Is Entire Human Race -- Not Just US Voters -- Getting Stupider?

Stanford University genetics professor Gerald Crabtree, thinks humans have been dumbing down for some time now. He may be right, but not necessarily for the reasons he thinks.

...rather than getting cleverer, human intelligence peaked several thousand years ago and from then on there has been a slow decline in our intellectual and emotional abilities.

Although we are now surrounded by the technological and medical benefits of a scientific revolution, these have masked an underlying decline in brain power which is set to continue into the future leading to the ultimate dumbing-down of the human species...

...Life as a hunter-gatherer was probably more intellectually demanding than widely supposed, he says. “A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his or her progeny, whereas a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would receive a substantial bonus and be a more attractive mate,” Professor Crabtree says. _Independent

Our Fragile Intellect -- PDF article by Gerald Crabtree discussing his theory

From a newsrelease on the study:

"The development of our intellectual abilities and the optimization of thousands of intelligence genes probably occurred in relatively non-verbal, dispersed groups of peoples before our ancestors emerged from Africa," says the papers' author, Dr. Gerald Crabtree, of Stanford University. In this environment, intelligence was critical for survival, and there was likely to be immense selective pressure acting on the genes required for intellectual development, leading to a peak in human intelligence. From that point, it's likely that we began to slowly lose ground.

With the development of agriculture, came urbanization, which may have weakened the power of selection to weed out mutations leading to intellectual disabilities.

Based on calculations of the frequency with which deleterious mutations appear in the human genome and the assumption that 2000 to 5000 genes are required for intellectual ability, Dr. Crabtree estimates that within 3000 years (about 120 generations) we have all sustained two or more mutations harmful to our intellectual or emotional stability. Moreover, recent findings from neuroscience suggest that genes involved in brain function are uniquely susceptible to mutations.

Dr. Crabtree argues that the combination of less selective pressure and the large number of easily affected genes is eroding our intellectual and emotional capabilities. _MXP

On the other hand, there is the 10,000 Year Explosion hypothesis, which outlines how modern Ashkenazi Jews evolved into the most intelligent and productive -- in a scholarly sense -- of all modern populations.

According to the 10,000 Year Explosion, civilisation actually accelerated human evolution in good ways.

And don't forget the "Lynn - Flynn Effect" (first discovered by Richard Lynn, but grand-standed by James Flynn). According to Flynn's interpretation, in some ways, modern humans are becoming more intelligent than their immediate ancestors, in terms of IQ test scores, at least.

But if we step back from the more focused viewpoints of Crabtree, Cochran & Harpending, and James Flynn, and look at the species as a whole, we see that the global IQ actually is decreasing -- but for different reasons than given above.

Because of differential birthrates between persons of high intelligence and persons of low intelligence, offspring from low IQ matings are much more numerous than offspring from high IQ matings -- and becoming exponentially more so over time.

There is nothing mysterious about this mechanism for the dumbing down of the species, although there is a great deal that is politically incorrect about it -- which is why you will not see it being taught in government schools anytime soon.

If you haven't seen the film Idiocracy, consider looking it up. It would be worth it just for the first 5 or 10 minutes. Here is a preview:



Pay attention to the family tree for the two featured family groups. Notice how the one family tree grows exponentially, while the other withers away.

Regardless, those who are concerned about the intermediate and long term future of the human species will need to pay attention to all levels of demographic change, from the molecular to the national and global.

And then there is the concern over a decline in the number and quality of human sperm -- popularly depicted in the book and film, The Children of Men. While recent Danish research tends to have refuted the idea of a decline in human sperm, males who produce prolific amounts of high quality sperm may be able to supplement their incomes as sperm donors. BTW, at the blog Al Fin, You Sexy Thing!, our writers take a look at the phenomenon of Semen Therapy, a new way for young men to pay their way through college.

The most significant force which is likely to counter-act any natural decline in human intelligence, is the fact that a lot of smart people want to become smarter. And since the genetics of cognition is approaching the stage where humans may be able to intervene to make new generations of humans more intelligent, the possibility of the "engineered evolution of cognition" is becoming a bit more probable as western science progresses.

