Are Humans Dumb? There are some people who think the human race is pretty dumb. There is one thing for sure we humans have made some really terrible decisions in our lifetime. One had only to look at our planet to determine this. When we are confronted with being in a panel such as a jury panel and there are about 100 prospective jurists which have to go on an elevator, they will all try to jam in one elevator, I have seen this many times. You would think they would know better. This is a very small example, here is a bigger one. Who would build a nuclear power plant in an area where there have been tsunamis? Apparently, humans would, just look where the Fukushima nuclear power plant was built. Could we have picked a worse place? The plant is spilling out radiation and contaminating huge areas of the sea and if something isn’t done it will get worse in the next few years. If we look at the development of nuclear weapons, we see humans creating weapons which really can’t be used because if one country uses them another country will wipe out that country and so forth leading to the destruction of the world and a nuclear winter. We know this yet we keep improving these weapons, having them is not bad enough. Nuclear weapons were the worst thing we ever developed, but now we are working on something some say is even deadlier. I am talking about artificial intelligence which could some day be the downfall of the human race. Some very powerful systems are being developed world wide and strangely enough the United States is working on an artificial brain known as sentient. Is this just a coincidence or do the scientists think the brain will be alive? If we ever create artificial life will it ultimately destroy us? Some believe it will thinking we are just too radical and dangerous. Bence Nanay Ph.D. in Psychology Tomorrow wrote an article titled “Stupidity Is Part of Human Nature.” It refers to all the articles published every week showing how irrational the human race is. We have all done stupid things at one time or another. I look back at some of the stupid things I did and I can’t help but laugh at how dumb they were. Some scientists are saying we are getting dumber and not smarter as a race. The nation of Norway was said to have been studied and the IQ of the citizens has gone down. There is compulsory service there with I.Q. testing and the scores are getting lower. Since 1970 to 2009 the I.Q. scores of each generation have gone down by seven points. This is a huge amount of decline. Research seems to have ruled out genetics. It is believed to be caused by the way we live. It is not believed to be cause by video games because in the early 1970s when it was detected there weren’t any. The cause is a mystery, but it seems this is an indication that our older population could be smarter than our younger one. Perhaps the problem is knowledge is not being passed from the older to the new generations because they just think they already know everything. Scientific American Magazine stated we have all done dumb things we knew we shouldn’t have. One psychologist stated there is a city built on the fact we will do dumb things and that city is Los Vegas, Nevada. I guess we can’t win an argument since the odds are always with the house. Did you ever see someone get a tattoo of their current girl or boy friend only to lose them and be forced to either have the tattoo redesigned, or taken off? This is more common than one might think. Another example might be someone that gets a weird haircut and immediately regrets it. There are plenty of more examples. Even famous people do dumb things. When CIA director General Davis Petraeus posed for a picture it was not very smart. He had posed with his biographer Paula Broadwell with whom he was having a secret extra-marital affair. You would have thought he would have be smarter than that. Bill Clinton was not too bright for a Rhodes scholar when he had an affair right in the White House and thought no one would notice. The man was surrounded by the Secret Service 24 hours a day. There are plenty of other examples of people we think of as smart doing dumb things. Gary Hart was a senator who resigned to run for president. He should have known posing for a photo with his mistress Donna Rice while wearing a tee shirt with the word Monkey Business on it was not the best move for someone having an extramarital affair with Rice. He also thought he was smarter than everyone else and the media would never find out. Why not just paste the words affair on a wall? Why would a CEO ring up a bill of $241,000 in a sex club on a company card and then dispute the charges? Did he think this would never come out? This caused the executive to have to resign and settle the case out of court. An editor at a prestigious newspaper was one of the youngest. He had a meteoric rise to the top of his profession until the publisher found out 27 of the articles he wrote out of 41 were not true. He was making up articles for a newspaper. We all know how something like this works out. How could he believe this would not be discovered? There have been many instances where scientists have falsified data for a discovery they have made. I always wondered about this, because one would think the data would be tested by other scientists which is what ultimately happens. When the other scientists do not get the same measurements in their experiments there is a big problem which could ruin a career and usually does. A department store in Ireland had the escalator which went down from the second floor to the first floor break. It was going to take a month to fix so signs were posted to use the stairs or elevators but so many people were getting on it guards had to be posted to redirect people. Why is it we all have failures of common sense from time to time. We might grab a hot pot handle or turn around and knock things off the table by swinging our arms? I guess we will never be perfect.
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