In 1963, the Royal Society in the United Kingdom issued a report complaining about the emigration of British scientists to the United States, lured by higher salaries and better living conditions.
I share your concerns about the "dumbing down" of the population. With regard to primary and secondary education, I think it's worse than you present. In Connecticut, for example, the state and its school districts have an explicit policy of requiring no mastery of any subject for grade advancement. There was a small sensation a few months ago when a recent honors graduate of Hartford Public High School, now attending the flagship University of Connecticut, testified that she can not read at all. The state and city have promised an investigation, but have shared no results. This was not an oversight; neither Hartford nor any other school district I know of requires students to master material in order to advance to the next grade.
I'm not sure, though, that the dumbing down is contributing to the anti-elitism of today's Trumpian politics. You say that it's a worldwide phenomenon, and there are certainly similarities between the US and Europe, but I'm not aware of similar trends in Korea, Taiwan, Japan, or Latin America. I think the elites have earned the distrust of the voters, due to clear (but different) causes in the US and Europe.
In the US, I think the elites have discredited themselves in several ways. They wrecked the financial system by allowing overly risky arrangements with incomprehensible instruments; the motivations were obsessive fixation on expanding homeownership (from politicians), mixed with greed and the opportunity to gamble with other people's money (for the financiers and traders). The result was a public fiasco, massive spending required to bail out the institutions, and an obvious perplexity on the part of government officials, unable to explain the causes of the collapses or future actions that could prevent a repeat. When covid started, the experts changed their recommended actions without explanation, supported economic shutdowns with dubious value, allowed exemptions from preventive measures for social justice protests, and shut down and ostracized experts who disagreed with any of the recommendations or questioned the claim that the origin of the virus was zoonotic. Now it appears that the dissenters were more right than the certified experts; right or wrong, though, their claims deserved serious treatment rather than suppression. Along the way, the elites decided that boys should be admitted to girls' sports leagues and locker rooms if they wanted, that the only way to treat people fairly is by permanent racial quotas, that open borders is a moral imperative, that radical restructuring of the economy to eliminate fossil fuels is an urgent necessity, and that certified truth-tellers were obligated to purge "misinformation and disinformation" from public fora. They implemented this agenda with no democratic mandate, often in violation of the law, and often while lying about their means and objectives. These elites have utterly discredited themselves, and will need a long time to regain public respect, once they decide to try.
In Europe, the foundational problem was a commitment to "ever closer union," which they interpreted to give more and more authority to EU-level bodies with no democratic legitimacy or accountability. When they attempted to codify this approach with the Constitution for Europe, the Constitution was rejected in several member countries, including France, generally seen as the most pro-EU country in the union. There was similar recklessness with the financial system, but in order to paper over insolvent governments more than to subsidize homeowners. Covid was somewhat less contentious than in the US, but there was generally little acknowledgement of the limitations of the expert's knowledge or the uncertainty that should have been attached to their recommendations. They pursued a similar open-borders agenda, again without democratic legitimacy, and lied to cover up shocking crimes committed by some of the immigrants. In the UK, they had similar racial issues to the US, again without public support. They were more enthusiastic for the trans ideology than their US counterparts, again without democratic legitimacy or public support. Most EU countries have been much more enthusiastic about the Green agenda, spending enormous amounts of money and resulting in higher energy prices with minimal or no effects on carbon emissions. European elites also have discredited themselves, and will need a long time to regain public respect.
I'm not defending screens and AI, which may be accelerating the dumbing down of the population. But our political problems will remain even if the dumbing down reverses next week.
A few months ago, the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams posted on X that he's become so distracted that he's started treating reading the same way he does exercise -- a necessary task that he forces himself to do in the same way he forces himself to go to the gym.
I've been trying to read more in recent months, and had some success, but only because I use an app called Freedom to significantly lock my access to distractions.
As a political platform, I believe there could be bipartisan consensus to ban certain classes of apps for people under 16. I'd like to see gambling apps banned too, but that would be harder to pass.
I teach graduate-level engineering classes. Barely any of my students are willing to do the bare minimum of visiting even the online aspects of our school’s library to complete their assignments. They complain that it is too much work to do basic background research for things such as identifying standards. Most of these students have no business getting a master’s degree in engineering, but they pay tuition and the school is obliged to process them so more students can pay money for their piece of paper.
