Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?

clovenhooves The Personal Is Political General Article Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?

Article Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?

Elsacat

578

Yesterday, 6:42 AM

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-we-living-in-a-golden-age-of-stupidity-technology

https://archive.today/3V39W

I'm not anti-tech at all. But anything overused, or used improperly, can be bad, no matter how good or helpful it can also be.

Quote:A global OECD study found, for instance, that the more students use tech in schools, the worse their results. “There is simply no independent evidence at scale for the effectiveness of these tools … in essence what is happening with these technologies is we’re experimenting on children,” says Wayne Holmes, a professor of critical studies of artificial intelligence and education at University College London. “Most sensible people would not go into a bar and meet somebody who says, ‘Hey, I’ve got this new drug. It’s really good for you’ – and just use it. Generally, we expect our medicines to be rigorously tested, we expect them to be prescribed to us by professionals. But suddenly when we’re talking about ed tech, which apparently is very beneficial for children’s developing brains, we don’t need to do that.”

Over-reliance on tech is only one issue with both kids and adults (the article covers both). But modern schooling seems to be setting up kids for a real-life "Idiocracy." Everyone's too busy freaking out over gender ideology in schools (which is a problem but appears to be on the way to solving itself as the fad dies out) to see a bigger threat that's likelier to affect their kid, and do so permanently, and they won't see their own complicitness in it with their own kids.

Technology has made me stupider, more attention-fractured. Some of it is my fault for sure. Nobody pointed a gun at me and ordered me to monitor work chat while being in meetings while checking email while working on projects, all in the name of "responsiveness." But in a world that demands multi-tasking, demands people do 20 things at once while truly focusing and retaining none of them, how to do things differently without opting out of the world as we know it?

And that doesn't even touch the way tech is adapting to people who fracture their attention like this in their nonworking lives, the person who scrolls on their phone while Netflix is on while paying bills or making dinner or tending to the kids. Netflix is responding by developing, or trying to develop, content that caters to people who are doing things other than watching what's playing.

Elsacat

Yesterday, 6:42 AM #1

Quote:A global OECD study found, for instance, that the more students use tech in schools, the worse their results. “There is simply no independent evidence at scale for the effectiveness of these tools … in essence what is happening with these technologies is we’re experimenting on children,” says Wayne Holmes, a professor of critical studies of artificial intelligence and education at University College London. “Most sensible people would not go into a bar and meet somebody who says, ‘Hey, I’ve got this new drug. It’s really good for you’ – and just use it. Generally, we expect our medicines to be rigorously tested, we expect them to be prescribed to us by professionals. But suddenly when we’re talking about ed tech, which apparently is very beneficial for children’s developing brains, we don’t need to do that.”

Clover
Kozlik's regular account 🍀🐐

1,187

Yesterday, 6:44 PM

Quote:
Quote:A global OECD study found, for instance, that the more students use tech in schools, the worse their results. “There is simply no independent evidence at scale for the effectiveness of these tools … in essence what is happening with these technologies is we’re experimenting on children,” says Wayne Holmes, a professor of critical studies of artificial intelligence and education at University College London.

Ha... Flashback to how people were thinking Gen Z kids were going to be the most technologically advanced generation yet, and then Millennials ended up stuck with being tech support for both Boomers and Zoomers... Turns out when you give kids device that has literally been dumbed down so hard that babies can figure out how to use it in the name of user experience, they don't actually learn anything technological. 🎶 Mommy let you use her iPad, you were barely two, and it did all the things we designed it to do... 🎶

Quote:But modern schooling seems to be setting up kids for a real-life "Idiocracy." Everyone's too busy freaking out over gender ideology in schools (which is a problem but appears to be on the way to solving itself as the fad dies out) to see a bigger threat that's likelier to affect their kid, and do so permanently, and they won't see their own complicitness in it with their own kids.

