Thread: There are so many stupid people alive...

This always happens. When a species becomes dominant, it starts to select for intra-species breeding dominance. Then shit happens, and the species is unfit to deal with that and goes extinct.

Case in point - dinosaurs with weird-ass plates and whatnot. Birds with stupid show-off feathers. An interesting counterexample is elephants. They have been breeding massive tusks for aeons, but now they are being born with tiny or no tusks at all, thanks to the poachers.

Wombat, I think it's also possible that too much intelligence may be the unfavorable trait here. This is going to sound weird but we need a certain amount of stupidity to keep us fucking and popping out kids.

Originally Posted by Silvestroyer

I live my life operating under the assumption 98-99% of the other people I encounter on a daily basis are brain-damaged, functionally retarded mongoloids. I view most other people as infantile garbage. Far too many experiences with students and coworkers have only confirmed this.

There is not a lot of information about this topic in the Internet. And actually if you investigate a little bit, you would only find a bunch of contradictory articles.

BBC News - Are humans still evolving by Darwin's natural selection?

Darwin's Natural Selection Still at Work in Humans

Humans have stopped evolving

Humans are still evolving, and soon we'll know a lot more about it – john hawks weblog

But for me this case is clear. We are surrounded by idiots. And without any predator or great equalizer, imbeciles nowadays are reproducing like rabbits.
Think about it: Most of the stupid people that we meet sometimes on a daily basis would not stand a chance in caveman times. The amazing atheist has got a great point in this video:

"Wombat, I think it's also possible that too much intelligence may be the unfavorable trait here. This is going to sound weird but we need a certain amount of stupidity to keep us fucking and popping out kids."

Natural Selection doesn't stop however as brains consume a lot of energy you can imagine in times of plenty a more efficient species may have a smaller brain as that is all that is required to survive and reproduce.

I don't think it has much to do with energy consumption. There is absolutely no driving force (in non-third world countries) influencing our evolutionary pathway to move to a cost efficient route. We live in nations of plenty and the only driving force for our evolution isn't a natural one. It's an artificial one. The primitive humans had to be cost effective with their energy output due to primitive tech and various factors of survival. The modern human goes to work 9 to 5 and sits in front of an electric device.

The factors here are
1. Raising children is very expensive. Smart people who become biologically driven to reproduce only want to have 1 or 2 children.
2. Smart people usually don't forget birth control and condoms.
3. Society has made it okay to be a single mother, so we have a huge demographic of fat, unemployed, pregnant women / mothers, who are collecting alimony, welfare, food stamps, and taking loans from the governments to go back to school.

We've been in an artificial selection process for some time. We've moved mostly beyond the natural ones (of course which still affect us e.g. - cancer, ebola, flu, etc.)

The movie "Idiocracy" anybody?

I keep saying, transhumanism and the Singularity are the only things giving me hope. Once we're able to design our traits, or even change our bodies and minds on a whim, we're fine.

If those things never happen, well. I guess we're screwed.

Originally Posted by Newtons3rdLaw

Natural Selection doesn't stop however as brains consume a lot of energy you can imagine in times of plenty a more efficient species may have a smaller brain as that is all that is required to survive and reproduce.

Well, energy consumption isn't much of a problem these days. Diabetus is.

Natural selection in the developed world will select for people that can handle the diet, and that recover nicely from plastic surgery.

The only problem I have with really stupid people is that their crap drags me along with them to the gutter.

I don't mind people being stupid in isolation. They can rot for all eternity. It really sucks when they start asking the smart people to save them from their stupidity but acutally want others to continually support their idiocy.

Originally Posted by gstoke

The only problem I have with really stupid people is that their crap drags me along with them to the gutter.

I don't mind people being stupid in isolation. They can rot for all eternity. It really sucks when they start asking the smart people to save them from their stupidity but acutally want others to continually support their idiocy.

Maybe the trick is to make them pay for the support or sell the stupid folk stupid stuff or go along for the laugh (its a good laugh to step into the gutter of stupid once in a while), witness the stupid and run away, unharmed, giggling like a schoolgirl...with a pocket full of cash!

I spent several years teaching at the post-secondary level. I started in the late 1980s and I quit early in the last decade. I've concluded that the whole educational system is hopelessly damaged beyond repair, thanks to doctrines such as "student as customer" and self-esteem.

The emphasis isn't on conveying knowledge and skills any more but in giving the kiddies whatever they want, be it whatever grade they expect or that magic piece of paper. Why? Because doing so is rewarded. Administrators get promoted for complying. Institutions receive extra government funding for churning out happy graduates. Popular teachers are regarded as "excellent". Those who are strict and insist that students should earn their rewards are severely punished, if not dismissed.

During my time as an instructor, I saw the student work ethic decline dramatically. When I started, it wasn't unusual to have closed-book exams. When I finished, I would have been reprimanded if I had insisted on it. (I once called on the carpet for allowing students only one text in an open-book exam. I imposed that rule because I wanted them to concentrate on writing the exam, not flipping through a pile of textbooks looking for problems similar to the ones being put before them. I did that as an undergrad and paid dearly for it.)

When I prepared exams, I would sometimes do a trial run, noting the time I would take and then multiplying by a factor to see if that would be enough for my students. When I started teaching, that factor was 3, so I would take 20 minutes for an hour-long exam. By the time I finished, that number had increased to 5. (By the way, I wasn't alone in noting this. The prof who supervised my last 2 graduate degrees noticed the same thing over at the uni.)

Unfortunately, the stupid people are winning. We're doomed, folks.