Some of this is expectations. When I taught first-year students at Chapman University, which is not the Ivy League, we made them read the kinds of books kids today supposedly can’t handle. It was a discussion class—no lectures—with two professors. Students had to turn in discussion questions for each class. (This was a few years ago and ChatGPT was just becoming available and only one of our best students was savvy about it.) They griped, they preferred the films we included, and their understanding wasn’t necessarily that deep but they managed. When they asked for rubrics or complained about the load, we said, “You’re in college now.” You can see the syllabus here: https://open.substack.com/pub/vpostrel/p/ambition-and-the-meanings-of-success-405?r=zpjg&utm_medium=ios
Well done as usual, Brink, but none of your recommendations will be adopted unless we achieve wide agreement on the purpose of education in our society. We need to establish a national consortium of educators to create a new vision of our mission, including higher ed, and then lobby like hell to implement it.
If we can define what knowledge the citizens in a tech-driven, democratic republic should possess, we will have a more solid foundation for our endeavors. We must also show respect for all stakeholders. If we can strengthen the firewall protecting us from government overreach we no longer need the ivory towers that separate us from the citizens we serve. While it's true students are failing to read, we have also failed to read them.
I believe it’s time to decide, and recommit, not just to a purpose, but also to a plan to fulfill our sacred obligation to inform the public and foster citizen engagement. In an age of disinformation and preemptive, calculated chaos, to do otherwise is neglectful and irresponsible.
"Kids at the 90th percentile read 1.8 million words a year on their own, compared to only 8,000 words a year for kids at the 10th percentile."
How can the income and wealth gaps not continue to widen given this disparity? And if such cognitive and cultural divides continue to grow unchecked, how long before we become a nation incapable of self-government?
The problem is, as the essay points out, is that people are increasingly choosing not to read, with serious consequences to their attention span, vocabulary, and ability to reason.
If we take the idea of subsidiarity seriously, then at the most basic level, “self-governance” means governing oneself. In a liberal republic that translates into personal freedom and responsibility - acting and then benefiting from, or paying the consequences of, those actions - all within a government-administered rule-of-law framework.
While I am not a white nationalist (no, really!), the white nationalist Scott Greer (who seems very bright and literate) did give me pause when he argued that continued mass non-white immigration may give rise to Chavism (see link). If we accelerate the process of admitting more low IQ populations, then it would seem there is irony in the fact that those liberals who lament our cognitive decline may be contributing to it due to an alleged moral imperative. On the other hand, the cognitive elite has the wherewithal to at least reverse the decline among themselves, which may allow for intelligent paternalistic governance (as Robert Michels argued, democracy is an elected oligarchy, so that would not be a change) of an ever dumber citizenry—but I don’t know if they can thwart Chavism.
This is a formidable problem without an easy solution. Back in 2006 Geoffrey Miller wrote about "fitness-faking technology" as a universal problem: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11475
Since 2006 it has only gotten worse with social media, ubiquitous porn, smartphones, and AI. Moreover we now have to contend with the prospect that AI itself will be used recursively to understand humans at a deep (and individualized) level, and find ways to ensnare our attention even better.
Miller's conclusion seems to be bearing out, that our culture is evolving into two populations: The people who can deal with all of these distractions (e.g., the top students that professors still see in their university classes), and the people who cannot. It's a set of personality traits that will lead to outsized success in the future.
I am surprised we don’t have standardized testing both to get into college and at graduation. I fail to see why we would subsidize anyone outside of the top third.
I recently read thru the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine for 1884. These are the guys who shoveled the coal into the boiler furnaces. The job required more brainwork than one might think but still, this was not one of the more intellectual jobs on the railroad. I doubt if there were many if any college graduates among the readership of this magazine, I’d guess that no more than half had gone all the way through high school.
I wonder how many recent college grads today would be able to comfortably read this magazine.