There are many forces at work shaping the evolution of humans on planet Earth. We should not assume that evolution naturally leads to greater fitness or sophistication. Natural selection would be just as happy to see humans dumbed down as to see them grow smarter. Most corrupt politicians would prefer to see them dumbed down -- they are easier to manipulate that way.

Widespread Mental Atrophy and the Coming Idiocracy

It has been widely observed that the birthrate of countries tends to fall as they become more wealthy. Most countries in Western Europe now have birthrates below the replacement rate; in the absence of immigration, their populations can be expected to fall in the future.

... one might expect that since low IQ countries tend to be less wealthy, they should also be expected to have higher birthrates than countries with high IQ. If population IQ and wealth remain constant, the average IQ of the world should then fall over time, since a larger portion of population growth will occur in low IQ countries. _Fourmilab

FourmilabWe are fairly safe in projecting a steady decrease in the world average population IQ over the next 40 years, given current trends in birthrates. The "Flynn Effect" may slow the rate of decline of mean global population IQ somewhat, but the trend seen in the two graphs presented here is the most likely general scenario, for this statistic.

GNXPFollow the Dark Blue Line Down L to R
This dysgenic trend is caused by differential birthrates between women of high intelligence and women of low intelligence. It portends an ominous future for large areas of the world which may lose or destroy their "smart fractions," their lifelines to high technology amenities of the developed world such as electricity, modern transportation, and modern medicine.

But a far more pressing concern for modern societies in the year 2011 is the process of "dumbing down" which has been applied to citizens from pre-school through graduate school, and beyond. It is this underutilisation of cognitive potential which is greasing the wheels for the bullet train bound for Idiocracy.

Consider the public and academic debate over why Japan surrendered at the end of World War II. In the Boston Globe article linked above, the author presents what he and others claim is a new and radical theory which they say is likely to overturn decades of conventional wisdom. Instead, what is presented is a false dichotomy -- an elementary logical fallacy which should have been spotted by anyone graduating from grammar school. Yet, you have academics grappling for supremacy based upon the inability to integrate multiple causes for events.

Or take this article about the famous "wild boy" Peter of 18th century Germany. The author of the article, an historian, apparently settles upon an explanation for the wild boy Peter's existence, which any 8 year old would instantly recognise as impossible. See if you can spot the author's oversight.

We are faced with a future of magnificent technologies, where each human can potentially own thousands of "technology slaves" to do large numbers of things for him on a routine daily basis. In such a pampered world, there is a clear danger of humans allowing many of their faculties to atrophy and wither, becoming vestigial. It is yet another form of "dumbing down," to add to the multitude of other forms emanating from schools, the media, mainstream culture, and the labyrinth of political rules, regulations, and norms which are endless, contradictory, inexplicable, and ultimately destructive to independent thought and action.

The Idiocracy will have many simultaneous causes. The process described in the video clip above is just one of the many dynamic foundations of the coming Idiocracy -- which will be far less benign and peaceful than the movie portrays. More like The Coming Anarchy described by Robert D. Kaplan.

The multicultural celebrations in London last week offer a foretaste of the coming state of any western cities which have allowed neo-tribalism and multiculturalism to proceed beyond a prudent point. Some cities will be lucky to escape total destruction of city centres and the immediate surrounding areas.

Global IQ Test Results by Nation

Many wonderful technological and scientific discoveries and developments are on their way. It is important to position oneself so as to be able to take advantage of these technological advancements. At the same time, it is important to place yourself and your family in a place of relative safety and security, and to always push yourself and those close to you to develop and expand their given abilities.

It is important to keep in mind the critical core needs of an advanced civilisation, and to develop better ways of providing them on an impromptu, decentralised basis. Brian Wang takes an interesting, preliminary look at this idea.

If your government and mainstream culture is killing the future of your civilisation, you need to think of alternatives.

