Are People Getting Dumber?

My personal view on the topic isn't whether we're getting smarter or dumber overall its the mediums we're capable of expressing these traits through.<p>Throughout history the only people who were given face time on radio/tv (internet wasn't a thing) were people that had gone through various levels of screening. If an idiot interviewed on the news and said irrelevant or hateful things they were simply not aired. The radio was run by professionals with invited guests. Other examples exist too.<p>However, today we provide the means for anyone to create videos of themselves or write articles and be put on the same stage as anyone else. Often times we see the dumb antics of various people as "entertaining" and it becomes encouraged.<p>Without diving too much deeper I believe it is simply a case not of smarter/dumber but instead an argument of how visible they are. We've always had "dumb" people but only within the last two decades have we created a medium they are capable of expressing themselves through.<p>*Obviously just my $0.02. I'm an engineer, not a researcher of the social sciences.

I'd like to read about the topic, but various op-eds just lose my interest. I would like to read something that is more conclusive, evaluates what intelligence is, uses facts and real information, and explains perceptions.

Psychologists actually have to recalibrate the scoring of IQ tests every few decades in order to keep the average at 100 -- and they need to do this because the scores are going up. I tried to get a psych friend of mine to explain this, because if you follow the implications it means that someone who scored an average IQ in the '20s would now be classified as mentally retarded, which strikes me as insane. But for whatever weight you want to give to this particular measure of intelligence, we're actually getting smarter.

Is it possible to have a smart discussion about whether people are getting dumber in casual, 300-word increments? Perhaps the worst offender is the essay by Erin Jackson, a stand-up comedian, which is neither smart nor funny and relies on phoned-in anecdote and hand-wavy syllogism to prop up her conclusion that people are getting dumber. But even in the essays that extol a more methodical approach to the question, like Steven Pinker's piece, we're left with appeals to evidence that must be taken on faith because there's no room to include them.