Millennials who grew up with No Child Left Behind were taught by teachers stressing the importance of improving some state test scores as the primary goal in their teaching and those students are now the ones who are teaching the next generation. (I wrote some of my thoughts about this in my "The educated proletariat and No Child Left Behind" thread.) Critical thinking has been abandoned since NCLB, imo, and rampant smartphone usage just added fuel to the fire (with AI slop being further used as an accelerant). I think that the gender ideology that has been proselytized in public schools is a symptom of this problem. I think this is also how the gender debate has gotten so fucking stupid, like you got teachers and liberal parents that were not taught critical thinking and just "be kind" screaming about how "trans good because it's good," and then you got conservative/moderate parents that were not taught critical thinking screaming that "trans bad because it's bad," with the "good" and "bad" attempting to be justified via usage of logical fallacies. Meanwhile, any actual analytical discussions on the harms of gender ideology and gender conformity as a whole are ignored because they're not able to be consumed in a 15 second TikTok video that primarily makes one feel rage or smugness.

Back on the tech side, yes, there has been significant comments in the teaching subreddits whenever they show up on my feed that talk about how smartphones are severely damaging the ability for children to be able to focus on teaching content. That is making matters even worse. Some teachers in school districts that have banned smartphones in class (honestly, crazy that they were ever allowed in the first place...) have optimistically mentioned an improvement in their student's behavior, so hopefully as more schools start implementing that, we can see some positive change.

The Guardian article She found that the more external help participants had, the lower their level of brain connectivity, so those who used ChatGPT to write showed significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity.

In other words, whatever the people using ChatGPT felt was going on inside their brains, the scans showed there wasn’t much happening up there.

[...]

[Teachers] worry AI is creating a generation who can produce passable work but don’t have any usable knowledge or understanding of the material.

The lights are on but no one's home... Ugh... This reminds me of a jarring interaction I had with a co-worker that seems to be overly relying on AI to do his job, maybe I'll rant about it in another thread.

Quote:To extend Christodoulou ’s metaphor, in the same way that one feature of an obesogenic society are food deserts – whole neighbourhoods in which you cannot buy a healthy meal – large parts of the internet are information deserts, in which the only available brain food is junk.

That seems pretty apt... And depressing. And then compound that with the fact that most people's attention spans have already been diminished by short form brain rot content, it'll make it even harder for them to want to get out of "information deserts," because anything else will be "boring."

Quote:What worries Miles and Clement is not only that their students are permanently distracted by their devices, but that they will not develop critical thinking skills and deep knowledge when quick answers are only a click away. Where once Clement would ask his class a question such as, “Where do you think the US ranks in terms of GDP per capita?” and guide his students as they puzzled over the solution, now someone will have Googled the answer before he’s even finished his question.

Imo, that's not really a problem. If the teacher wants to be stuck in a time where students couldn't quickly search such basic factual information, they can do that, but they're not teaching their students critical thinking then. Like, clearly the solution isn't "oh you're not allowed to look up facts," because in the real world, people can look up those facts now, so the answer is to actually utilize critical thinking skills in questions that do not have factual answers. (And even if they were in a situation where they couldn't look up facts, the answer to such a question could be "I don't know," and you would continue the discussion based on various assumptions you are making.) This particularly just seems like a lazy teacher complaint, similar to how math teachers in the past would lecture their students "you won't always have a calculator on you"... haaaaa.

Quote:“Being able to Google something and providing the right answer isn’t knowledge,” Clement says. “And having knowledge is incredibly important so that when you hear something that’s questionable or maybe fake, you think, ‘Wait a minute, that contradicts all the knowledge I have that says otherwise, right?’ It’s no wonder there’s a bunch of idiots walking about who think that the Earth is flat. Like, if you read a flat Earth blog, you think, ‘Ah, that makes a lot of sense’ because you don’t have any understanding or knowledge.”

Yeah, reading that the Earth is flat online isn't knowledge... it's just misinformation. So, now the teacher complains that when students look up facts on the internet, they can get misinformation? Then going back to the original complaint of students being able to easily look up facts for a factual question like "what's the GDP of the United States?", why can't the teacher just start asking Socratic method questions to the student who found the fact online, like where did they find the fact from, how valid is that source, how did that source get that data, and so on.

Hmm, I kind of went off on a tangent there at the end, those paragraphs interviewing that teacher just seemed really stupid to me lol. Maybe I'm missing something and I'm the stupid one tho. :meowderp:

Anyways, good article, albeit a bit depressing to read about all the stupidity going on, though what isn't depressing right now anyway? :catcry:

Kozlik's regular member account. 🍀🐐

Clover

Kozlik's regular account 🍀🐐

Yesterday, 6:44 PM #2

Quote:
Quote:A global OECD study found, for instance, that the more students use tech in schools, the worse their results. “There is simply no independent evidence at scale for the effectiveness of these tools … in essence what is happening with these technologies is we’re experimenting on children,” says Wayne Holmes, a professor of critical studies of artificial intelligence and education at University College London.

