Overall really good critiques of his video. Just a couple of notes, particularly about how television and other mediums affect the minds of people: - IQ level is not decreasing in younger generations. In fact it's been going up fairly consistently. Look into the Flynn Effect. There's been a slight breaking in the trend in recent years in some countries but overall it's held. - Just because a medium requires you to be somewhat active within it doesn't mean it's working all the same muscles as reading. Think about how fragmented the attention is of many people. Constantly task-switching. Much of the media people engage with *is* the short-form content that you noted as an exception to your thesis. It's not enough that there are tons of long-form articles, etc. out there on the web. The real question is how much and for how long do people engage with those materials compared to TikTok or other short-form entertainment content? The really interesting thing with all this is the internet allows for the extremes of all mediums from previous eras all at once. Available 24/7 365. Want to go down a rabbit hole of shortform fun yet moronic content? TikTok et al have you covered where MTV no longer does (and it will be directly customized to your tastes). Want to debate some obscure book from 500 years ago? There's a forum for that. One thing to note about that though is the TikToks of the world are much more habit-forming than something like a serious web forum so it gets increasingly more difficult to pay attention to the stuff that would probably give you a stronger mind via engaging with it.
The Flynn effect technically doesn't apply anymore but there are several reasons to believe it wasn't even real. If we look at the correlates to intelligence that can be measured across a society like the diversity and amount of vocabulary we're using or reaction times or per capita innovations they've all gone down since the 1870s. This would make sense because child mortality sharply declined in this period which had the side effect of allowing people with worse off genes live on (because poor genetic mutations of the mind mean genetic mutations of the body) . You can also look at the interests of a society and they have all become less intellectual think of how Einstein,Sigmund Freud and the like were treated like rock stars. As well in regard to screens I'd say they've definitely nullified the population. The Canandian study is an example but even from anecdote my father was telling me a few days ago he knows a mother restricted her son from all screens and now he is now about 14 and is in the Oxbridge set. In my opinion over time our societies will develop social taboos through sexual selection that'll make using screens every night as taboo as drinking alcohol every night
Nick! You HAVE to link up with Rudyard and do a video series that examines how the economic environment affected societies throughout history. That would be LIT!! Love your podcast.
WRONG! ;) 50's were ECONOMICALLY the best. 90's were best for bubble getting truck quick schemes and stories. In the 50's the USA simultaneously inherited global police power, ruins of empires, folded the and their colonies (mostly) into a global alliance, sold production with no competition for payments made with loans the USA gave to everyone in the alliance, and was like China in manufacturing but free (and in many ways, then more advanced than they are today). There just isn't any comparison to those who look at the stats. Measures by the 90's were really heavily manipulated (r.g. gov knowing the country is bankrupt already and hiring Harvard to help "save" on SS benefits via adjusting CPI...), dollar had precipitously declined, labor competion with offspring not only kept pressure on wages down but mass loss of industry hollowed out American cities...
Alot of places didnt have telephones and refrigerators till long after their advent. 1950s did see increasing masse adoption of tech that had already been growing
The biggest mistake WhatifAltHist makes in my opinion is to say that the Vietnam War wasn't that important. The thing is, the Vietnam War is the first war where the general American population begins to think that America is not on the side of good. Even though America did some terrible things in World War 2, the point is, the general population thought that America was on the side of good. We were defeating Hitler and Japanese imperialism. Whereas in the Vietnam War, we were fighting an enemy that just wanted land reform under Communism, and we did it by destroying entire villages (My Lai massacre) and raping women.
For us yes, but globally it's importance is arguable. If heard historians say that if the US made that stand in Africa, it would have been far more effective.
Vietnam was also largely about protecting the global heroin trade, if you don't account for that you really don't understand global power for the last couple huhdred years.
The recording software I used was different for this reaction video and it the background noise removal feature must have hit my voice disproportionately. I fixed it part 2.