David Foster, I enjoyed reading your post about an issue of Locomotive Firemen's Magazine published in 1884. I read all the comments on the post as well. Regardless of some of the caveats about the job responsibilities of coal shovelers being more sophisticated at times, approaching that of a railroad engineer back-up, I agree with your overall impression. The caliber of that magazine would be far ahead of anything like GQ today. The depth and variety of columns probably puts it closer to a hybrid of The Atlantic or Harper's with Scientific American. That wouldn't be accessible nor of interest to many people today, a sad thought.
The comments and your post emphasized that when there is less to distract and entertain us, specifically television and mobile phones, we are left to our own devices: reading in particular but also crafts, contract bridge, listening to and making music (be it choir or with instruments), DIY projects of all sorts... all of which require active cognitive involvement rather than passivity.
I'm not going to say you're wrong here, but I will say, I find the evidence uncompelling that there is a clear crisis that can be clearly described as "Americans getting dumber". I'm more inclined toward some of your later discussion about some comparatives; passive TV watching; the value of deep reading. I'm easily convinced we're missing opportunities to be smarter. But I'm not quite convinced that all changes we've gone through add up to a net negative.
Going through some of the initial sections, you start with assessments of reading. Some of these assessments are mixing interest in capability. I wonder how many others are doing the same but not saying it or not realizing they are? It's an important distinction. It's one thing to say someone has no capability for reading, and another no interest. In fact, with lesser interest, you should consider forgiving some level of lack in capability. Capability is mostly built through use, so you expect less; which might seem all negative at first, but if that time goes somewhere else, maybe you're missing something of value by using old standards that you don't understand because you never had interest in them?
To the professors statements about vocabulary, I'd really want to dig into that deeper. One force against large vocabularies is "Global English", and it's not altogether a bad thing. If you're not familiar the basic concept of Global English is a more constrained set of ways to use English that are more easily understood by a wider group. It's not "dumber", but actually a challenge to be clear using simple language. Inherently, that means being more selective about using an extensive vocabulary. There's positives AND negatives associated with a type of literary writing that uses every trick in the English language and a type of writing that avoids it. But what's certain is, readers will add to the rating of those who use the type of language they are accustomed to and subtract from the ratings of those that don't.
Global English also does have the inclusiveness problem, in that it inherently is trying to communicate to others who's commitment to English is less total, and all other aspects of intelligence considered, should thus be predicted to be less full. But the alternative is exclusion.
Does all this matter? Well, maybe not in some cases. If we already agree being smarter is better than being dumber, we can still justify effort in improvements without evidence we're getting dumber. Why even waste time on that debate if the evidence is mixed and inconclusive? Twisting it to fit a negative narrative will actually make it harder to measure differences in various tactical improvements. Maybe it wins some points of compelling action.. but maybe it drives people away too or causes them to spin in circles, or try to rollback history in both impossible and counterproductive ways.
I do think getting smarter is important to our democracy, as you call out. I've got my own effort (https://norabble.substack.com/p/money-more-than-just-stuff-its-trust) to try and describe economics in a way that is both true and I think would help individuals think about their society affecting decisions (like voting and public discourse) in a way that understands how macroeconomics is not just (personal economics * 340 million). I definitely think understanding this would lead to some different and better decisions. But I don't need to conceive of a time in the past when this was widely understood for it to be worth doing.
I think in the end, your narrative has a few problematic points, that emerge toward the end. If the arc is toward some kind of AI restrictions, it's vague and mostly unsubstantiated. That means if it does happen, it's has a high chance of doing more harm than good.
If the arc is toward an explanation of current political events, it's insufficient. There are bigger forces at work. It's also the wrong timescale, you can't fix current politics through a fix to long-term education. At some point it will have an effect, but you can't implement a change to long-term education without first winning a political contest. It's also problematic to conceive of the opposition as the "dumber". That doesn't provide you with a persuasive argument, only an alienating statement. While I do believe there's a lot of people who'd make a different decision with a deeper understanding of certain topics, and that in an overall arc, that would lean toward the views I have, I don't think there's a continuum where the less understanding you have, the farther you move away from my views. There's a lot of people with similar views to my own that don't understand them well.