Quote:But modern schooling seems to be setting up kids for a real-life "Idiocracy." Everyone's too busy freaking out over gender ideology in schools (which is a problem but appears to be on the way to solving itself as the fad dies out) to see a bigger threat that's likelier to affect their kid, and do so permanently, and they won't see their own complicitness in it with their own kids.

The Guardian article She found that the more external help participants had, the lower their level of brain connectivity, so those who used ChatGPT to write showed significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity.

In other words, whatever the people using ChatGPT felt was going on inside their brains, the scans showed there wasn’t much happening up there.

[...]

[Teachers] worry AI is creating a generation who can produce passable work but don’t have any usable knowledge or understanding of the material.

Quote:To extend Christodoulou ’s metaphor, in the same way that one feature of an obesogenic society are food deserts – whole neighbourhoods in which you cannot buy a healthy meal – large parts of the internet are information deserts, in which the only available brain food is junk.

Quote:What worries Miles and Clement is not only that their students are permanently distracted by their devices, but that they will not develop critical thinking skills and deep knowledge when quick answers are only a click away. Where once Clement would ask his class a question such as, “Where do you think the US ranks in terms of GDP per capita?” and guide his students as they puzzled over the solution, now someone will have Googled the answer before he’s even finished his question.

Quote:“Being able to Google something and providing the right answer isn’t knowledge,” Clement says. “And having knowledge is incredibly important so that when you hear something that’s questionable or maybe fake, you think, ‘Wait a minute, that contradicts all the knowledge I have that says otherwise, right?’ It’s no wonder there’s a bunch of idiots walking about who think that the Earth is flat. Like, if you read a flat Earth blog, you think, ‘Ah, that makes a lot of sense’ because you don’t have any understanding or knowledge.”

Anyways, good article, albeit a bit depressing to read about all the stupidity going on, though what isn't depressing right now anyway? :catcry:

Kozlik's regular member account. 🍀🐐

YesYourNigel

269

Yesterday, 10:38 PM

The internet and especially ChatGPT are what made me go from a typical lazy kid who absolutely despised school to a certified nerd with knowledge of a ton of things from world history to quantum physics. It's also what allowed me to develop masculine interests and skills that I have always been discouraged from and told they were rocket science (they're not).

The vast majority of people around me lack basic knowledge of science and humanities, things we were supposed to learn in school. But everyone realises this is unreasonable because of how much our schooling relies on memorising tons of pointless information. The internet is what allowed content creators, often students who understand what it's like to struggle with this stuff, to actually break through the godawful format of formal education that relies not on making ideas understandable using simple intuitive means, but on making you seem smart by memorising jargon and throwing overcomplicated formal explanations at you concocted by people whose life passion is that subject, and who are more focused on having the explanations be the most technically accurate covers-all-edge-cases ones than actually comprehensible to people who neither know nor are interested in the subject.

ChatGPT for me was the teacher I never had: one who I could ask the dumbest questions in as much detail as I wanted to, one that would always meet me at my level instead of complaining that I didn't meet them at theirs, one that would dumb things down or go on tangents as long as it helped me developed a deeper understanding, instead of waiting to get back to reciting the "proper" explanations and order of things from textbooks. Formal education has always been so passive - I was always stuck with a ton of questions ("How do we know that?" "What about this case?" "How does that relate to this thing?") and the one-sided, shallow nature of it meant no-one would answer them. I was told to memorise the answers, pretend I know what I'm talking about and that was it. ChatGPT gave me the ability to hone connections between these things, to really get to the point of these subjects.

Unfortunately I realised most people use ChatGPT for really petty bullshit. And when they use it for studying, they just use it as Google or ask it to write school essays for them which they then just copy+paste. I think one good skill that using ChatGPT has taught me is how to ask exact questions, how to isolate exactly the parts that I am struggling to understand and how to word them in a way that they can be answered. I think maybe kids should be given that as a prompt: talk to ChatGPT about the lecture and ask it questions about it, or ask it to dumb it down. I also think ChatGPT is a great way to make learning interactive and actually feels like being taught by someone or exploring a subject, which is far more natural for people as opposed to just passively reading a book.