Dividing the Nation: Going Galt vs. Government a la Carte

When most Americans think of secession, they imagine maps of a divided America such as the one above. Most of us learned in history class what happened the last time a group of states decided to secede from the Union. Very few people want a repeat of the War Between the States. Therefore, a far more popular form of secession -- personal secession -- is gaining more modern adherents. Personal secession is a more finely grained form of secession than regional, state, or county secession -- it is secession on the individual level.

Have you seriously thought about seceding from the monstrous beast that the US government (or any central government) has become? First you have to consider all the things that governments provide. Police, fire departments, water, sewer, medical care, national defense, schools, roads, licensing, environmental regulation, protection from fraud and abuse, and so on . . .

"Personal secession ....things like homeschooling, house churches, home gardening, home-based economics, just regaining privacy and a sense of community rather than worrying about what's going on in Washington, D.C... What's the latest thing from the Supreme Court? _CNN

The quote above comes from the leader of a group of christian secessionists. But it could as easily come from a group of libertarian or communist or hindu secessionists. Personal secessionists may "go Galt", or do most essential things for themselves. It is possible to do that, but a division of labour in society provides for more leisure, and more choices in products and services.

How can you non-violently secede from an idiocracy without having to do everything for yourself and your family? Call it "virtual secession" or non-territorial secession.

The problem with physical secession is that it is very difficult to achieve critical mass. There is probably not much overlap between the people you want to live with and the people who want to choose your particular form of government. The vast majority of us put up with government we dislike in order to live in proximity to people with whom we want to work and play.

With virtual secession, you could still live in San Francisco or Manhattan or Silver Spring while seceding from much of the government at the city, state, and Federal level. You and your next-door neighbor might belong to very different governmental units. _ArnoldKling

Patri Friedman runs a blog called A Thousand Nations, which looks at increasing personal freedom through new nation formation. This post from A Thousand Nations looks specifically at "virtual secession" or "non-territorial secession." And Cato Unbound devoted a special issue to the topic of "self-governance" or personal secession.

Libertarians and other informed malcontents have been thinking and writing about secession for well over a century. And with the coming of the uber-statist Obama Pelosi regime, the idea is likely to come to the surface more and more often. People who believe that they can work within the system to make it more rational, may get involved in the "You Cut" movement, where citizens work with legislators to cut the least useful and most destructive government programs. But for many persons, government has gone much too far off the deep end of totalitarianism for such "trimming about the edges" to work.

Today, our government interacts with us as subjects and children. It takes money from the productive and responsible and uses it to pay for the consequences of the people who are irresponsible and unproductive. As long as bad behavior is subsidized two things will be true. The irresponsible will not make responsible choices unless they are forced. The second is that the government will continue to assert its right to regulate all our behavior on the grounds that it is paying the bills, even though it is with our money. If we choose to interact with our government as children, expecting it to meet our every need, then it will fill the role of parent and will exercise legitimate control as a consequence of that occupation.

The fix to this is simple. Remove the government safety net. For one hundred and fifty years of our history we got by just fine without it. There was no FDA, no welfare checks, no illegal drugs, no government health insurance or Social Security. Somehow, without the government intervening, the American citizen built this country from a few colonies on the eastern seaboard to a world power, economically and militarily. Somehow, hard drinking settlers tamed the west. Without government regulation, we all had food to eat and water to drink and roofs over our heads, and that food and shelter was considerably better than that in the Old World. If you engaged in negative behavior you bore the consequences. If you lost your job you found something else or you depended on your family or neighbors and they determined your “recovery” or the worth of putting their time and money into your life based on your cooperation. If you resorted to crime to support bad habits, justice was swift and harsh. Morality, justice and community were essential in such an environment and that is exactly the way it should be. _SecessionUniversity

You will find a lot of reading material pertaining to such topics at the Mises Online Library, and at the Library of Liberty Online.

The basic idea is the formation of organisations that operate in parallel to the government, to provide essential goods and services which persons cannot reasonably provide for themselves. In such a system, bad choices will lead to unpleasant consequences. That means that persons who are particularly stupid or impulsive will not do well in such a system unless they are surrounded by a close-knit society of friends, relatives, co-religionists, etc. who are standing by to help them through the rough spots.

