The hubris of youth – Tim Pool’s Show

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  • #257214
    Vknid
    Moderator

      I was watching TimCast tonight.  And I heard Ian (I think that is his name) claim that humans ,due to the things like the internet, now are “hyper aware” and previous generations were just “ignorant”.

      I find this thought process to a frequent mistake of young people.  To assume that the countless generations that came before you, that you rest on the shoulders of, were somehow beneath you.  That your generation are the smart ones and everything is now figured out and anyone that came before was somehow less.

      I recall thinking this way when I was a very young man and I see my own child now think this same thing to the point of scoffing at previous generations.

      The irony is that I believe the internet , social media specifically, has poisoned people’s minds and in fact we are all now less intelligent for it.  Everything we all have is due to the work and sacrifices of previous generations.  The ease with which most of us now live would not be possible without the work, sweat, tears, intelligence and care of those who came before us.

      Young people should revere their ancestors and thank them and not just assume everyone over 30  is simply old and stupid.  Yes I know, when you are 15/16 you not only believe you have a handle on the world you KNOW it.  It’s nearly the same for everyone.  We all think that until the world firmly plants a foot right in your  nether regions.

      “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”― Gustav Mahler

      #257445

      Well, fundamentally, you’re not wrong. It’s completely ignorant take to suggest we’re somehow smarter than men of a hundred years ago just because of the Internet – It might be one of the biggest depository’s of information ever conceived, but lots of insane misinformation gets uploaded too and that spreads faster because it’s easier to comprehend.

      Though I think it’s also wrong to suggest the Internet is somehow responsible for overall cognitive decline – Average Western IQ peaked in the late 1800’s and has been on the decline ever since. If trends continue, than within the next one hundred years the average IQ will fall to match Latin America, the Middle-East or North Africa.

      Welcome to societal collapse.

      (Sources if you’re interested):

      https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7616-entering-a-dark-age-of-innovation/

      https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289613000470?via%3Dihub

      #257454

      You can look at it a number of ways. On one hand, we never had so much access to data, culture and information. Also, all of that can lead to a blindness since there is just so much of it that it can be hard to focus. We are bombarded with information constantly and that can create another kind of ignorance. But here’s the thing. You don’t get the Ten Commandments, or the Bill of Rights without people being aware. These didn’t form out of the blue with a single stroke of genius. These were concepts that evolved and strengthened over long periods of time through observation and experimentation of what worked and didn’t when it came to human society. The ancients were hyper aware of the world around them because they had to be for survival. They may not have understood the natural forces at work the way that we do now, but they were aware. We build on what came before and those innovations of both the recent and ancient past took vast intelligence to accomplish.

      #257460
      Vknid
      Moderator

        Great points all around.

        But we should not conflate having information available and using the information available.

        If you are in a room full of food but you refuse to eat, you still starve.

        #257444

        <Duplicate post, got caught by the spam filter>

        https://web.archive.org/web/20220211170332/https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.975.5206&rep=rep1&type=pdf

        • This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by WeareChaoS.
        • This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by FallenOmegaStar.
        #257588

        I think it depends on whether we conflate ‘hyper-aware’ with ‘hyper-knowledgeable’.

         

        In a sense, these two or so generations have immediate access to more information than any generations before them. They are bombarded with more negativity at once, they are simultaneously aware of more issues and more points of view at once, they are exposed to many more conflicting views at once before they shut themselves off in comforts of echo chambers and they’re more encouraged to point out the problems and mistakes of previous generations.

         

        This doesn’t neccessarily translate to wisdom or knowledge, but I believe it does shape up how they respond to certain things, and it does show the generations before the internet really took off as potentially being ‘ignorant’ of the magnitude of problems and amount of them both worldwide and in any given country; thing is whether this lack of focus and amount of concerns is actually translating to making things better over time, which in my opinion often isn’t the case.

        #257590
        Vknid
        Moderator

          knowledge does not equal intelligence does not equal wisdom

           

           

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