Are Westerners getting dumber?

I read an article a few months ago that literacy scores among people in Europe and America were getting worse. I would link to this article, but as I am a dumb Westerner I have not saved it anywhere and I’m not willing to find it. But if you use Google you can see many articles speaking about the same subject from different viewpoints.

Personally, I think people are smarter than ever, but also dumber in certain areas. The way the world is now you can get away with being poor at things that you needed to be good at in the past, but you need to be good in other areas.

What even is intelligence?

People normally judge intelligence by IQ scores, but IQ scores don’t actually correlate to intelligence as they’re specific tests, all they do is measure how good you are at taking one specific test. Then we add the fact that there are many different IQ tests out there created by different parties that have different standards.

There are no universal unbiased IQ tests so I don’t think they hold any value other than being a way to boost your ego.

The average person seems to judge intelligence by how similar someone’s opinion is to theirs. If you think like me then you must be smart, and if you don’t then what are you even doing here?