Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for September 29, 2020

Because people can pick and choose what they want to believe.

Because people want to believe what’s easy and convenient rather than what’s true. Hence why they run with the idea that the reason we can’t have universal healthcare in the US isn’t because corporate American wants to keep the working class under its thumb since it’s tied to employment and leaving your job means losing your insurance, thus making it extremely difficult, expensive and risky to leave a job you hate. Instead, it’s easier to believe people are just lazy and want something for nothing.

If Ray Bradbury were still alive, I’m sure he could explain it to you guys.

Echo chambers

I actually Googled it.

Good luck utilizing a Magic Eight Ball for a second opinion.

Because people (some) don’t know how to think or reason.

People began to rely on and consider the collective knowledge according to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and/or Reddit as gospel truth, and carelessly tossed self fact-checking as a non-essential evil.

Kill Da Google!

I did google “why are we getting stupider” and there are articles about it. Apparently IQs have been dropping since the 70s. But not in the US — at least not yet.

People need to be smart enough to use knowledge by thinking. We are so screwed.

People have ALWAYS been pretty dumb…

Siri, why are people getting more stupid?

When was the last time you looked something up yourself?

IQ scores have been consistently increasing over the last century, by more than a point per year. There have been some reports of drops in the most advanced nations; mostly since the 1990s, not 1970s. Whether higher scores actually means higher intelligence is a different question — maybe people are just better at taking the test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

There’s a difference between knowledge and intelligence.

You won’t find the latter on the Internet.

There’s no cure for stupid, but in the age of the internet there’s no excuse for ignorance.

It just appears that people are getting stupider. Half the people have always been stupider than the other half. It’s just that with social media it’s easier for the stupider half to expose themselves.

We got stupider because we have all the world at our fingertips. Just like how no generation since the advent of pocket calculators knows how to do arithmetic.

The worst part is you can’t fix stupider!

It’s like putting a book under your pillow. All you get is a sore head.

Wailing like a banshee. What exactly is a banshee anyway?

Some friends and relatives used to say, “Ask jimm. He’ll know.”

Later on, if there were no computer handy, it became, “Who needs the internet? Ask jimm.”

Then, there was the advent of pocket internet-capable devices.

Now, it’s 》》click click《《 “A female spirit in Irish folklore whose horrifying shrieks are an omen of imminent death.”

And sometimes, “I’m too lazy to look it up. Ask jimm.”

How did people get stupider?

Watching faux noise 24/7 for many years = drumpf’s base!

It says we’re all getting dumber new science proves it/

Perception seems to usurp facts lately and that is a shame!

Rat and Goat you are not people, so where is the problem ? … Croc Power !

Knowledge is only a part of what makes a person smart. You also need wisdom and common sense. Both are becoming harder to find. As for me, I admit it’s often the wisdom part that I need to work on.

Also, it’s possible that the number of stupid people hasn’t really increased. I think with social media stupid people just have a way to make their stupidity known to more people.

“Reply hazy, ask again.”

I always distinguish IQ, which is like horsepower, from common sense, which is like traction.

Confirmation bias.

My theory is that it was never about having the knowledge – it was all about discovering it. The exercise keeps your brain healthy. Now, it’s just handed to us on a plate…

Alcohol kills brain cells, and nobody intelligent is facing 2020 sober.

First, don’t confuse ignorance with stupidity.

As for ignorance, when you know that you can look up individual facts at any time, there is less incentive actually to master any subject.

The knowledge is there but some where along the line the skills to actually use it has been lost.

Bada “Bing.”

Back in about 2008, a relative, knowing I was a librarian, asked me why he could find no information in the library’s databases that supported the oil companies’ claims that climate change was a hoax. I gently tried to explain that, if all the research supports climate change, it’s probably real. But no, he continued searching for books that supported his view. People are dumber now because they are willfully so.

To put it in Dungeons and Dragons terms, the problem isn’t that our Intelligence scores are dropping, the problem is that our Wisdom scores are dropping.

I saw this years ago.

A time traveler has arrived from the Middle Ages, and asks you to show him the most amazing thing about the 21st Century.

You explain, “I hold in my pocket a device that allows me instantaneous communication throughout the world, and access to the greatest trove of knowledge ever gathered. I use it to argue with strangers and watch cat videos.”

No one really has to do a lot of hard work to learn something if they just “Google” it. Plus the internet is a mix of accurate and wildly inaccurate information, and unless you can exercise critical thinking and do fact checking, you will indeed appear to be dumb. Just hop on twitter sometime to see what I mean.

Apparently, it’s because politicians and CEOs are taking over the world.

Well, you can’t learn everything. Some things really are ungoogable. I tried to find out what the name of a very obscure book I read as a kid was. I tried to learn if sneeze fetishism exists. I tried to find out what an ex was up to 15 years after we lost touch. Came up empty. It’s just as well, none of those things matter and learning them would make me lose brain cells.

“We all know how stupid the average person is. Now realize that, by definition, fifty percent of the population is dumber than that.” -Ivan Stang

The internet discourages in-depth knowledge and encourages knowing a little bit about a bunch of unrelated things. It also throws all information into a common bucket: The Health Of The Planet and the Sex Life Of A Minor Celebrity are treated as of equal importance.

Supply and Demand. If the Supply of Information is infinite, and Value of Information becomes worthless.

If you can just call up information, you are much less likely to remember anything.

We have access, but don’t know how to use it.

Same as always; we’re collectively more able to connect to answers but 1:disinformation abounds and people arent getting connected to “critical thinking skills”, just flat one-dimensional answers. 2: just like during the romantic period in europe, only some people are getting the classical education. the rest are just learning how to use current widgets.

