I thought that the article was very good and said several things, none of them contradictory. One of my favorite paragraphs was this:
One of several corollaries to the cultural brain hypothesis is that larger, more interconnected populations amass cumulative cultural know-how at a faster rate. Evidence for this idea is abundant. Henrich cites studies of traditional tool technology in Polynesia and Oceania, which have found that larger, more populous islands (those with a bigger collective brain) had more sophisticated tools for marine foraging and fishing. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, when the government simplified the postal system in 1840 so that anyone could mail a letter for a penny, “There was a spike in innovation, because a lot more letters were zooming around.” In the early 20th century in the United States, IQ scores in rural towns “increased dramatically” whenever investment in schools, roads, and railroads connected these communities to the larger national “cultural brain.” Prohibition provides a counterexample: the shuttering of saloons led to a drop in innovation. That discovery was “non-intuitive,” Henrich notes, because one might expect that people would be “cognitively healthier without alcohol. But people were swapping ideas” and conceiving new ones in the saloons, leading to “a lot of innovation.”
The place where this theory hits the wall is with the advent of the internet, where in theory, everyone on earth has access to all information at the click of a mouse. The problem is that the web created communities within the larger community of country or town where people with similar pre-formed ideas were able to reinforce each other, no matter how factually challenged or ignorant those ideas might be. A large portion of the world actually got dumber watching cable news and sharing their crazy ideas online. It was a hotbed for bigotry and conspiracy theories that persist to this day. No one seems to seek out verification or contrary opinion to their pre-formed ideas, regardless of which end of the political spectrum they land on.
It's like the old joke; "I have a device in my pocket with all of the accumulated knowledge in the history of the world on it and I use it to watch cat videos and argue with strangers."