Systems of self-governance will tend to promote and unleash persons who are intelligent, disciplined, competent, and forward thinking. That is exactly the type of person the future will demand, to meet the type of challenges that wait for us.

In the US, society has been engaged in the dumbing down and handicapping of generations of its citizens -- at least since the 1950s. That process of induced helplessness and dependency received a turbo-boost from the election of the Obama-Pelosi regime. But the final destination of selectively breeding for incompetence in the face of hopeless economic and demographic challenge, is utter calamity.

Unless thoughtful persons are willing to try another approach, they are dooming future generations to a society of certain collapse from debt and demography -- the very problems that are doing in Europe, Japan, and Russia in real time.

This is not a flush of oil a mile deep, 100 miles offshore from a lazy big easy. This is a river of destruction flowing down on all of us from the source -- Washington DC. What are you going to do?

Teaching Self-Esteem Backfires! Teach a Child to Enjoy a Challenge, Instead

Parents and teachers have been misled for many years--lured by the siren song of "self-esteem" to ruin a child's chances for success. Stop doing that!

...more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.

The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

Praising children’s innate abilities, as Jonathan’s parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.

...the most persistent students do not ruminate about their own failure much at all but instead think of mistakes as problems to be solved. At the University of Illinois in the 1970s I, along with my then graduate student Carol Diener, asked 60 fifth graders to think out loud while they solved very difficult pattern-recognition problems. Some students reacted defensively to mistakes, denigrating their skills with comments such as “I never did have a good rememory,” and their problem-solving strategies deteriorated.

Others, meanwhile, focused on fixing errors and honing their skills. One advised himself: “I should slow down and try to figure this out.” Two schoolchildren were particularly inspiring. One, in the wake of difficulty, pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips and said, “I love a challenge!” The other, also confronting the hard problems, looked up at the experimenter and approvingly declared, “I was hoping this would be informative!” Predictably, the students with this attitude outperformed their cohorts in these studies.

...The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that’s that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they can be remedied by more effort. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.

SciAmMind

The author of the SciAm Mind article may have her terminology a bit confused, but the underlying idea is sound: ability--competence--is malleable and can be developed through hard work and training. Intelligence is the component behind the capacity for competence. Intelligence was always there, waiting to be trained. It is safe to say that no children are trained to use their intelligence to its fullest.

In fact, with the abysmal performance of schools--still teaching self-esteem, thus teaching failure--it is safe to say that the disconnect between intelligence and performance can be vast indeed.

Psychological neoteny is lifelong incompetence--the learned helplessness of an incompetent adolescent that persists throughout the person's lifetime. But no one needs to be incompetent. Each person capable of basic schooling contains a core of competence that can be trained and developed. Government schools appear designed to create and permanently instill psychological neoteny.

If government school methods of teaching are worse than worthless, you might think that the methods could be changed. But you would be wrong to think that. Few things are as impervious to improvement as government schools. Much better to scrap the system entirely--at least the poorest performing 40%--and hand over the responsibility to outside groups more in contact with the last few decades' findings in the neuroscience of learning.

We are spending a lot of money to ruin our children. How stupid is that?

Is Dumbing Down Schools a Political Issue?

First of all, dumbing down the schools is not a "liberal" vs. "conservative" issue. Leftist (a more accurate term than "liberal") parents love the children they send to public school every bit as much as rightists who send their children to private or religious schools. If they sometimes push their children into poor learning environments, it is not out of a lack of love.

Next, what makes an issue a "political" issue? A political issue is one that is discussed in political campaigns, mentioned often in legislative sessions, and featured prominently in the speeches of elected officials. Political issues are frequently addressed in legislative bills and laws. In that sense of "political", school dumbing down barely moves the detector. While government schools have become mass producing meat grinders for the minds of the young, there are no government or political officials whose mention of government schools ever comes close to describing the problem.

Rather, it is a question of "raising test scores", "achieving higher levels of ethnic diversity", "increasing tolerance", "better orienting girls for careers in science and math", and other overly focused goals that fail to address the underlying problem of failure to prepare young minds for a tumultous future.

