On the Road to Idiocracy
Ken_g6 writes:
People really are getting dumber. Futurism echoes a paywalled Financial Times report:
...assessments show that people across age groups are having trouble concentrating and losing reasoning, problem-solving, and information-processing skills - all facets of the hard-to-measure metric that "intelligence" is supposed to measure.
Is it COVID?
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.
is it smartphones?
While there certainly are ways to use tech that don't cause harm to cognition, studies show that "screen time" as we know it today hurts verbal functioning in children and makes it harder for college-age adults to concentrate and retain information.
They also mention a decline in reading, but don't come to any conclusions. So why do you think people are getting dumber?
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