I gave up on news. Watch it for 5 min and youll see how stupid we can be. Actually news doesnt exisit any longer just whatever version you choose to hear. Like feeding a rabid Pavolvs dog. We are not better for it in total Id say.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/is-smart-technology-making-us-dumb/ I googled this of course.

That’s strange….when I Googled that question up popped a picture of trump.

I asked Google, and Google replied, “My bad.”

Realized having more info than the contents of the Alexandrian Libraries in the palm of the hand neutralizes all excuses for not applying myself.

If you’re ‘googling’ why people are getting more stupid . . .

There is a defect in the human brain that causes humans to immediately believe the first thing they hear about a given subject is true. Said defect, left unaddressed, will cause them to defend that first thing they heard no matter what knowledge undermines said first thing. A solution was found to this issue about 2,300 years ago by a man named Aristotle, a process of deduction and logic that disregards first-knowledge bias in favor of seeking an actual answer. This method has since been refined, and is currently known as the “scientific method”.

Multiple cultures have posited that there is no cure for “stupidity”, but there absolutely is. We’ve had said cure for over two millennia, in fact. The main problem is that it generally is best applied during childhood, before the very defect it corrects sets in and prevents it from taking root.

I know Stephan knows this, but as long as people think that wisdom and compassion have anything to do with knowledge, little is going to change on the macro level.

“Hey, Siri, why am I so stupid?”

Well, it started when one party thought that an ex-actor in the early stages of dementia was a gift from god.

IQ’s may not be dropping but integrity certainly is.

“It didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done . . . . You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox. . . .” Dr. Ian Malcom (Jeff Goldblum) to John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), Jurassic Park (1993).

Seems the smart people are continuing school and post grad work instead of having kids.. this was a conversation I had with a friend over twenty years ago.

That’s an easy one: We have all the collective knowledge of the world in our hands; we no longer have to work for information, so out brains are atrophying.

knowledge and wisdom are two different things.

Watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix – we’re being used and manipulated.

Because that is what there taught in school by the “geniuses”.

“in our hands” is a figure of speech here, and “literally” has the opposite meaning. So, Rat, you get the stupid (ignorant) label.

They voted trump

they dropped heavily in the US on 1/20/2017

I think we had a national lobotomy in 2016. Been plummeting ever since.

As witnessed by the final closed book PhD exam question, “What is that thing called on the tip of shoelaces?”

It’s easy to see why that is.

Over 90% of the “information” online is what our Commander in Sleaze would call Fake News because it is only true from a very narrow perspective based on false assumptions. The more people foolishly swallow that stuff at face value the more they damage their own intelligence.

The movie Idiocracy explains it perfectly, even though it’s a comedy.

The Internet is full of knowledge, if you have the intelligence to use it properly. Something is not necessarily true, NO MATTER HOW BIG AND BOLD THE TYPE or how often it is repeated, and might well have started as a joke, someone didn’t “get”.

Simple : although nobody wants to hear or believe it , overpopulation has caused the gene pool to no longer exist , now all that remains is a bog !

It’s pretty simple. Before the PC you had to go to the library (remember those?),and figure out the best place to find what you wanted to know. A learning experience on it’s own.

Actually, we don’t have all the collective knowledge of the world in our hands. Not everything has been transcribed to electronic format yet. And I’ve run into situations where some things that were online were lost because they weren’t added to the internet archive before their original page was deleted.

I googled it too. It is strange the effect comic strips have on us isn’t it.

Stupid is often caused by arrogance… not lack of knowledge. Arrogance on the other hand, is often accompanied by lack of accurate knowledge.

How does that joke go? Student asks teacher a question. Teacher responds, “I don’t know – let’s check on Google!”, Teacher then comments, “what did we do before Google?” Student replies, “knew stuff?” I may have gotten that wrong, let me Google it …

To be fair, only about 40% of us are stupid.

Because they rely on Google and only read news that caters to their beliefs.

“By Googling every damn thing” should be one answer!

The problem is that in addition to all human knowledge, we have all of human ignorance, and deceit, much of it contradictory to human knowledge in order to hide and discredit the truth because it was inconvenient in some way, ranging from hard to understand to harmful to individual or corporate interest. There is so much Ignorance and deceit that it’s hard to find the truth in a Google search sometimes. Google needs a “Fact-Checked” or “Reputable-Source” option.

People don’t separate facts from opinions/emotions.

The easier life gets, the lazier people get. Since thinking requires effort, many people avoid it whenever possible.

Just because we have access to the knowledge, doesn’t mean we retain it

thanks to incompetent teachers, the IQ in the US can’t get much lower.

“The sum of intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing.”

If you believe anything/everything you read on the webz, you are self-certified Stupid! First-hand knowledge or trustworthy sources (plural) can help….

Because the Internet is uncurated and vast. We’re human and tend to look for those we share viewpoints with. This leads to isolating ourselves in self-perpetuating echo chambers where we’re no longer challenged to consider new ideas or points of view, which in my opinion makes us stupid.

There’s a very insightful recent book — “The Shallows” — that basically argues that every advance in imformation technology over the centuries has made our brains lazier and less physically capable of sustained analytical thought. The Internet, the greatest such advance since Gutenberg’s printing press, has seriously advanced the process. And hence this strip.

They keep changing the IQ tests because it isn’t fair if anyone gets less than a 100.

. . . because knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing. Knowledge is just the ability to memorize facts. Intelligence is the ability to THINK about them.

U.S. Educational system lowered the standards. That’s why not yet.

It’s not that people don’t have knowledge. Its that they are atracted to what makes them angry.