social standards, and the values of society, and has nothing to do with evolutionary shortcomings.
That said, the way some people here claim you are pushing eugenics is completely baseless.
But contrary to your thinking, it seems to me that evolution favor the intelligent more now than it ever did. The demands to intelligence to do well in society are ever increasing, and doing well is an advantage when wanting to have children.
Wealth inequality is returning to pre-WW1 levels and climate change's effects are becoming visible to the average person, making people desperate for a way out. Education budgets in the US have been steadily slashed, far-right agit-prop by people like Steve Bannon has flooded the internet while the political class that could oppose it are pacified by corporate donors.
No need for social darwinism or sketchy eugenics-flavored arguments to explain this.
Yes. Next question.
Nope, humans have always been stupid. People said the same shit when the printing press was invented, or TV, or whatever.
Seriously, crack a history book. Modern times are actually pretty good, even with all the bullshit.
It's pretty good compared to, say, 100 years ago. But is it better than, idk, 10 years ago? This is highly dependent where you live, of course. But, in the US, I can 100% say life was better a decade ago and people weren't outright rejecting intellectualism en masse.
The idiots didn't have their own eco chamber. As an unfortunate byproduct of the social media they realised how many of them there are and organised themselves.
54, American here. Yeah, I think we peaked in the 80s and 90s after a small setback in the 70s. Through 2010 was pretty good as well except for 9/11 fucking up our politics and legislation.
I'd agree the US peaked in the 90s. 2008 really fucked us for almost a decade, though. Economy had essentially recovered by 2014/2015sh until COVID. I'm almost 40, so most of my adult life has been plagued by crisis after crisis.
Humans have always been stupid but today technology has made it easier for the dumbest among us to be more influential than any stupid person of any prior era. This, we are in the golden age of stupidity.
It's fake gold spray paint.
That wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
AI is also putting pressure on the ability to have multiple, independent sources by diverting traffic away from those sites. Just like reddit kills independent phpbb boards, AI will (and is) killing critical thought.
Oh that's been going on way before AI became a thing
Yes but this has accelerated it. I dont actually read anything anymore. I just ask chat gpt. In the end, it will make me dependent on it. And so many people will go that route, for different reasons.
Doing a web search now feels like wasting a lot of time when chat gpt has the answer already.
I think this is already changing everything. School system, education, learning, jobs, careers, etc.
I blame google. Seriously.
I almost exclusively use Perplexity to search for things now. When it gives me reliable information and actually answers the question I ask it, it’s fantastic. But that’s still only around 80-90% of the time. That’s actually not very reliable at all by any metric which is worth paying attention to.
But once upon a time you could search google and it’d look for the words that you searched for. But for years now it’s used “natural language” searches, which means that if you’re searching for a specific word it might not even look for that word at all. It might even take a definition of that word that you didn’t intend and search instead for a synonym to fit that definition.
Add SEO, ads, and paid search boosting, and you end up with results that are far less useful than they used to be. Add to that the fact that a lot of the actual sites being searched are now AI-generated themselves, and google is now a bad way to try to find something. And every other search engine has followed suit.
So I use Perplexity because even with an objectively bad hit rate - and the fact that it basically returns one answer from multiple sources, rather than multiple sources some of which might not be related to what I’m looking for, and therefore when it misunderstands is perhaps worse than google - it’s better than a traditional search engine for almost all text-based searches.
It’s clearly unsustainable, though, and for many different reasons. It’s certainly an iteresting time to be observing all of this. I can’t help but wonder what the landscape will look like in 10 years.
We are living through idiots revenge.
It's only a golden age insofar as a golden shower is golden
i mean there was the whole Dark Ages thing.
We’re well on our way to Dark Ages 2: Electric Q-galoo
Dark, because not much written history about it is available; not necessarily because Western society was especially stupid. Maybe it was, but we can't know because how few records remain.
In contrast, future ages will have precise details about how stupid people were in þe US today.
Also, add this:
https://old.lemmy.world/comment/20014496
I meant to say your first part there and forgot. :) So, THREE reasons the times were called thus.
Obviously.
I have a book titled "Generation Doof" (Generation Stupid), and yes, this book got it right.
I'm afraid that most people under 30 would simply cease to function if the internet suddenly went away.
I mean I’d be absolutely, jump out of a window, levels of absolutely fucked without the internet.
Idiocracy was a documentary.
People have made that joke since the movie came out. Bit every year that passes idiocracy looks like the good ending.
Yeah but Trump and Musk are showing the worst behavior of humanity in front of the entire planet. That scene in idiocracy with the president could easily be Trump or Musk. So I dont know if its a joke anymore.
There is no attempt to be a good person, have any morals, any shame... In fact, its the opposite of those things that make money and creates infamous individuals that get all the attention.
So its logical to assume that this path will continue, where any attention is great because it makes money through ads connected to what people are watching.
Of course we could say that humanity should not pay attention to this. That worked while the people doing the bad things were just celebrities. Now we have presidents and billionaires doing those things. Its affecting everyone what they say or do.
I think its easy to get a general sense of dread from observing all this. Many feel like the world has gone crazy. But its more that these specific people are getting the attention, or rather, taking it.
The golden age of having to hear from stupid people.
where's that Kylo Ren MORE! meme at...
