♟ Are people getting dumber?

This week, a friend of mine, Jack Raines, wrote a LinkedIn post that went viral. 7,300 likes. 1,105 comments. Over 1 million impressions.

I recommend reading it in order to enjoy the rest of today’s newsletter.

Jack did actually run a beer mile with some business school friends of his, but it was not part of the interview process for Goldman Sachs. Anyone who took half a second to think critically about the post quickly realized it was satire. A joke.

I say this because an ungodly amount of people did not get the joke.

It’s been a guilty pleasure of mine this week to check in on the replies to Jack’s post as it spread. Watching them pour in has been like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

I’ve screenshotted some of the best ones below.

It’s addicting to see people missing the joke so self-assuredly. These comments are the definition of “they really thought they did something.”

As I scrolled and scrolled, the same thought kept popping into my head: are people getting dumber?

Look at the job titles of the people in the comments. These are executives at companies. They have been on the earth and the internet for a good portion of their lives.

How the heck can so many people misread a situation so thoroughly?

Are we as a species actually getting dumber?

Let’s investigate.

The Reverse Flynn Effect

You may have heard of the Flynn Effect, which refers to the observed trend of increasing IQ scores over time. For basically the entire 20th century, both humanity’s fluid intelligence (problem-solving) and our crystalized intelligence (book smarts) increased steadily and substantially.

The reverse Flynn effect, on the other hand, is the opposite trend—a decrease in IQ scores over time.

This reversal of the Flynn effect was first identified in Norway in the 1990s, where researchers found that IQ scores were declining by about 0.2 points per year. Since then, similar declines have been observed in other countries, including Denmark, Finland, France, and the United Kingdom.

There are several theories about what might be causing the reverse Flynn effect. One possibility is that it's related to changes in education—for example, some researchers have suggested that the emphasis on standardized testing may be limiting students' creativity and critical thinking skills.

Another possibility is that it's related to changes in nutrition or environmental factors. The age of horrible food diets and excessive air pollution may be affecting cognitive development.

Lots of research has been dedicated to both the Flynn effect and its reversal, but overall it’s extremely hard to pinpoint causality when it comes to species-wide effects.

Perhaps it’s social evolution at work

I have a bit of a different theory when it comes to the reverse Flynn Effect. I don’t think people are truly getting dumber.

Instead, the tests we are using to monitor the Flynn effect aren’t keeping up with the rapidly evolving skill sets the modern era encourages.

“Most people don’t need to do long division very much anymore. If they do, they have calculators,” science writer Steve Davies explains in a piece titled Are We Getting Dumber. “Things like identifying emerging social trends, determining whether someone is lying, and working collaboratively are much more important to success in the modern era.”

Basically, a lot of the old IQ tests we’ve typically used to measure general intelligence are very outdated.

Davies goes on to posit that social factors are changing so quickly that tests can’t keep up. Humans are adapting at a pace never before seen in our history, accelerated by the rise of technology.

So modern people aren’t necessarily dumber than our ancestors, we just have far different challenges to face.

While it makes logical sense to not fully trust the reverse Flynn Effect, the reaction to Jack Raines’s post still lingered in my head. So I kept searching.

Poe’s Law

I actually learned about Poe’s Law from Jack’s own blog on his previous LinkedIn exploits. It’s an internet adage that describes the difficulty of distinguishing genuine extremism from parodies or satirical expressions of extremism.

In other words, it's really hard to tell when someone is being serious online.

Jack’s post about the beer mile is a classic example of this. He was being extreme in his satirization of banking and LinkedIn culture, but didn’t expressly indicate that.

So of course people took it the wrong way.

But here’s the deal—in the previous section we learned that the reverse Flynn effect is likely BS because society has changed so quickly that typical intelligence tests no longer provide an accurate barometer of modern intelligence.

But I would argue that Poe’s Law is a highly accurate measure of modern intelligence. Deciphering content online is one of the most important skills you can have in the modern era. And yet literally hundreds of people failed it so spectacularly under Jack’s post alone. One post! Hundreds of failures!

It’s why I can’t shake the feeling that maybe we actually are getting dumber.

Failing to pass Poe’s Law is the modern-day equivalent of failing an IQ test.

Final Thoughts

Steeped in this entire piece is my own self satisfaction. One of the more satisfying parts of “getting the joke” is making fun of others who don’t. It’s classic “us vs them” tribalism that encourages loyalty from people within the group in return for the security that comes with being a part of a tribe.

I get the joke so I wrote a whole piece aligning myself with the “in” crowd.

Does this truly make me smarter than the people who don’t get it? Again, we can’t really arrive at a satisfying answer. It’s all contextual and in this context I have a more discerning eye then they do.

But given the importance of responsible participation in online discourse these days, I’m more than a little nervous that there are still so many people out there ill-equipped to determine reality online.

With AI deepfakes and elections cycles on the horizon, “internet dumb” people are increasingly going to be at risk of manipulation. And that manipulation will certainly spill into the real world.

So maybe everyone isn’t getting dumber, but it would sure make me feel a lot better if people would stop falling for Jack Raines LinkedIn posts sometime soon.