There is a major difference between absorbing information and critically analyzing the information in front of you. I was born in 78. In school we would have exercises labeled critical thinking yett, there was nothing critical in the exercise. You can see this in political discourse. Political debate is typically surface level, without any real depth taking place within the discussion. You can find plenty of deep discussion available, but those discussion are outside the mainstream. He has valid reason to dismiss IQ testing. IQ test gauge absorbed information, not the ability to come up with an original solution. For instance, they will have patterns and you need to solve the pattern. The solution is found by drawing on pattern recognition skills you have been taught. You are simply following a process that has been absorbed.
I’m tired of this stereotype. My boomer dad and his brother inherited a family business from their father and uncle. They might have had other career preferences, but they selflessly did it. Then they sold and did very far-sighted estate planning. Just the exception?
you should also hear this comment --it'll remind me to return and continue. So busy it's hard to resume when there's so much going on, so much content, and so little time. And I was really enjoying points you're making.
I think that overall you did a great analysis of the material at hand. I especially found the idea of diffusion of culture to be interesting, and logical. One aspect I disagreed with was when you stated that the fears of the cold did not augment consumer culture, based on the fact that 3rd graders would not be affected. There is plenty of literature to support the notion that our subconscious emotions and behaviours are mostly formed within the first 7 years of our lives. "Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man." - Aristotle There is plenty of contemporary literature to back this up as well. What has been perfected in the last century is the appeal to our emotional desires. Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, learned everything he could, from his uncle, about primal desires, and applied it to marketing. It turns out fear is one of the greatest tools used in marketing, no matter the product you are selling. When children were told to hide under desks, the product they were being sold was YOLO. The world is going to end, so you might as well enjoy. This goes on today with constant fear mongering that the world is going to end. What is the product being sold? I did find your content interesting and useful. Subscribed
American Italian food is generally from the poor regions of Italy, the south. The specialty, technical culture is the north. There isn’t a lot of food that comes from the north. Italy is almost two different societies, as had long been realized. The liberalizing of divorce doesn’t come from the Boomers. Even the graph you provided points to that - where it started to increase in the early 1960s before the Boomers had a chance to get married. What kicked this off is something people don’t realize. Right after WWII people people of different ethnic backgrounds, who immigrant ancestors migrated here in the late 19th century, moved to the suburbs. While these people were Americanized on the surface, they carried their immigrant habits with them, good and bad. These were the marriage partners, often coming from partners they met in high school. Or college. That created another issue, in that the parents of the couple didn’t get to know each other well, only a few years. This even happened in churches, like the Catholic ones, where a suburban Catholic Church didn’t appear to a specific ethnic group, but all in the area, such that people with Italian, Irish, German, and Polish surnames mixed - along with their ancestral habits. Young adults in their 20s don’t realize these (plus annoying habits are hidden during dating), so when you get 10-20 years into marriage, these different ancestral habits clash - and become unbearable. That lead to the increase in divorce rates - and it was exacerbated by their families who didn’t have strong enough bonds before marriage to mediate and defuse conflicts. It didn’t really hit Boomers as these things take a while, and it wasn’t until the next generation that people took a step back from marriage. What do I mean by “these habits?” I’ll give an example - from an ethnic group that’s only common in the far northern states (Wisconsin to Washington), the Norwegians. My co-worker grew up in a Scandinavian neighborhood, but he wasn’t of that ancestry. He told me why he wouldn’t date the girls from Norwegian families “they’re really cute, but their fathers are nuts!” As someone of Norwegian ancestry and some habits, I know these annoying habits he’s talking about. He was astute enough to see this, but many guys in his neighborhood weren’t. Now, people still married within their existing ancestral ethnic groups, and divorce rates increased there as well. While those habits didn’t clash as much, I think that was more a matter of divorce not shameful as it was half a century ago. It’s probably why they rose throughout the world too, as other countries copied the Americans. The skyrocketing divorce rates are therefore the melting pot in play - it’s a deeper level of melting than we wish to acknowledge, yet.
