You see a lot of interesting looking people when you spend six hours in the waiting area of an ER.

That is a very minor Silver lining in an otherwise dark cloud. Hope all’s ok!

Ditto. If you were waiting for 6 hours to get seen by a doctor, that's a good sign. Low priority.

Things are fine, or at least no worse than they were yesterday. My father-in-law had a stroke a few weeks ago. We are here in AZ to help out. Today he had swelling an dark color in his foot. At the end of the day they said there was no reason to worry today and sent us home. He needs to see a vascular specialist to keep an eye on it.

But seriously, it was a freak show in the waiting area.

ETA: We only waited two hours for them to see him. The rest of the time was taken up doing tests. I stayed in the waiting area because I felt his wife and my wife were enough in with him.

I shall defy the title of this thread to tell you all that I am getting another cat, and it’s looking highly likely it will be a kitten who may or may not go blind at some future time due to juvenile cataracts.

That is all.

Awwww Pics please!!

Trust me, when I get a new cat, there will be pictures.

Something something new pussy.

Newer than my current one at any rate.

It’s like 99% that I’ll be getting this specific cat, a roughly 5 month old male Siamese who was rescued from a hoarder situation, apparently a really bad one with dead and sick animals all over the place. He had a bad respiratory infection when he was rescued (and his brother died) but other than the possible eye problems he’s fine now. I’ll probably be getting him the very end of this month or the first week of November, I’m taking a trip to NY in two weeks and it would make zero sense to bring him up to Maryland then immediately leave him alone for four days.

Gotta pick out a suitable name, no way he’s keeping the one from the foster (Q-ball). I’m really excited about this, I’m fully embracing the crazy cat lady persona. Although two actual cats is my limit. I’m not THAT crazy.

Do you have some data to suggest that the average IQ is far lower since smartphones were introduced?

Do you know of some way to quantify polarization? Would increased polarization lead to more civil wars?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_...of_progression though I don't actually believe this is due to IQ. I liked the idea that it was due to an aging population.

How about the percentage of republicans marrying democrats? https://www.voanews.com/a/mixed-poli...e/3705468.html

We have fairly similiar in the UK where people say on Tinder 'I don't talk to Tories'.

Whatever the interpretation is, saying we're "far dumber" seems to be a bit of a stretch.


This seems to be a pretty good quantitative indication of increasing polarisation.

The Aman.da Kno.x, Flat Earth, and JFK threads did not exist before smartphones were common, proving that smartphones result in both a dumber and more polarized population.

My phrasing was bad: I don't think we're getting dumber, and posted that earlier. I do think we're getting more polarised though, certainly in Europe and the US.

Yeah, the "far dumber" was a Howard quote

No, but I didn’t really mean it in an IQ sense. In large part, our society argues about silly issues in unsophisticated ways. Pull up a comment thread to an article on fox or cnn, and the level of rhetoric is about at the level of “No, you!”

I don’t. And I suppose my comments are undisciplined, in that I can’t support them with anything more than anecdotes.

It was, and I was speaking loosely. I do think that the art of conversation and the ability to write carefully and well are both decaying. How often do conversations you’re in really make you think hard? What percent of the time is your written communication a casual 2p2 post as opposed to a thoughtful and careful letter? In my case, the answers are “rarely” and “very high.” It’s certainly possible that we’re the same now as we always have been. But my strong subjective impression is that my smartphone is a massive distraction from focused and disciplined behavior.

I think the increased amount of visible writing is just exposing the level of writing that was always there, from people who before would never have their written words visible to anyone.

I am genuinely not sure whether that’s a somewhat subtle troll.

No it's not a troll. Before the Internet, most people didn't use the written word to communicate, at least beyond a scrap of a note on a refrigerator, or a hastily scribbled Thank You note.

Now, people who before would only have used the spoken word, are posting on Twitter, on Facebook, on Internet forums, and more. They're having to write to communicate, and they're terrible at it.

So it looks like people are worse at writing than they used to be. But they aren't. They were always terrible. You just never had to read it before.

I always had problems with writing. It is not only in english but in every language I speak. And it was despite the huge amount of books I have read.

Writing on the internet propelled me forwards with writing in general. I don't have this "OMG OMG OMG how should I start this report" any more in my job. I don't have to dig so much through examples and templates. I learned to put this question in front "What do I actually want to communicate?". Writing got for me a lot easier due to the internet.

Clearly you are right that I put in more effort in my professional writing. I vowed so often to start to proofread my posts before I push "submit" and I still rarely do it. But a sheer amount of text I produce on the internet improved somehow my ability to verbalize my thoughts.

I did understand the post. I just thought that your last sentence was poorly written, and I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate.

Howard,

I don't think YouTube commenters would have been masterful scribes or orators in pre-smartphone eras.

Old dude gonna old. Missing the good ol' days of riveting repartee and separate water fountains.

Last sentence? It was a one sentence post!

Howard confirmed senile.