W24 •A• The Stupidity Subsidy ✨

**Khayyam** (0:00)
Welcome to The Deep Dig, where we break down complex subjects with Token Wisdom.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
And just to be perfectly clear, right out of the gate, Token Wisdom isn't some guru sitting on a mountain somewhere.

**Khayyam** (0:11)
Right. Absolutely not. We're talking about extracting the exact tokens of knowledge, like the literal nuggets of actionable insight that you actually need to survive the absolute onslaught of information we are all drowning in.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:24)
Every single day.

**Khayyam** (0:25)
Every single day. So I want to start today by looking you right in the eye, or I guess the ear, considering the medium we're in, and delivering the most confident, load-bearing, universally accepted wrong sentence on the Internet today.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:38)
Oh, lay it on them.

**Khayyam** (0:39)
You ready for this? Here it is. We're getting dumber.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:42)
I mean, it's basically the baseline assumption of every single cultural critique right now.

**Khayyam** (0:46)
Everywhere. You literally cannot escape it. Everyone from your cranky uncle complaining at Thanksgiving, to literal tech billionaires in Silicon Valley, to random verified accounts with classical statues as their profile pictures.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:00)
Oh, the statue guys. Always the statue guys. Always. They are all out here screaming that society is actively losing its mind.

**Khayyam** (1:08)
Right. The narrative is that our IQs are just falling off a cliff.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:12)
They were sliding rapidly backward into the primordial ooze, and that idiocracy wasn't a comedy, it was a documentary.

**Khayyam** (1:18)
Yeah. It is the ultimate tension of our current era, right? This inescapable, suffocating feeling that humanity is just reverting.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:27)
Which is exactly why we are pulling this specific thread today on this deep dive. Because we're looking at a blisteringly sharp piece of source material.

**Khayyam** (1:35)
Yeah. An op-ed by At-E-Am Khayyam titled The Stupidity Subsidy.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:40)
Such a good title.

**Khayyam** (1:41)
It's so good. And the central premise of this piece, it doesn't just push back on that panic, it completely flips the entire board over.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:47)
Totally upends it.

**Khayyam** (1:48)
Right. Because the core argument here isn't that our inherent biological intelligence moved, it's that the reward function moved.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:55)
Reward function moved. I mean, you are absolutely going to want to strap in for this one. Because our mission today, right here, right now, is to entirely dismantle this comfortable, arrogant panic around falling IQs. We are going to dig up and resurrect a genuinely savage economic theory from 1976

**Khayyam** (2:14)
That most people have completely forgotten about, by the way.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:17)
Oh, totally forgotten. And we are going to explain the exact mechanics of how we inadvertently built a planetary scale, trillion-dollar machine that literally pays brilliant people to act like absolute idiots.

**Khayyam** (2:32)
And then, the kicker, we blamed the idiots for acting exactly how the machine paid them to act.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:38)
Exactly. We built the trap.

**Khayyam** (2:39)
We manufactured the bait. We handed a customized trap to every single person on Earth. And then we just sit around acting shocked when this steel jaws snapshot in our collective psyche.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:48)
It's wild.

**Khayyam** (2:50)
So if you are ready to find out the real mathematical reason why the absolute smartest people you know are posting the most unhinged self-destructive things online, can you dig it?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:01)
Hold on. Let me jump in and play devil's advocate right out of the gate here. Because I know exactly what the listeners are shouting at their dashboards right now. They're saying, wait a minute, the slant effect did stall.

**Khayyam** (3:09)
Yeah, they're looking at the numbers.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:11)
Right. And they aren't wrong about the raw numbers. The data is sitting right there. Standardized test scores in Norway, Denmark, France, Britain, they are demonstrably dropping.

**Khayyam** (3:23)
Measurably going down.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:24)
We're talking about a decline of roughly five to seven points a generation in some of these cohorts. So how do you look at a measurable cross national decline in cognitive horsepower and not conclude that the species is sliding backward?

**Khayyam** (3:37)
I mean, it looks like a completely clean descent into cognitive collapse. Right. The graph goes down. Ergo, we are getting stupider.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:45)
Exactly.

**Khayyam** (3:45)
But hold up. This is where the source material drops the hammer with this 2018 study by Bratsberg and Rogeberg.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:52)
Oh, the PNAS paper.

**Khayyam** (3:53)
Yes. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the methodology they use to prove this isn't genetic rot is just, I mean, it's an absolute masterpiece of data science.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:02)
It really is elegant because they bypass the fatal flaw of most population studies.