Europe had a 2021 military budget of around $460bn PPP and so many areas where it's obviously always been larger than the US due to larger population size, lower costs, Soviet leftovers etc. Europe's naval industry still leads and the other arms sectors still have a lot of competition left to preserve individual national security while allowing a lot of technology sharing and joint projects to combine advantages. Europe has had nearly continuous warfare for 15k years so the novelty value isn't the same ROI as the US still gets.
Chriss predicted this and breaks this down is on our first interview on the economic future of California. ruclips.net/video/QUFt2FCvg_c/видео.html I’ll answer the rest of your questions in the 1K sub special video.
Im not sure if Mario and Kirby increased my overall iq. Im sure some kind of problem solving and reaction timing are improved more than from tv, but 1,000 hours of skyrim did little to improve my general capabilities other than teaching me about mead. The fact that they're more fun than tv may imply we spent even more time on entertainment versus spending time reading or practising practical skills, like woodwrokering, sewing, etc. Compared to someone in 1950, I spent vastly less time learning anything useful.
I love your counterpoints and agree with most of it... but the sound of your voice is too low, that made the video hard to watch, however the analysis kept me here, so keep up the good work!
Overall really good critiques of his video. Just a couple of notes, particularly about how television and other mediums affect the minds of people:
- IQ level is not decreasing in younger generations. In fact it's been going up fairly consistently. Look into the Flynn Effect. There's been a slight breaking in the trend in recent years in some countries but overall it's held.
- Just because a medium requires you to be somewhat active within it doesn't mean it's working all the same muscles as reading. Think about how fragmented the attention is of many people. Constantly task-switching. Much of the media people engage with *is* the short-form content that you noted as an exception to your thesis. It's not enough that there are tons of long-form articles, etc. out there on the web. The real question is how much and for how long do people engage with those materials compared to TikTok or other short-form entertainment content?
The really interesting thing with all this is the internet allows for the extremes of all mediums from previous eras all at once. Available 24/7 365. Want to go down a rabbit hole of shortform fun yet moronic content? TikTok et al have you covered where MTV no longer does (and it will be directly customized to your tastes). Want to debate some obscure book from 500 years ago? There's a forum for that. One thing to note about that though is the TikToks of the world are much more habit-forming than something like a serious web forum so it gets increasingly more difficult to pay attention to the stuff that would probably give you a stronger mind via engaging with it.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. You make a lot of good points.
The Flynn effect technically doesn't apply anymore but there are several reasons to believe it wasn't even real. If we look at the correlates to intelligence that can be measured across a society like the diversity and amount of vocabulary we're using or reaction times or per capita innovations they've all gone down since the 1870s. This would make sense because child mortality sharply declined in this period which had the side effect of allowing people with worse off genes live on (because poor genetic mutations of the mind mean genetic mutations of the body) . You can also look at the interests of a society and they have all become less intellectual think of how Einstein,Sigmund Freud and the like were treated like rock stars.
As well in regard to screens I'd say they've definitely nullified the population. The Canandian study is an example but even from anecdote my father was telling me a few days ago he knows a mother restricted her son from all screens and now he is now about 14 and is in the Oxbridge set.
In my opinion over time our societies will develop social taboos through sexual selection that'll make using screens every night as taboo as drinking alcohol every night
Iq is going down. Being on social media drops it automatically.
IQ and testosterone are going down from the end of the Victorian era. These are some of the largest and longest running datasets we have as a society
Nick! You HAVE to link up with Rudyard and do a video series that examines how the economic environment affected societies throughout history. That would be LIT!! Love your podcast.
WRONG! ;)
50's were ECONOMICALLY the best. 90's were best for bubble getting truck quick schemes and stories.