I also can't reliably assume someone with very different views to my own is uneducated or low intelligence. I do tend to think they've made a mistake somewhere, but they may have impressive skills overall, and one crucial divergence. That might seem an egotistical view, and yes, it somewhat is. It's hard to exist without carrying confidence in your own views. I'm willing to listen and I do internally ask hard questions of myself too. I tend to think that behavior is what's been disappearing more than any other. I wish I could go into the reasons for that here; I do have some unique views there in addition to some that are more common, but I fear it would distract.
Yes, I know this is a video and therefore feeds into the whole narrative about losing our intelligence to television and shorts. But I also think Ronny Chieng is on to something. We see the behaviors in a society that we reward. And for a long time, as you note, we have rewarded succeeding on tests and getting good grades instead of rewarding actual learning. What would it take to make real learning become an American ideal again? What could change if people "did their homework ... you know, show the work" because they believed it was the right thing to do? For our country? https://youtube.com/shorts/tTL5FFaJa3Q?si=VuN82lFCnR92ORuM
You don't appear to be correcting for biological differences. Crudely: America is becoming less white. Being brown reduces average IQ by 10 to 15 points with disastrous effects at the population level.
GSS Wordsum scores cover the same phenomenon in universities. Cheap education only helps to the extent a talent pool is intelligent enough to take advantage up to its mental cap. Once the smart fraction is educated and the midwits edified, opening universities further dilutes the customer pool's quality and drives down the cap as administrators seek to appeal to all.
You're right. I'm also concerned about the impact of passive stimulus (e.g., mobile phone usage, television/ streaming/ anime for hours on end) on white people and those of other races who are on the right tail of the distribution. I worry whether they are also susceptible to the deleterious effects.
The first 90% was excellent and thought-provoking. Not sure why you decided to bring politics into it at the end, though. I guess that's the risk you take when you write for Substack: the lack of an editor.
I share your concerns about the "dumbing down" of the population. With regard to primary and secondary education, I think it's worse than you present. In Connecticut, for example, the state and its school districts have an explicit policy of requiring no mastery of any subject for grade advancement. There was a small sensation a few months ago when a recent honors graduate of Hartford Public High School, now attending the flagship University of Connecticut, testified that she can not read at all. The state and city have promised an investigation, but have shared no results. This was not an oversight; neither Hartford nor any other school district I know of requires students to master material in order to advance to the next grade.
I'm not sure, though, that the dumbing down is contributing to the anti-elitism of today's Trumpian politics. You say that it's a worldwide phenomenon, and there are certainly similarities between the US and Europe, but I'm not aware of similar trends in Korea, Taiwan, Japan, or Latin America. I think the elites have earned the distrust of the voters, due to clear (but different) causes in the US and Europe.
In the US, I think the elites have discredited themselves in several ways. They wrecked the financial system by allowing overly risky arrangements with incomprehensible instruments; the motivations were obsessive fixation on expanding homeownership (from politicians), mixed with greed and the opportunity to gamble with other people's money (for the financiers and traders). The result was a public fiasco, massive spending required to bail out the institutions, and an obvious perplexity on the part of government officials, unable to explain the causes of the collapses or future actions that could prevent a repeat. When covid started, the experts changed their recommended actions without explanation, supported economic shutdowns with dubious value, allowed exemptions from preventive measures for social justice protests, and shut down and ostracized experts who disagreed with any of the recommendations or questioned the claim that the origin of the virus was zoonotic. Now it appears that the dissenters were more right than the certified experts; right or wrong, though, their claims deserved serious treatment rather than suppression. Along the way, the elites decided that boys should be admitted to girls' sports leagues and locker rooms if they wanted, that the only way to treat people fairly is by permanent racial quotas, that open borders is a moral imperative, that radical restructuring of the economy to eliminate fossil fuels is an urgent necessity, and that certified truth-tellers were obligated to purge "misinformation and disinformation" from public fora. They implemented this agenda with no democratic mandate, often in violation of the law, and often while lying about their means and objectives. These elites have utterly discredited themselves, and will need a long time to regain public respect, once they decide to try.