The dumbing down of schools in North America goes far beyond left-right politics. It goes to the heart of whether future generations will be able to confront the existential and near-existential threats they will meet. It is a large determinant of the survival of western civilisation. Minimising the importance of the widespread movement to dumb down education, is a form of denial which is equivalent to denying existential risk itself.

Whether dumbed down children are indoctrinated into leftist, rightist, centrist, or uppist or downist political points of view is irrelevant. The salient point is that the children's minds have been stunted--as if they had been chained inside a closet during their formative years and missed numerous developmental windows.

It is true that confirmed, activist leftists are far more likely to deny that there is any such problem as I have mentioned with government schools. Any problems that may exist can be easily solved by budgeting more money for the schools, by providing better financing to the intellectual architects of the present system. Do the same, only more of it. This advocacy by leftist activists, and the opposition to modern trends in government education by many in the center and on the religious right, may well lay the groundwork for this issue to become a public political issue, in campaigns and in legislative action.

But those political activists above are not usually addressing the key concern--the dumbing down, the stunting of minds, the age-isolation away from learning responsibility: leading to psychological neoteny. The abolition of the diversity of ideas--the only kind of diversity that matters in education--from the college and university environment that leads to academic lobotomy. Those issues remain beneath the radar for the most part. They are not political, unless the desire to see humans achieve the most that they can is political.

Is the Internet Getting Dumber? Provocative Letter From A Reader

Dear Al Fin,

When I started on the internet in Jan 1992, its average IQ in my
estimation was at least 130.

I arrive at this estimate by noting that 130 is the average IQ
among computer programmers. Programmers and system
administrators, a job that is approximately as intellectually
demanding as programmer, probably contributed >40% of the
content (mainly Usenet and ftp documents; the web was not an
important source of content for me till late 1993) I consumed
during those early years. College professors and grad students
contributed much of the rest.

Moreover, The content authored by people of diverse occupations
who were neither academics or IT professionals seemed to me at
least as intelligent as that from the IT pros and academics.

Undergrads were a big part of the internet in 1992, but I tended
to avoid forums, .e.g., IRC and MUDs, populated mostly by
undergrads.

The IQ of the author of the average piece of content picked at
random from the net in 2007 is still above the average worldwide
IQ because smart people spend more time on the net than dumber
people, but the mere size of the net ensures its average IQ is
significantly lower than in 1992.

The difference between 1992 and 2007 has provided me a very vivid
and detailed illustration of your point about the importance of
keeping the IQ of a population high. If the evolution of the net
is any illustration, a community with high IQ functions much more
efficiently than one of lower IQ.

On the mailing lists (and newsgroups, which are very similar) I
read in 1992, when someone asked a question he often would
instruct his reader to reply to him personally. He would
summarize the replies he received and post the summary to the
list (or newsgroup).

The purpose of asking a question this way, for those who cannot
guess, is to keep the volume of traffic as low as possible while
exchanging as much useful information as possible.

In the lingo of the net of 1992, this was referred to as keeping
the list's "signal-to-noise ratio" high.

In the net of 2007, most participants of mailing lists do not
show any signs of being aware that keeping the signal-to-noise
ratio high might be a desirable thing.

And many list owners and moderators speak of their list as if
more traffic is always a good thing, with no sign that they are
aware that traffic imposes a cost on the reader (namely, it
consumes the reader's time and attention).

It has been at least five years if I recall correctly since
I saw a question-asker offer to summarize the responses
he receives to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high.

Moreover, regularly I see evidence that a participant cannot
figure out how to send a personal email to the author of a post:

"Please excuse me for posting this to the entire list but I'm not
very computer sauve. I would like to contact Isis back-channel
but don't know how to do this. When I hit reply button it seems
to go to entire list. If Isis would be so kind as to send me a
personal message with her email address I would much appreciate
it. Thank You."

Think about this for a second: all the person needed to do is to
find the email address of "Isis" (copying the address to paper if
she cannot figure out cut and paste) then to send an email to
that email address.

