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Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

> We are surrounded by imbeciles. Social media has enabled the village idiots of every town and region to discover each other and band together in the millions. Society is actually regressing intellectually for the first time since the Dark Ages.

+1, Uncomfortable Truth.

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I would say, to anyone who actually believes this, to get off social media and touch grass. Social media idiots have no meaningful impact on your life.

Brexit

Abortion Laws

Btw. I'm still thinking about a question of: in a population without natural selection what is supposed to counter act accumulation of negative mutations. I can't help but to think that people are getting dumber on average. Just look at recordings of old tv shows.

What makes you think we don't have natural selection? Most economically advanced countries have below-replacement fertility. Being eaten by a leopard or failing to have enough children are the same from the point of view of natural selection.

Yeah, but afaik most educated and intelligent people are the ones with least amount of kids. At least in the west, though i suspect rest of the world is not much different and/or copying west.

So it's not the same.

It is exactly the same. Natural selection only cares about reproduction rate. It doesn't matter if we consider a trait "bad" (such as lower education or intelligence) - if it results in more offspring, it is what evolution will select. Conversely, if it results in fewer offspring, it will slowly be weeded out, even if we'd rather keep it.

Yeah, so being not too smart is selected for in an ecology of indudtrual civilisation. Which doesn't bode too well for it as it depends on people able to deal with complex matters.

Also other traits are not selected for either as modern medicine saves us.

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