In the 50's the USA simultaneously inherited global police power, ruins of empires, folded the and their colonies (mostly) into a global alliance, sold production with no competition for payments made with loans the USA gave to everyone in the alliance, and was like China in manufacturing but free (and in many ways, then more advanced than they are today).
There just isn't any comparison to those who look at the stats. Measures by the 90's were really heavily manipulated (r.g. gov knowing the country is bankrupt already and hiring Harvard to help "save" on SS benefits via adjusting CPI...), dollar had precipitously declined, labor competion with offspring not only kept pressure on wages down but mass loss of industry hollowed out American cities...
Alot of places didnt have telephones and refrigerators till long after their advent. 1950s did see increasing masse adoption of tech that had already been growing
The biggest mistake WhatifAltHist makes in my opinion is to say that the Vietnam War wasn't that important. The thing is, the Vietnam War is the first war where the general American population begins to think that America is not on the side of good. Even though America did some terrible things in World War 2, the point is, the general population thought that America was on the side of good. We were defeating Hitler and Japanese imperialism. Whereas in the Vietnam War, we were fighting an enemy that just wanted land reform under Communism, and we did it by destroying entire villages (My Lai massacre) and raping women.
For us yes, but globally it's importance is arguable. If heard historians say that if the US made that stand in Africa, it would have been far more effective.
Vietnam was also largely about protecting the global heroin trade, if you don't account for that you really don't understand global power for the last couple huhdred years.
The audio levels are all over the place with this video.
The recording software I used was different for this reaction video and it the background noise removal feature must have hit my voice disproportionately. I fixed it part 2.
There is a major difference between absorbing information and critically analyzing the information in front of you. I was born in 78. In school we would have exercises labeled critical thinking yett, there was nothing critical in the exercise. You can see this in political discourse. Political debate is typically surface level, without any real depth taking place within the discussion. You can find plenty of deep discussion available, but those discussion are outside the mainstream. He has valid reason to dismiss IQ testing. IQ test gauge absorbed information, not the ability to come up with an original solution. For instance, they will have patterns and you need to solve the pattern. The solution is found by drawing on pattern recognition skills you have been taught. You are simply following a process that has been absorbed.
I’m tired of this stereotype. My boomer dad and his brother inherited a family business from their father and uncle. They might have had other career preferences, but they selflessly did it. Then they sold and did very far-sighted estate planning. Just the exception?
The estate planning part is definitely not the exception.
Good video, although your mic's very quiet and Whatifalthist's video is very loud in the video.
Growing up in the 90s was awesome.
you should also hear this comment --it'll remind me to return and continue. So busy it's hard to resume when there's so much going on, so much content, and so little time. And I was really enjoying points you're making.
I think that overall you did a great analysis of the material at hand. I especially found the idea of diffusion of culture to be interesting, and logical.
One aspect I disagreed with was when you stated that the fears of the cold did not augment consumer culture, based on the fact that 3rd graders would not be affected.
There is plenty of literature to support the notion that our subconscious emotions and behaviours are mostly formed within the first 7 years of our lives. "Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man." - Aristotle
There is plenty of contemporary literature to back this up as well. What has been perfected in the last century is the appeal to our emotional desires. Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, learned everything he could, from his uncle, about primal desires, and applied it to marketing.
It turns out fear is one of the greatest tools used in marketing, no matter the product you are selling. When children were told to hide under desks, the product they were being sold was YOLO. The world is going to end, so you might as well enjoy. This goes on today with constant fear mongering that the world is going to end. What is the product being sold?
I did find your content interesting and useful. Subscribed
Thanks for the sub!
Bro ended with a Forest Gump line 😂
American Italian food is generally from the poor regions of Italy, the south. The specialty, technical culture is the north. There isn’t a lot of food that comes from the north. Italy is almost two different societies, as had long been realized.
