Making wild assumptions about my character flaws is not an “another opinion”, it’s an insult. An unprovoked one, I might add.
Furthermore, Bio’s assertion comes from inability or willful refusal to engage with my arguments. My point of view is that Cataclysm, being a global apocalyptic event and all, will force people to employ more efficient survival and economic strategies, because the alternative is death. The state of the world serves as an overriding factor, and individual reactions to the whole situation will quickly become irrelevant.
I’m not sure how this point of view makes me egocentric, but I do know that there will be no further discussion if this is how it goes around here.
Depends how you define “smart”. If it is in the form or intelligence (IQ) than maybe fluid intelligence might improve in some people as they are forced to solve problems they have never faced before and crystalline intelligence could very well increase in many people as they need to learn entirely new skill sets and ways of thinking to survive in this new world.
If you mean smart in a more general way than I would argue that maybe not the cataclysm itself would make people smarter (unless they mutated) as the conditions that it creates certainly would improve many people’s mental capabilities as they are forced to use them:
Better planning now that calendars and electronic schedules have become obsolete and you need to figure out how you are going to use your time and how.
You will be forced to rely on your memory more for mapping the terrain and for navigation (no GPS for you) as well as for remembering all of the new skills you have learned.
You will have to adopt a certain level of strategic thinking to deal with the monsters as well as for hunting successfully.
You would need to get very resourceful and creative to solve problems you never had to face before and use the limited resources that you have access too. Even if resources weren’t an issue because you scavenge you would still need to get past the zombies or mutants guarding them.
Since an IQ of 100 is a relative definition in itself (based on the age and some other factors the “normal” or “average”), it will adjust with every dead person.
Interestingly, with enough deaths of “stupid” people in the world, the IQ of the remaining will decrease (without a change in their intelligence, lore aside).
Technically GPS would still function a few years into the future, although with increasingly less precision and an increased risk of satellite collision.
Intelligence doesn’t exist on some continuum that can be measured, and pointing to things like 100+ IQ as if it correlates strongly with some generalized intelligence measure has a lot of flaws. And the example of hoarding around coronavirus has its own problems. Yes, stores were running out of “silly” things like bread, milk and toilet paper, but they were also running out of sanitizers and durable calories (canned goods, rice, beans). And gun stores have been running out of inventory consistently all year.
In short, it is a flaw to underestimate people based on things you hear from media. They typically make better decisions than the spectacle of society is willing to give them credit for.
This. The media is often surprised when there’s a power outage or a government shutdown or something and we’re not immediately at each other’s throats. They sometimes even report urban legends that fit their notion of how people are, like reporting on how snipers were supposedly shooting at rescue workers during hurricane Katrina. (Never happened)
A large group of people given the chance to calmly assess situations will generally make much better decisions than any one individual. That goes out the window, however, when it comes to appeals to emotion, which can twist their decision making skills. Basically crowds are wise, mobs are dumb and dangerous. (This is why appealing to fear, hate, anger, and envy are the preferred tactics of crooked politicians)
Even determining what a ‘smart’ decision is depends a great deal on game theory outcomes which are generally both unstable and probabilistic.
If people are rushing out to buys guns because of a general public perception of instability that then subsides, the gun buyers were ‘stupid’ because they spent a lot of money on something they clearly didn’t need.
If however, the panic continues to increase because of the perception of instability as more people rush to arm themselves, then the gun buyers were right - even though their run on gun stores may well have been the proximate CAUSE of the panic that finally leads to citizens shooting each other.
In this case its like a bank run. Your money is fine UNLESS everyone tries to withdraw at once, in which case everyone trying to withdraw becomes the actual threat and cause of systemic collapse. Individually intelligent action leading to collectively stupid calamity.
These are both classic game theory problems where people preparing for the worst outcome CAUSE the worst outcome. Were they right, or were they wrong? Depends on whether you’re asking the question from an individual or societal standpoint. If you ask as an individual, its a toss up, because they’ve prepared themselves for a bad situation, but also placed themselves in that situation - but if you ask as a society, they were entirely wrong and fucked it up for everyone.
Of course, if society is coming apart because of some EXTERNAL threat such as a natural disaster or inter dimensional invasion, then the negative game theory aspects of arming yourself or looting your neighbor’s house for canned goods mostly disappears and such behaviors become mainly constructive. But actually this seems to be rather the rarer case historically. Lots of countries have managed to panic themselves into very bad situations, effectively self-destructing due to the perception of threat - often encouraged by foolish or self-interested leadership who stand to benefit from such disruption.