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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Maybe people are getting dumber because of COVID.[1] Even after recovery, having mild COVID seems to cost 3 IQ points.[1] Reinfection, 2 more IQ points.[2] This is for people who have recovered, and does not include "long COVID".

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-iq-brain-age-cognitive...

[2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2400189

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This is actually the result of Facebook, youtube the hyper focus on surfacing a topic a post you see share or like to keep you engaged. You see a post share it with your friends Facebook algo see your interest shows your a hundred and keeps taking deeper down the rabbit whole. So the main reason for this is social media. A few years ago I used to argue with family and friends over such stupid topics to tell them it is wrong but mostly keep quite or ignore as my mental health is more important to me.

This clicked for me back in 2015. A friend shared something on Facebook that sounded plausible but felt off. I looked into it, and added a polite comment pointing out that it was a hoax. With a link to the Snopes article. I expected a reaction like "haha, oops". Instead, she deleted my comment.

That's when I realized that Facebook was a platform for spreading digital viruses that use human minds as their host. I deleted my account shortly after and never returned.

That seems unlikely, but if we accept it's true, that's only 5% dumber for someone with an average IQ, and that doesn't seem like nearly enough to account for believing something obviously implausible like controlling hurricanes. If people had basic scientific literacy they should be able to see the amounts of energy needed would be staggering.

This was going full force well before COVID. Before 2016, though that was when it became a lot more overt.

Did you leave out the /s? Or are you seriously implying the crazy conspiracy garbage we're seeing recently is a result of COVID? Because that sounds just as deranged as <waves hands at all the other dumb shit on the internet>.

It's not a joke. "A three-point downward shift in IQ would increase the number of U.S. adults with an IQ less than 70 from 4.7 million to 7.5 million – an increase of 2.8 million adults with a level of cognitive impairment that requires significant societal support."

Then there's long COVID. A detailed overview of that.[1] As of late 2023, about 5% of US adults report having long COVID. It appears that, if it lasts a year, there's usually no further recovery.

Some new results indicate that at least some long COVID sufferers still have a reservoir of the active virus.[2] That's encouraging, because antivirals may help them. It indicates where to look.

This is very real. Most people are tired of hearing about COVID, but the virus isn't tired.

[1] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/27756/chapter/8

[2] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/10/getting-to-th...

Except a lot of this conspiracy nonsense is being propagated by people who are otherwise functioning adults, with decent jobs, etc. I'm not saying COVID isn't impacting IQs, but to claim that COVID is a major contributing factor to the current era of mainstream conspiracy theories is, as I said, just as insane as the rest of the madness.

I take COVID and long COVID seriously, but we have many examples of anti-rationality as a political problem predating the pandemic. The fact that Trump was elected as a candidate who was more about slogans than policies and achieved political success by being overtly anti-intellectual seems to weaken your theory of COVID as the sole or even major factor.

Think farther back to conspiracy theories that gained wide acceptance in earlier administrations - FEMA concentration camps, Obama isn't a US citizen, 9-11 was an inside job etc. The same patterns of ideation were laid out in Richard Hofstatder's famous essay 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics' which was written in 1964: https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...

...and of course you could trace them farther back through the red scare, the interwar period, the gilded age, post Civil War reconstruction, and the ideas that drove the outbreak of the civil war in the first place.

So while I agree COVID is an exacerbating factor, it's a quantitative rather than a qualitative change.

Anti-rationality and ignorance aren't new to the scene in the US. In 1980, Isaac Asimov wrote an essay titled "Cult of Ignorance." [1]

    “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and 
    there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism
    has been a constant thread winding its way through our 
    political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion
    that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as
    your knowledge.'”

[1] https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...

Note that the person you are replying to never said that COVID was the only explanation for this stuff.

I think one only has to look at history to discount such theories as this but people will still try to propagate such pseudo science.

Between covid brain, ipad kids, heavy metal poisoning, and decades of attacks on the education system the US is dropping IQ points while mental illness is on the rise.

Maybe, but people were going like this before COVID.

- We can't measure "IQ" accurately enough to 2 or 3 points.

- People have been dumb for decades, the modern internet + social media has just weaponized it.

- It didn't remotely start in 2020 unless COVID caused a time loop that caused Trump to get elected in 2016.

I already take the IQ test with a big grain of salt. Now there were some small studies done on IQ in relation to COVID? And it supposedly decreases IQ by a few points? Yeah, right, I believe it right away man.

And the vaccine increases your IQ?

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