The liberalizing of divorce doesn’t come from the Boomers. Even the graph you provided points to that - where it started to increase in the early 1960s before the Boomers had a chance to get married. What kicked this off is something people don’t realize. Right after WWII people people of different ethnic backgrounds, who immigrant ancestors migrated here in the late 19th century, moved to the suburbs. While these people were Americanized on the surface, they carried their immigrant habits with them, good and bad. These were the marriage partners, often coming from partners they met in high school. Or college. That created another issue, in that the parents of the couple didn’t get to know each other well, only a few years. This even happened in churches, like the Catholic ones, where a suburban Catholic Church didn’t appear to a specific ethnic group, but all in the area, such that people with Italian, Irish, German, and Polish surnames mixed - along with their ancestral habits. Young adults in their 20s don’t realize these (plus annoying habits are hidden during dating), so when you get 10-20 years into marriage, these different ancestral habits clash - and become unbearable. That lead to the increase in divorce rates - and it was exacerbated by their families who didn’t have strong enough bonds before marriage to mediate and defuse conflicts. It didn’t really hit Boomers as these things take a while, and it wasn’t until the next generation that people took a step back from marriage.
What do I mean by “these habits?” I’ll give an example - from an ethnic group that’s only common in the far northern states (Wisconsin to Washington), the Norwegians. My co-worker grew up in a Scandinavian neighborhood, but he wasn’t of that ancestry. He told me why he wouldn’t date the girls from Norwegian families “they’re really cute, but their fathers are nuts!” As someone of Norwegian ancestry and some habits, I know these annoying habits he’s talking about. He was astute enough to see this, but many guys in his neighborhood weren’t.
Now, people still married within their existing ancestral ethnic groups, and divorce rates increased there as well. While those habits didn’t clash as much, I think that was more a matter of divorce not shameful as it was half a century ago. It’s probably why they rose throughout the world too, as other countries copied the Americans.
The skyrocketing divorce rates are therefore the melting pot in play - it’s a deeper level of melting than we wish to acknowledge, yet.
Why did divorce rates skyrocket in ethnically homogeneous European countries concurrently with the time it was happening in the US?
Europe had a 2021 military budget of around $460bn PPP and so many areas where it's obviously always been larger than the US due to larger population size, lower costs, Soviet leftovers etc. Europe's naval industry still leads and the other arms sectors still have a lot of competition left to preserve individual national security while allowing a lot of technology sharing and joint projects to combine advantages. Europe has had nearly continuous warfare for 15k years so the novelty value isn't the same ROI as the US still gets.
Nick, if you want a history lesson mixed with comedy, check out Razorfist. He is hilarious. He does a great one on Walt Disney.
Do you have any plans on making a video about California's $25 billion deficit?
Chriss predicted this and breaks this down is on our first interview on the economic future of California.
ruclips.net/video/QUFt2FCvg_c/видео.html
I’ll answer the rest of your questions in the 1K sub special video.
Im not sure if Mario and Kirby increased my overall iq. Im sure some kind of problem solving and reaction timing are improved more than from tv, but 1,000 hours of skyrim did little to improve my general capabilities other than teaching me about mead. The fact that they're more fun than tv may imply we spent even more time on entertainment versus spending time reading or practising practical skills, like woodwrokering, sewing, etc. Compared to someone in 1950, I spent vastly less time learning anything useful.
I love your counterpoints and agree with most of it... but the sound of your voice is too low, that made the video hard to watch, however the analysis kept me here, so keep up the good work!
I really like this channel because nick doesnt seem to lie or become hyperbolic for clicks
50s 60s one household income, 90s two household income. It was better in the 50s and 60s.
8:40 "The world's coming to an end, I don't even care. As long as I can have my limo and my orange hair" Earache my Eye
I enjoyed this video but as others have said, audio could use some work.
I can hardly hear half of the dialog.
Enormous blind spot in so far as this analysis excludes any mention of Gen X.
Gotta fix your audio dude
That was recorded two years ago. I've fixed it since.
Baby boomer zombies
30