Edited Yesterday, 10:43 PM by YesYourNigel.

YesYourNigel

Yesterday, 10:38 PM #3

Magpie

105

8 hours ago

(Yesterday, 6:44 PM)Clover
Quote:What worries Miles and Clement is not only that their students are permanently distracted by their devices, but that they will not develop critical thinking skills and deep knowledge when quick answers are only a click away. Where once Clement would ask his class a question such as, “Where do you think the US ranks in terms of GDP per capita?” and guide his students as they puzzled over the solution, now someone will have Googled the answer before he’s even finished his question.

Imo, that's not really a problem. If the teacher wants to be stuck in a time where students couldn't quickly search such basic factual information, they can do that, but they're not teaching their students critical thinking then. Like, clearly the solution isn't "oh you're not allowed to look up facts," because in the real world, people can look up those facts now, so the answer is to actually utilize critical thinking skills in questions that do not have factual answers. (And even if they were in a situation where they couldn't look up facts, the answer to such a question could be "I don't know," and you would continue the discussion based on various assumptions you are making.) This particularly just seems like a lazy teacher complaint, similar to how math teachers in the past would lecture their students "you won't always have a calculator on you"... haaaaa.

Quote:“Being able to Google something and providing the right answer isn’t knowledge,” Clement says. “And having knowledge is incredibly important so that when you hear something that’s questionable or maybe fake, you think, ‘Wait a minute, that contradicts all the knowledge I have that says otherwise, right?’ It’s no wonder there’s a bunch of idiots walking about who think that the Earth is flat. Like, if you read a flat Earth blog, you think, ‘Ah, that makes a lot of sense’ because you don’t have any understanding or knowledge.”

Yeah, reading that the Earth is flat online isn't knowledge... it's just misinformation. So, now the teacher complains that when students look up facts on the internet, they can get misinformation? Then going back to the original complaint of students being able to easily look up facts for a factual question like "what's the GDP of the United States?", why can't the teacher just start asking Socratic method questions to the student who found the fact online, like where did they find the fact from, how valid is that source, how did that source get that data, and so on.

Hmm, I kind of went off on a tangent there at the end, those paragraphs interviewing that teacher just seemed really stupid to me lol. Maybe I'm missing something and I'm the stupid one tho.

Anyways, good article, albeit a bit depressing to read about all the stupidity going on, though what isn't depressing right now anyway?

I think his point was more that people (especially younger generations) now outsource everything to the internet and don't have their own internal store of knowledge anymore. The teaching of critical thinking skills that you're describing still needs to happen of course, but you can only do that if you're starting from a solid foundation of basic knowledge of how the world works. People also don't tend to retain information equally well if they simply look it up, compared to reaching the answer through their own reasoning skills. Nor do those skills get any practice at all. So these kids are basically trapped in a cycle where they're never achieving the ability to properly acquire knowledge.

That said, I would love a return of the Socratic method as a legitimate method for learning. Nowadays it gets treated as nothing more than a shortcut to getting accused of "sealioning" 🫠

(Yesterday, 10:38 PM)YesYourNigel ChatGPT for me was the teacher I never had: one who I could ask the dumbest questions in as much detail as I wanted to, one that would always meet me at my level instead of complaining that I didn't meet them at theirs, one that would dumb things down or go on tangents as long as it helped me developed a deeper understanding, instead of waiting to get back to reciting the "proper" explanations and order of things from textbooks. Formal education has always been so passive - I was always stuck with a ton of questions ("How do we know that?" "What about this case?" "How does that relate to this thing?") and the one-sided, shallow nature of it meant no-one would answer them. I was told to memorise the answers, pretend I know what I'm talking about and that was it. ChatGPT gave me the ability to hone connections between these things, to really get to the point of these subjects.

Unfortunately I realised most people use ChatGPT for really petty bullshit. And when they use it for studying, they just use it as Google or ask it to write school essays for them which they then just copy+paste. I think one good skill that using ChatGPT has taught me is how to ask exact questions, how to isolate exactly the parts that I am struggling to understand and how to word them in a way that they can be answered. I think maybe kids should be given that as a prompt: talk to ChatGPT about the lecture and ask it questions about it, or ask it to dumb it down. I also think ChatGPT is a great way to make learning interactive and actually feels like being taught by someone or exploring a subject, which is far more natural for people as opposed to just passively reading a book.

