The human race is gradually becoming dumber.

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Want proof? People consider Michael Bay's Transformers films to be masterpieces on the same level as Citizen Kane. Methinks... civilization is screwed.

are you american?

remember this, outside america (or even the comfy lil west, that includes both europe and australia) is a huge world. many of them never even heard about "michael bay"

comfort yourself with this thought.
the stupidity of pop culture came, but will also go away.

Too much exposure to American culture makes me more stupid...

watch the tyra banks show

it
REALLY
hurts

People like you really get me fired up. The human race, and society as a whole, is actually becoming smarter. Every major crossnational IQ study revealed that the average IQ of the sampled population rises every year. Check it. The only thing that's happening to advancing sects of the human race is that traditions and customs are decaying with each generation - much to the chagrin of the elderly (I'm sure everyone here, no matter what race or country they're from, knows an elderly person that laments about "the way things used to be"). What most don't realize, though, is that as they die, new ones are being born. You don't watch the grass grow day by day.

Who considers the Transformers films to be "masterpieces"? Sure, the first got praise, but by no means was considered a world-beater. The near-unanimous view on the sequel is that it was loud, convoluted, heartless, and hardly worth the price of a ticket.

It's kind of a 1984 effect...most people these days can't be bothered with anything that's old, so they have nothing to compare modern cinema to. I'm sure Michael Bay is Shakespear compared to the reality bullcrap that is television @_@

Same reason they can get away with so many awful remakes these days. Look at I Am Legend, "The film is the forty-seventh highest grossing film of all time."

Who in the hell compared transformers to those others? The word I'm hearing from friends and in newspaper reviews is all equally bad. I've not heard one positive thing. Not even that its a good popcorn flick.

This thread reminds me of this.

The human race is not getting dumber, we just happen to be holding higher standards, that have been passed down for countless generations. Most new parents don't seem to be about upholding standards or traditions, so that might explain some. (I also blame rap music and modern television, plus the large tendency for said parents to cave into demands well too easily. Mumble...grumble...in my day..we had to earn it! Don't get me started on download speeds now...You Whippersnappers!)

Well, I liked it a great deal. I paid my money to see giant alien robots beating the hell out of each other for two hours. Nothing more, nothing less.

And that's what I got - value for money, says I. I certainly didn't go into the cinema expecting high art, not from a film directed by Michael Bay. I mean, if you go into one of his movies expecting it to be some deep commentary on the human condition, you're always going to be disappointed.

Oh, and there was the added bonus of some Megan Fox-related visuals too, which helped a lot. I love her

(I'm also reading Paradise Lost at the moment, so make of that what you will )

*facepalm*

Transformers I and II are about giants robots kicking the crap out of each other, nothing more nothing less. I really don't care what the story was about. When I see a movie I want to be entertained, nothing more nothing less. I'll find my intellectual stimulation somewhere else.

Right, but there's a significant problem with citing the Flynn Effect for the umteenth time, which is that you're looking at a trend which has gone on in a period of large advances in health and education. IQ shows a strong heritability, and also appears to show a significant negative correlation with fertility (as studies over several decades have indicated). Now, I'm no biologist, but that sounds like selection for low intelligence to me, and the possible implications for the average genotypic IQ are not to be dismissed with some hand wave about the Flynn effect or something (XKCD, I'm looking at you). Of course, I do not know how this works internationally, as the phenomenon appears to be primarily in the developed world.

IQ has, however, gone up since 50 years ago or so, that much is not disputed, nor yet is the above effect significant enough to mean we'll all be necessarily drooling idiots by 2050. Although, the problem becomes more convoluted if we consider what we even mean by intelligence; I've known plenty of high IQ individuals are, for all intents and purposes, small souled creatures.


But how did it sell? And Star Trek was a critical success *ducks for cover*

Most American blockbusters suck in my opinion. I'm more into obscure low-budget films.

That just means they're scoring higher on a test, not that actual intelligence is rising. People getting schooled more, and in particular taking more standardised tests than ever before in human history, could explain it just as well. In fact I have yet to hear a convincing counterargument to the notion that, while people who are intelligent and responsible may or may not use contraception, people who are both stupid and irresponsible are very unlikely to use it - meaning stupidity and irresponsibility are being selected for. So you have more schooling and maybe better health driving IQ scores up on the one hand, and stupidity being genetically selected for - sounds to me as leading, eventually, to a world of drooling idiots in which you need a PhD to flip burgers, because a Master's in burgerological sciences isn't a good enough qualification to get you hired.

Er, I'd say uneducated people are more likely to breed, if they had the same chances for an education they might be even smarter than you.

But what this really is about is that you're saying that a group of people, the lower class, are fundamentally dumber than another group, the upper class.