Test scores across OECD countries peaked around 2012 and have declined since. IQ scores in many developed countries appear to be falling after rising throughout the twentieth century. Nataliya Kosmyna at MIT’s Media Lab began noticing changes around two years ago when strangers started emailing her to ask if using ChatGPT could alter their brains. She posted a study in June tracking brain activity in 54 students writing essays. Those using ChatGPT showed significantly less activity in networks tied to cognitive processing and attention compared to students who wrote without digital help or used only internet search engines. Almost none could recall what they had written immediately after submitting their work. She received more than 4,000 emails afterward. Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material. A British survey found that 92% of university students now use AI and roughly 20% have used it to write all or part of an assignment. Independent research has found that more screen time in schools correlates with worse results. Technology companies have designed products to be frictionless, removing the cognitive challenges brains need to learn. AI now allows users to outsource thinking itself.
Yes, but not for the reasons this article points out.
People have been proud to be stupid and afraid of knowledge for decades.
Oh yeah? C’mere a minnit and say that to me face
People were ignorant in previous centuries because they didn’t know better. Today they are willfully ignorant in spite of having the facts available.
the issue with becoming more knowledgable about the world is you feel less special.
and people are desperate to feel special. our entire consumer economy is built around exploiting folks insecurities and convincing them that their purchases make them better than other people.
I could say anything is a crutch that removes the burden from our minds. Calculators remove the burden of doing basic math and map apps remove the burden of maintaining a mental map. Both of these can result in a person who can’t independently do basic calculations or navigate and won’t understand the methodology behind the calculations. Now if this is a problem is open to debate.
Now using AI to avoid learning is a problem since it results in fraud. “I claim I understand this but I don’t.”
Not me. Because I am smart.I know because I’m smart. If I were stupid, I wouldn’t know. See?
So simple!
There was a Twitter exchange Erich did the screenshotted rounds a year or so ago, which went something like this:
Tweet 1:
Sometimes i spend so long crafting the perfect prompt that i realise what the solution is and don’t even have to ask ChatGPT
Tweet 2:
Bro just discovered “thinking”
Using AI as a rubber duck is what he did. I’ve used you guys in that manner. Quit a couple of asklemmy posts I had started because crafting the question and explaining the issue led me to a resolution.
Yup. Makes me wonder if they teach people rubber duck debugging any more.
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I guess, yes? When social engineering is stronger than free will and common sense then I’d call that gullible/stupid.
for those rolling their eyes on link aggregator linking to another link aggregator - this is the actual original article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-we-living-in-a-golden-age-of-stupidity-technology
And it was posted in this community recently.
My bad, I never saw it 🤷♂️
Looking around at my family, neighbors and coworkers getting hoodwinked by AI left and right… yeah that tracks.
We are living in the golden age of the MAGAt.
If this is starting post 2012, then social media is probably also to blame.
Yep, that’s certainly what started it, AI just made it way worse
From the OG Guardian article:
“It’s only software developers and drug dealers who call people users,” Kosmyna mutters at one point, frustrated at AI companies’ determination to push their products on to the public before we fully understand the psychological and cognitive costs.
I disagree for a ton of reasons but what a great line.
I want someone to do a study of people who graduate from St johns vs people from say nyu or similar and how they function in today’s society.
the individual matters more than the education. i know several st johns graduates whose personality is yes-men. i have a liberal arts education from an ivy and 95% of my peers at uni thought it was stupid and just wanted job skills. they didn’t give a fuck about learning or education, they just went there so they could get a job at goldman or similar and get rich or because their parents told them had to. they thought i was mentally ill for valuing liberal arts and focusing on education rather than getting a big fat paycheck after graduating.
a Socratic education only works if you already inclined towards skeptical inquiry. you can’t educate people into skepticism, it’s really an emotional disposition. normal people do not want to think anyone than they want to run marathons. only a small percentage of people are inclined to such activities.
i taught philosophy for 3 years, about 500 students. maybe a dozen of them actually learned anything… the other 490 were just there for a requirement/grade/elective and did absolutely did not give a fuck other than thinking quoting Plato make them sound smart and win arguments, or help them further entrench themselves in their delusional conspiracy mindset. had about 50% of my students actively argued for exploiting slaves for business profits, because all that mattered was their own wealth.
for every liberal atheist skeptic linux genius here on lemmy, there about a 100+ people who believe the opposite out there in the real world.
a Socratic education only works if you already inclined towards skeptical inquiry
Or if you just accost people in the streets like Socrates :b
I work at a top university and can confirm that the overwhelming majority of students are concerned primarily about jobs. It doesn’t matter how good the school is; this is an effect of industrialization and more importantly education being reduced to a means for economic development and productivity. In my experience, it is ironically worse at the “better” schools where acceptance is highly competitive. If I’m being honest, a good community college is the sweet spot: teachers invested in teaching and students with the leisure and/or low risk/investment in just learning things for the heck of it.
Nice, thanks for sharing your experience.
I’ve only known a few go through St John’s and they are all very intelligent, yet partially disconnected from modern life, sort of like the Amish.
A slashdot post? Is it Y2K?
from the not-very-good-at-analogies dept
Slashdot is like a canned fart in a bottle forgotten in the attic. Open up the bottle, take a sniff… welcome back!
i suspect slahdot people are quite happy in their bubble there without the facebook and other users…
Yes I am 😁
Oh, hey, what’s this article about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory that stupidity enabled Nazis?
Hur hur… Bonhoeffer. You’re mom’s a Bone Hoeffer.
Yeah, I was recently introduced to Bonhoeffer, his insight is incredible and the fact that similar mistakes are taking place today.
Peter Turchin is as close to Hari Seldon I think we’ll have, his models point to a lot of turmoil in the future.