ChatGPT is what is called a "large language model". It's essentially just a language predictor, it comes up with whatever responses sound plausible based on the input you give it. It doesn't know whether the information it gives you is correct or not, because despite what commonly used terminology implies it does not actually have any sort of higher intelligence.

You cannot be certain that what you're being taught is actually correct (unless you double-check through more traditional channels, but then why not do that in the first place?). And what you experience as learning to ask better questions is in reality chatGPT adapting to your conversational style because giving you a good user experience is what it is built to do.

None of the (questionable) benefits you might be getting out of using chatGPT is worth the negative effects of using it, both on your own brain (as already outlined in the article Elsacat posted) nor on the environment.

Magpie

8 hours ago #4

(Yesterday, 6:44 PM)Clover
Quote:What worries Miles and Clement is not only that their students are permanently distracted by their devices, but that they will not develop critical thinking skills and deep knowledge when quick answers are only a click away. Where once Clement would ask his class a question such as, “Where do you think the US ranks in terms of GDP per capita?” and guide his students as they puzzled over the solution, now someone will have Googled the answer before he’s even finished his question.

Imo, that's not really a problem. If the teacher wants to be stuck in a time where students couldn't quickly search such basic factual information, they can do that, but they're not teaching their students critical thinking then. Like, clearly the solution isn't "oh you're not allowed to look up facts," because in the real world, people can look up those facts now, so the answer is to actually utilize critical thinking skills in questions that do not have factual answers. (And even if they were in a situation where they couldn't look up facts, the answer to such a question could be "I don't know," and you would continue the discussion based on various assumptions you are making.) This particularly just seems like a lazy teacher complaint, similar to how math teachers in the past would lecture their students "you won't always have a calculator on you"... haaaaa.

Quote:“Being able to Google something and providing the right answer isn’t knowledge,” Clement says. “And having knowledge is incredibly important so that when you hear something that’s questionable or maybe fake, you think, ‘Wait a minute, that contradicts all the knowledge I have that says otherwise, right?’ It’s no wonder there’s a bunch of idiots walking about who think that the Earth is flat. Like, if you read a flat Earth blog, you think, ‘Ah, that makes a lot of sense’ because you don’t have any understanding or knowledge.”

Yeah, reading that the Earth is flat online isn't knowledge... it's just misinformation. So, now the teacher complains that when students look up facts on the internet, they can get misinformation? Then going back to the original complaint of students being able to easily look up facts for a factual question like "what's the GDP of the United States?", why can't the teacher just start asking Socratic method questions to the student who found the fact online, like where did they find the fact from, how valid is that source, how did that source get that data, and so on.

Hmm, I kind of went off on a tangent there at the end, those paragraphs interviewing that teacher just seemed really stupid to me lol. Maybe I'm missing something and I'm the stupid one tho.

Anyways, good article, albeit a bit depressing to read about all the stupidity going on, though what isn't depressing right now anyway?

(Yesterday, 10:38 PM)YesYourNigel ChatGPT for me was the teacher I never had: one who I could ask the dumbest questions in as much detail as I wanted to, one that would always meet me at my level instead of complaining that I didn't meet them at theirs, one that would dumb things down or go on tangents as long as it helped me developed a deeper understanding, instead of waiting to get back to reciting the "proper" explanations and order of things from textbooks. Formal education has always been so passive - I was always stuck with a ton of questions ("How do we know that?" "What about this case?" "How does that relate to this thing?") and the one-sided, shallow nature of it meant no-one would answer them. I was told to memorise the answers, pretend I know what I'm talking about and that was it. ChatGPT gave me the ability to hone connections between these things, to really get to the point of these subjects.

Unfortunately I realised most people use ChatGPT for really petty bullshit. And when they use it for studying, they just use it as Google or ask it to write school essays for them which they then just copy+paste. I think one good skill that using ChatGPT has taught me is how to ask exact questions, how to isolate exactly the parts that I am struggling to understand and how to word them in a way that they can be answered. I think maybe kids should be given that as a prompt: talk to ChatGPT about the lecture and ask it questions about it, or ask it to dumb it down. I also think ChatGPT is a great way to make learning interactive and actually feels like being taught by someone or exploring a subject, which is far more natural for people as opposed to just passively reading a book.

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