In Europe, the foundational problem was a commitment to "ever closer union," which they interpreted to give more and more authority to EU-level bodies with no democratic legitimacy or accountability. When they attempted to codify this approach with the Constitution for Europe, the Constitution was rejected in several member countries, including France, generally seen as the most pro-EU country in the union. There was similar recklessness with the financial system, but in order to paper over insolvent governments more than to subsidize homeowners. Covid was somewhat less contentious than in the US, but there was generally little acknowledgement of the limitations of the expert's knowledge or the uncertainty that should have been attached to their recommendations. They pursued a similar open-borders agenda, again without democratic legitimacy, and lied to cover up shocking crimes committed by some of the immigrants. In the UK, they had similar racial issues to the US, again without public support. They were more enthusiastic for the trans ideology than their US counterparts, again without democratic legitimacy or public support. Most EU countries have been much more enthusiastic about the Green agenda, spending enormous amounts of money and resulting in higher energy prices with minimal or no effects on carbon emissions. European elites also have discredited themselves, and will need a long time to regain public respect.
I'm not defending screens and AI, which may be accelerating the dumbing down of the population. But our political problems will remain even if the dumbing down reverses next week.
Sorry, bro. This piece was like soooo long and theres like no vdo to watch. Just cant be bothered, ya know?
Fr bro yapping too much
A few months ago, the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams posted on X that he's become so distracted that he's started treating reading the same way he does exercise -- a necessary task that he forces himself to do in the same way he forces himself to go to the gym.
I've been trying to read more in recent months, and had some success, but only because I use an app called Freedom to significantly lock my access to distractions.
As a political platform, I believe there could be bipartisan consensus to ban certain classes of apps for people under 16. I'd like to see gambling apps banned too, but that would be harder to pass.
I teach graduate-level engineering classes. Barely any of my students are willing to do the bare minimum of visiting even the online aspects of our school’s library to complete their assignments. They complain that it is too much work to do basic background research for things such as identifying standards. Most of these students have no business getting a master’s degree in engineering, but they pay tuition and the school is obliged to process them so more students can pay money for their piece of paper.
Some of this is expectations. When I taught first-year students at Chapman University, which is not the Ivy League, we made them read the kinds of books kids today supposedly can’t handle. It was a discussion class—no lectures—with two professors. Students had to turn in discussion questions for each class. (This was a few years ago and ChatGPT was just becoming available and only one of our best students was savvy about it.) They griped, they preferred the films we included, and their understanding wasn’t necessarily that deep but they managed. When they asked for rubrics or complained about the load, we said, “You’re in college now.” You can see the syllabus here: https://open.substack.com/pub/vpostrel/p/ambition-and-the-meanings-of-success-405?r=zpjg&utm_medium=ios
Well done as usual, Brink, but none of your recommendations will be adopted unless we achieve wide agreement on the purpose of education in our society. We need to establish a national consortium of educators to create a new vision of our mission, including higher ed, and then lobby like hell to implement it.
If we can define what knowledge the citizens in a tech-driven, democratic republic should possess, we will have a more solid foundation for our endeavors. We must also show respect for all stakeholders. If we can strengthen the firewall protecting us from government overreach we no longer need the ivory towers that separate us from the citizens we serve. While it's true students are failing to read, we have also failed to read them.
I believe it’s time to decide, and recommit, not just to a purpose, but also to a plan to fulfill our sacred obligation to inform the public and foster citizen engagement. In an age of disinformation and preemptive, calculated chaos, to do otherwise is neglectful and irresponsible.
"Kids at the 90th percentile read 1.8 million words a year on their own, compared to only 8,000 words a year for kids at the 10th percentile."
How can the income and wealth gaps not continue to widen given this disparity? And if such cognitive and cultural divides continue to grow unchecked, how long before we become a nation incapable of self-government?
Library cards are free. Anyone can read as much as they want.
Self-government is a bad joke that has been propogated upon us. How on earth could 350 million possibly "self" govern
The problem is, as the essay points out, is that people are increasingly choosing not to read, with serious consequences to their attention span, vocabulary, and ability to reason.
If we take the idea of subsidiarity seriously, then at the most basic level, “self-governance” means governing oneself. In a liberal republic that translates into personal freedom and responsibility - acting and then benefiting from, or paying the consequences of, those actions - all within a government-administered rule-of-law framework.