On the group in question the email address is almost always
valid and not mangled against spammers (because Yahoo Groups
verifies address validity when you subscribe) and is always to be
found in the From: field of the header.

And what sort of internet user cannot send an email to
an address written down on paper in front of her?

Actually, the person quoted above is a better mailing-list
participant than many in 2007 in that she articulates her
inability, apologizes for it and is aware that it is less than
ideal.

I could go on with this comparison for a long time, but it is
probably more illuminating for the reader whose interest has been
piqued to sample a newsgroup thread from 1992 for himself.
For example, one might read the famous "LINUX is obsolete"
thread:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/browse_thread/thread/c25870d7a41696d2/f447530d082cd95d?tvc=2

Now since Google Groups' web site might contain a lot of code to
clean up the messages and thereby show the messages posted to
1992 Usenet newsgroups in an unfairly positive light relative to
2007 newsgroups and 2007 mailing lists, it behooves the reader to
view the original versions of the messages, which (on Google
Groups) are available at the top of every message via a link
titled "Show original" though one has to click "More options" to
reveal that link. Here for example is the original version of
the first message in the thread:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/msg/f447530d082cd95d?dmode=source

Al Fin Note: I feel that the reader is quite correct--the internet has not only gotten less intelligent over the past 15 years, it has gotten much ruder. Rather than using the remarkable resources of the internet to enlarge their horizons, more people seem to be using it as a gossip forum, or a political (even terrorist) attack platform.

Fortunately the internet allows for "enclaves" of intelligent discourse and instruction. Those who wish to use the internet for personal growth and learning are completely free to do so. You could look at the divergent uses of the Internet as a form of "Balkanization." But that is the nature of any enabling technology. It can only enable us to do what we are predisposed to do.

Cognitive Dissonance on Global Warming Due in Britain Tomorrow If Strong Action Not Taken

Memo--Need to Know Only:

Modern westerners have forgotten how to read. When presenting information to them, it is vital to present the information on film, or video. Further, one must present only one side of the story. Presenting two or more sides to any story risks creating cognitive dissonance, which in an Idiocracy can bring down an entire government.

British television's Channel Four risks the horror of cognitive dissonance tomorrow by showing a documentary contradicting Al Gore's well-received documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," which won an American Film Oscar. The documentary is titled "The Great Global Warming Scandal."

A television documentary airing this week in Britain claims the greenhouse theory on global warming is a scam.

Filmaker Martin Durkin's documentary "The Great Global Warming Scandal" says the sun, and not human-generated greenhouse gases, is to blame for the increase in the Earth's temperature, The Washington Times reported.

Durkin says the greenhouse theory is "the biggest scam of modern times."

The program, scheduled for broadcast Thursday on Britain's Channel 4, features experts in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, biogeography and paleoclimatology, the newspaper said.

Source.

The actual truth about "global warming" is far less important than what people actually believe about it. If people can be led to believe that "global warming" is a danger to the entire earth and all its inhabitants, governments can pass sweeping legislation, installing huge new departments monitoring and regulating every private, business, and governmental action that even peripherally impacts on "global warming." International institutions in particular could benefit--in effect creating a massive international transfer of wealth from those who have it, to those who want it and can acquire the power to take it.

With so much at stake, it is important that people not be confused. They should be presented with only one side of the topic, so that their depleted cognitive apparati not be overloaded. I cannot stress this strongly enough.

A decades-long campaign to dumb down the schools is just now ready to bear fruit in a very large way. For the public's own good, those who control the gates to public information--assimilable information such as video and film media--must forcefully prevent conflicting points of view from being viewed.

Up until now, we have been able to control most of the substantial sources of information to the public dealing with important topics. Blogs and other minor media are unimportant, given the low credibility most people assign to the internet. Television and cinema, however, are taken very seriously by the dumbed down populace.

I trust you will all see to it that the public's right to protection from cognitive dissonance is protected. Anything less is irresponsible.

Hat tip Audacious Epigone.