I haven't conducted many mass studies upon the cognitive faculties of mankind, so my input here ain't the most credible, but I think the most reasonable answer would be I don't know... but I doubt it. I think we can expect a lot of people to say "But other studies show IQ averages have risen worldwide!" or "IQ tests aren't an accurate measure of intelligence!" or "Reaction time tests aren't an accurate measurement of brain performance!". All of those things are true. There are a lot of things that we are good at measuring. We can measure the length of a plank, we can measure the speed of a car, the speed of light to a significantly accurate point, the chemical composition of a distant planet, the time it will take for an asteroid to hit the planet Earth and the approximate location of the impact, the amount of rocket fuel needed to fly a fancy robotic science lab from Florida to Mars, but none of those things are sentience, we really suck at measuring sentience, it's hard to measure something you're still trying to understand on a basic level. Universities are still arguing over whether or not people can be left-brained or right-brained. Science fiction movies like Lucy or Transcendence are still playing with the idea that we only use a minuscule portion of our available cognitive capabilities. I think until we really have a firm grasp on what intelligence even is, we won't be able to conduct any accurate studies on the overall intelligence of an entire evolving civilization, regardless of how many IQ tests we take.
Right now I think the best thing to do would be to stop asking "are we more or less intelligent than we used to be?" and instead ask "are we much better off as a civilization than we used to be?". The best way to do that is to investigate trends in healthcare, economics, employment, communications infrastructure, scientific progress and innovation, educational resources available to common people, safety, natural resource distribution, freedom of democracy, social equality, and so on. And I think the longer you look into topics like that the more you'll find we're improving in all of those areas at an accelerating pace.
As it has been mentioned already, the information age and the very sudden explosion of social networking has put us all on a stage, everyone is watching everyone and it's much harder to hide mistakes than it was in the past. Every moment of idiocy is caught on camera, our triumphant moments as a species are often massively overshadowed by skateboard bail compilations and funny cat videos, but progress is still very much in full swing and a closer look at human progress is usually a lot more reassuring than Huffington Post headlines.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bobbycob
There's 3 reason why the Rolling Stones are better. I'm going to list them here. 1. Jimi Hendrix from Rolling Stones was a better guitarist then Jimmy Page 2. The bassist from Rolling Stones isn't dead 3. Rolling Stobes wrote Stairway to Heaven and The Ocean so we all know they are superior here.
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