While I am not a white nationalist (no, really!), the white nationalist Scott Greer (who seems very bright and literate) did give me pause when he argued that continued mass non-white immigration may give rise to Chavism (see link). If we accelerate the process of admitting more low IQ populations, then it would seem there is irony in the fact that those liberals who lament our cognitive decline may be contributing to it due to an alleged moral imperative. On the other hand, the cognitive elite has the wherewithal to at least reverse the decline among themselves, which may allow for intelligent paternalistic governance (as Robert Michels argued, democracy is an elected oligarchy, so that would not be a change) of an ever dumber citizenry—but I don’t know if they can thwart Chavism.
https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/02/an-american-hugo-chavez-is-coming/
Thanks for the URL! It is an excellent read, despite being disturbing and probably prescient.
Lots of Postman references these days!
Excellent piece
This is a formidable problem without an easy solution. Back in 2006 Geoffrey Miller wrote about "fitness-faking technology" as a universal problem: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11475
Since 2006 it has only gotten worse with social media, ubiquitous porn, smartphones, and AI. Moreover we now have to contend with the prospect that AI itself will be used recursively to understand humans at a deep (and individualized) level, and find ways to ensnare our attention even better.
Miller's conclusion seems to be bearing out, that our culture is evolving into two populations: The people who can deal with all of these distractions (e.g., the top students that professors still see in their university classes), and the people who cannot. It's a set of personality traits that will lead to outsized success in the future.
I really like that Geoffrey Miller essay. I quoted at length from it in an earlier essay. https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/weird-scenes-from-a-shrinking-planet-38e
Great article.
I am surprised we don’t have standardized testing both to get into college and at graduation. I fail to see why we would subsidize anyone outside of the top third.
I recently read thru the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine for 1884. These are the guys who shoveled the coal into the boiler furnaces. The job required more brainwork than one might think but still, this was not one of the more intellectual jobs on the railroad. I doubt if there were many if any college graduates among the readership of this magazine, I’d guess that no more than half had gone all the way through high school.
I wonder how many recent college grads today would be able to comfortably read this magazine.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/73340.html
David Foster, I enjoyed reading your post about an issue of Locomotive Firemen's Magazine published in 1884. I read all the comments on the post as well. Regardless of some of the caveats about the job responsibilities of coal shovelers being more sophisticated at times, approaching that of a railroad engineer back-up, I agree with your overall impression. The caliber of that magazine would be far ahead of anything like GQ today. The depth and variety of columns probably puts it closer to a hybrid of The Atlantic or Harper's with Scientific American. That wouldn't be accessible nor of interest to many people today, a sad thought.
The comments and your post emphasized that when there is less to distract and entertain us, specifically television and mobile phones, we are left to our own devices: reading in particular but also crafts, contract bridge, listening to and making music (be it choir or with instruments), DIY projects of all sorts... all of which require active cognitive involvement rather than passivity.
I'm not going to say you're wrong here, but I will say, I find the evidence uncompelling that there is a clear crisis that can be clearly described as "Americans getting dumber". I'm more inclined toward some of your later discussion about some comparatives; passive TV watching; the value of deep reading. I'm easily convinced we're missing opportunities to be smarter. But I'm not quite convinced that all changes we've gone through add up to a net negative.
Going through some of the initial sections, you start with assessments of reading. Some of these assessments are mixing interest in capability. I wonder how many others are doing the same but not saying it or not realizing they are? It's an important distinction. It's one thing to say someone has no capability for reading, and another no interest. In fact, with lesser interest, you should consider forgiving some level of lack in capability. Capability is mostly built through use, so you expect less; which might seem all negative at first, but if that time goes somewhere else, maybe you're missing something of value by using old standards that you don't understand because you never had interest in them?
To the professors statements about vocabulary, I'd really want to dig into that deeper. One force against large vocabularies is "Global English", and it's not altogether a bad thing. If you're not familiar the basic concept of Global English is a more constrained set of ways to use English that are more easily understood by a wider group. It's not "dumber", but actually a challenge to be clear using simple language. Inherently, that means being more selective about using an extensive vocabulary. There's positives AND negatives associated with a type of literary writing that uses every trick in the English language and a type of writing that avoids it. But what's certain is, readers will add to the rating of those who use the type of language they are accustomed to and subtract from the ratings of those that don't.
