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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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...

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