No they aren't. There are just more idiots in the us because it has a larger population. Here in germany there are a ton of idots too (AFD voters (extreme right))
the americans are generally less literate though. germany's self-reported 99% literacy rate is quite a bit higher than the us's self-reported 92% literacy
(the AFD is of course awful)
A literate person has better opportunity to learn ethics and good thinking habits, but they also have better opportunity to confirm their own biases and be manipulated by grifters. It is kind of a wash when it comes to being a good person or not if the rest of the education system doesn't actually educate.
I suspect there may be a discrepancy in what is defined as illiterate. You'll find plenty in America who may struggle to read quickly, but I only know one person who is fully illiterate in all languages (she can spell her name and can read numbers though) but she's more than 90 years old and I'm from a low literacy area.
how dare you insult the wikipedians who vote on articles for deletion!!!
ok fair... way to bring in politics on a 196 post...
also guten tag
It's a political post and was popular enough to get shown outside of the community. What did you expect?
It's all fun and games until you find out the rest of the world isn't any smarter, we're just monoglots who can't parse foreign news sources.
All the world is just playing it by ear and hoping for the best.
I don't think America's people are specially worse than other countries.
There are everything like every other place. Here in europe we have our share of stupid people. Have you ever seen people breaking each other heads every week because they have different football (I mean soccer) teams?
We have still Kings and Queens. They may not have political power (though they actually do have it) but still live like... Well.. like kings on public money just for being born with royal blood. And most people support the monarchy.
True. As a kid, even I knew that hope was naive.
Nope. We're all dumb the world around. We can individually be taught, but to make that work we generally need to get more people than not front loaded with what we're trying to do (in the modern world, make societies of tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, not fall apart, say from corruption at the top).
A recent Kurzgesagt video Is Our World Broken stated the problem in very hagiographic terms. It comes down to this: Evolution takes a long time, and we've gone from small migratory bands to stationary agrarian clans to nuclear families in industrial societies very fast, and our brains still think feudal loyalty hierarchies are a better idea than the fixed principals applied equally as a social contract. We still think society should be small, that we should know everyone personally, and that being odd (wrong skin color, worshiping the wrong god, talking with a dialect, etc.) are signs of infectious disease which will potentially kill off the entire clan, and we should throw rocks at them and burn the bodies.
The White Christian Nationalist movement isn't unique to us and Germany, but is a purification movement that is behind every witch-burning epidemic, and is visible in the fall of the Mayan and Roman empires; the despair of kings and high lords as they cling to power slipping away.
The interesting thing this time is we commoners are talking about it on the internet. We get to hear academics who have studied this stuff not only tell us the bad that can happen, but how other instances have been able to prevent that bad. So we might be able to slow it down, prevent it altogether, or find a less tumultuous path through it... so we can deal with the great filters, like the climate crisis and plastic crisis that might kill us all.
My piece of the elephant is this: All of our billionaires and 100 millionaires seem to be possessed with making more, even though their hoard is well beyond enough to take care of their family, and is only being used to gain more wealth, lather, rinse, repeat. Not a one of them is considering giant humanitarian projects that would assure a bronze statue of them was erected in every state park. And that shows us our stupidity of who we are in the dark.
Honestly, evolution is not our friend here. A lot of problems we see in humanity parallels other mechanisms that have similar incentives for success. Social Darwinists were correct about capitalism mirroring evolution, but wrong about that being a good thing. Evolution will maximize suffering if it helps the species. It will not make them live better or be safer. If anything, encouraging that system is against the interests of all who favor personal safety. You'll almost always get eaten by other dogs eventually.
It depends on where evolution takes us, but yes, the mechanisms of evolution are too slow for us to count on them helping us adapt to the new paradigm.
When we went agrarian enough to stop migrating, it came with the responsibility of being able to defy our instincts for small, clean societies. Stationary agrarian societies need large numbers to operate, and this is susceptible to parasitism, e.g. corruption and demagoguery.
Then we moved on from agrarian to industrial and from that to digital. The thing is, the corruption has been there since the dark ages. But with the internet and the free-flow of information that it offers, we can detect the corruption more easily. However we're used to socio-political systems to solve these problems without resorting to violence, and those are either ineffective or corrupt themselves.
The horror of it is that we are individuals in giant social movements, and so participate by adding our tiny amount to mechanations far bigger than ourselves. And many of us are going to get harmed or killed in the stampedes.
We might evolve to where we are able to better make rational choices rather than do what we feel is right, but more likely we'll have to invent psychological tools to make sociological changes. We see this with Charles Schultz adding Franklin to the Peanuts gang, or Mr. Rogers soaking his feet with Officer Clemmons. SMBC has approached the idea more than once, but we haven't yet found a breakthrough to solve critical recurring problems like over-prioritizing boys sports in education, sexual harassment and exploitation in the workplace or police brutality, all which seem to be informed by dominance hierarchy.
Still, some warblers learn to identify and group-attack cuckoos to chase them away from nesting areas. Birds in Australia teach each other to flip cane toads over to avoid their poisonous back glands. We may yet get lucky.
I feel like an average person or group of people are of average intelligence.
But huge masses of people? They begin to adopt emergent traits that cancel out individual intelligence. It's why foot traffic can be modelled as a liquid. Or why the entire field of economics can exist.
This makes large public masses have predictable behavior that's exploitable by grifters, demagogues, and propaganda.
I've come to realize that the upper limit of human intelligence is both surprisingly smart, and depressingly stupid. I'm lucky enough to be smarter, but also smart enough to know I'm an absolute idiot. I'm not even that smart in an IQ sense, just lucky in my experience, education, and focus. I'm smart in a particular way, but I'm not quick or even capable of many basic tasks.
I don't enjoy people seeing me as smart, because they then expect things I don't feel capable of. I don't want that pressure! I'm not that much smarter than you 😫
I'm European, and my relatives often buy into and bring up the US crackhead conspiracy theories they saw on Facebook and from coworkers.
I was having an argument the other day concerning things like the weather machine conspiracy theory, chemtrails, and a bunch of shit about how the war in Ukraine is made up to steal money and how Zelenskiy was trying to abandon his country and flee because he's a coward or whatever. A lot of US and Russian brainrot makes its way here I suppose.
That's "I Love Amy", isn't it?
Yup! 😁
My current workting theory is that societies reliant on collectively ignoring/justifying the atrocities thet are built on cannot thrive.
We've always been dummies, and mostly in ways that have nothing to do with IQ.