Global English also does have the inclusiveness problem, in that it inherently is trying to communicate to others who's commitment to English is less total, and all other aspects of intelligence considered, should thus be predicted to be less full. But the alternative is exclusion.
Does all this matter? Well, maybe not in some cases. If we already agree being smarter is better than being dumber, we can still justify effort in improvements without evidence we're getting dumber. Why even waste time on that debate if the evidence is mixed and inconclusive? Twisting it to fit a negative narrative will actually make it harder to measure differences in various tactical improvements. Maybe it wins some points of compelling action.. but maybe it drives people away too or causes them to spin in circles, or try to rollback history in both impossible and counterproductive ways.
I do think getting smarter is important to our democracy, as you call out. I've got my own effort (https://norabble.substack.com/p/money-more-than-just-stuff-its-trust) to try and describe economics in a way that is both true and I think would help individuals think about their society affecting decisions (like voting and public discourse) in a way that understands how macroeconomics is not just (personal economics * 340 million). I definitely think understanding this would lead to some different and better decisions. But I don't need to conceive of a time in the past when this was widely understood for it to be worth doing.
I think in the end, your narrative has a few problematic points, that emerge toward the end. If the arc is toward some kind of AI restrictions, it's vague and mostly unsubstantiated. That means if it does happen, it's has a high chance of doing more harm than good.
If the arc is toward an explanation of current political events, it's insufficient. There are bigger forces at work. It's also the wrong timescale, you can't fix current politics through a fix to long-term education. At some point it will have an effect, but you can't implement a change to long-term education without first winning a political contest. It's also problematic to conceive of the opposition as the "dumber". That doesn't provide you with a persuasive argument, only an alienating statement. While I do believe there's a lot of people who'd make a different decision with a deeper understanding of certain topics, and that in an overall arc, that would lean toward the views I have, I don't think there's a continuum where the less understanding you have, the farther you move away from my views. There's a lot of people with similar views to my own that don't understand them well.
I also can't reliably assume someone with very different views to my own is uneducated or low intelligence. I do tend to think they've made a mistake somewhere, but they may have impressive skills overall, and one crucial divergence. That might seem an egotistical view, and yes, it somewhat is. It's hard to exist without carrying confidence in your own views. I'm willing to listen and I do internally ask hard questions of myself too. I tend to think that behavior is what's been disappearing more than any other. I wish I could go into the reasons for that here; I do have some unique views there in addition to some that are more common, but I fear it would distract.
Yes, I know this is a video and therefore feeds into the whole narrative about losing our intelligence to television and shorts. But I also think Ronny Chieng is on to something. We see the behaviors in a society that we reward. And for a long time, as you note, we have rewarded succeeding on tests and getting good grades instead of rewarding actual learning. What would it take to make real learning become an American ideal again? What could change if people "did their homework ... you know, show the work" because they believed it was the right thing to do? For our country? https://youtube.com/shorts/tTL5FFaJa3Q?si=VuN82lFCnR92ORuM
You don't appear to be correcting for biological differences. Crudely: America is becoming less white. Being brown reduces average IQ by 10 to 15 points with disastrous effects at the population level.
GSS Wordsum scores cover the same phenomenon in universities. Cheap education only helps to the extent a talent pool is intelligent enough to take advantage up to its mental cap. Once the smart fraction is educated and the midwits edified, opening universities further dilutes the customer pool's quality and drives down the cap as administrators seek to appeal to all.
You're right. I'm also concerned about the impact of passive stimulus (e.g., mobile phone usage, television/ streaming/ anime for hours on end) on white people and those of other races who are on the right tail of the distribution. I worry whether they are also susceptible to the deleterious effects.
Genes and environment both matter in this discussion. Unfortunately, who in charge is ready to have it?
No one? Try to approach from either point of view (genes or environment) or both, and become unelectable, unemployable, and a social pariah.
The first 90% was excellent and thought-provoking. Not sure why you decided to bring politics into it at the end, though. I guess that's the risk you take when you write for Substack: the lack of an editor.