Or as the kids say today, “No shit, Armlock.”
Young people are struggling with reduced attention spans and weakening critical thinking skills. Though there has been a demonstrably steep decline in cognitive skills since the COVID-19 pandemic due to the educational disruption it presented, these trends have been in evidence since at least the mid-2010s, suggesting that whatever is going on runs much deeper and has lasted far longer than the pandemic.
If there is anythng to this it would be due to smart phones and the like. I can see how people wouldn’t think they need to memorize things any longer and various other areas of cognition that might decline. The obvious thing that fits here is the movie Idiocracy.
However, I’m personally leery of studies that show big movements of anything like this. Evolution takes place on a long time scale and not over a few years.
These aren’t my thoughts but somebody I read on another board who was also critical of this study and studies like these:
1.It’s possible the measures used in the study are wrong.
2It’s possible that due to things like smart phones that intelligence has shifted to other areas of cognition like possibly an increase in the ability to focus on two things at a time.
The Australian Broadcasting Company radio documentary Future Tense did an episode a couple weeks ago on something related to this (and also mentioned in the excerpt) declining attention spans. It turned out one study was based on nothing more than how long people stayed on a web page before clicking and that is in decline. This study was based on real data from ISPs. As was pointed out in the episode, there can be multiple explanations for that so it isn’t really proof of anything. There was then contrary evidence presented showing increasing attention spans and concentration such as the lengths of movies increasing again, people binging streaming television shows and the ability of people to play video games for hours on end.
In the end, that suggests what was already known: that people don’t have trouble concentrating on things they enjoy doing.
I’m not sure that I agree with your final statement. I love to write this page, but I often find that when I am researching something I am interested in, I get distracted by something I’m even more interested in, and this can become a concatenation so convoluted that I lose track of the original project. The internet, with its infinite nooks and crannies, containing a high percentage of all human knowledge, is definitely tough on concentration.
Does that carry over to non-internet activities? I can’t say.
Two things
1.Of course it could be ADD/ADHD but I doubt that in your case. I wonder how many of the things you get distracted by are related even if just tangentially to what you were originally researching.
2.I appreciate the first part of what I wrote might have seemed like a contradiction (although again these aren’t my arguments orginally.) On the one hand, I’m arguing that brains don’t change that quickly, on the other hand that cognition might shift to another area given that its less needed for things like memorization. It’s a bit of a cliche, but there are the claims about people who lose a sense but have other senses strengthened. I think it’s recognized that cognition can shift to enhance other areas slightly and in this case I’m referring to abilities that brains already have, whether that includes the ability to focus on two things at the same time, I don’t actually know.
I think the idea of a looming ‘Idiocracy’ is bit of a misassumption. The premise of Idiocracy was that ALL of humanity got dumber, but in this case, it seems apparent that there’s a now a concerted effort by well educated and intelligent people, backed by enormous wealth, to take control of the US government and do away with the inefficiencies of lobbying . Regulation and law were the last bastions preventing corporations from stripping workers of their rights and destroying the environment – all of which is now effectively gone. The difference now is that a majority of voters are becoming too dumb to even notice (or care) that they’ve been manipulated.
This isn’t only doing away with inefficiencies. Did you see they want to shutter the Education department? They want a populace without the tools to think critically or resist in even the most rudimentary way. The Fuckstick said it, he loves his low-education voters. Cos they’ll fall for anything.
Well educated and intelligent? It’s more like the cult of believing wealth equates to education, intelligence, and merit is the crux of idiocracy.
To make money, all you need is someone to convince to give you money, that’s it. To get a position somewhere, all you need is to convince the decision maker to give you one, that’s it. There’s no requirements or grand tribunal that comes up with methodologies for wealth or merit in society.
Tesla died a broke man despite inventing the entire AC electrical grid system we use today. Bell Labs had a group of forgotten engineers invent the transistor, which is the crux of all computing today. DARPA invented the TCP/IP computing system we’re communicating on right now. Xerox PARC engineers handed the archetypal user interface to computers we all use today away. Paul Allen purchased the fringe OS that copied CP/M from Gar Kildall that then became MS-DOS that IBM allowed Microsoft to keep the license for. And Tim Berners-Lee created the application protocols we al utilize the web for today.
Note in all of this, the original scientists and engineers who created all of the technology infrastructure we utilize today as the crux of our economy and it’s the rich public figures that sit in rooms and exploit others and make terrible decisions are the ones considered intelligent and worth of these societal credits we call currency.
That’s the idiocracy in society. And I’ve seen at a low level what these “DOGE kids” credentials are and what they’ve attempted to do. They’re not very smart, with a social media history of requiring AI to write their scripts and at a high level Musk with a remedial understanding of nuance of a database system making wide claims to fraud.
If humanity survives and actually evolves into a more intelligent species, this era and mythos of people like Musk and Trump will be looked at the same way we look at early societies offering human sacrifices to false idols.
My wife teaches, She says the kids hit hardest by Covid are in second grade now. They’re hell on wheels: they throw stuff, have a tough time learning, are in or near tantrum mode all the time. Around 2033, when they start driving, fucking look out.
I’m completely shocked at this revelation given the amazing logical worldview prevalent in today’s society.