Are We Living in a Golden Age of Stupidity? (theguardian.com) 191
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.
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.
Simple answer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Simple answer [to the complicated question] (Score:2)
Do I have to complete the quote? It would be additional evidence. [And the moderators rated that FP "Informative"? Really?]
Also me thinks though dost not followeth the link and readeth the story. The original is on the clickbait-ish side, but the Slashdot summary version much more so. The original starts with videos, and I think the complicated answer is more along those lines. So here's a short summary of my latest thinking on the topic of human intelligence, such as it is.
Long time ago some general purpos
Not a Golden Age, a Pyritic Age (Score:3, Funny)
Is that a legal adjectival form for fool's gold? But I bet I don't get my funny mod because I forgot to work the joke into the long comment...
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The kids are now saturating their video channels with garbage like cute cat videos instead of complicated books.
This, exactly. I was saying to someone recently - I've watched too many cat videos in the meantime for me to remember the details - that when we start to abandon our ability to read and write, we abandon the basis of modern civilization. My point was that learning-by-reading and learning-by-listening are fundamentally different, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Oral learning will never be anywhere near a substitute for learning by reading.
When we start to abandon reading - as we are currently doing in
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Being trapped in the idioms of Microsoft, Apple, technology in general, is the exact reason why we, as a society, are going downhill.
No one can think beyond looking for an application to do their work. I guess we can blame Steve Jobs for "there's an app for that?"
We can spread the blame around a bit to MBAs also, for making key strategic ideas like independence from vendors and self determination, unthinkable. They are thinkable, they provide value, and
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How do you define a "woman" again, Mr Brain Surgeon?
Why does it make any difference how "woman" is defined? So you can tell them what they can do with their bodies?
We're Closing the Search Engine Loophole (Score:2)
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.
Luckily Google and other search engines are closing part of the cognitive loophole by putting an AI summary at the top of all results.
Re: We're Closing the Search Engine Loophole (Score:5, Funny)
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Testing strategy (Score:3)
I'm convinced my high school French language classes were skewed away from learning useful skills and biased in favor of writing skills because it made it easier to test. The tests are running the show to the detriment of learning.
Educators need to push past outdated written tests and find new ways to assess skills. I suspect that AI could play a role for good in that.
Re:Testing strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm convinced my high school French language classes were skewed away from learning useful skills and biased in favor of writing skills because it made it easier to test.
Aren't writing skills useful? In my experience, writing, reading and speaking ability are usually tied together.
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All three are separate even with the same base language. I can understand a great deal of a language due to having lived in this foreign country with fluent children for a long time, and can read the language very well, but can barely speak it because speaking is a different part of the brain than understanding, and I work in english all day....And writing? My spelling is atrocious and I hear words I think is a single word but its really 3 words said quickly together so when I write said words as a single w
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It turns out that, in French, many of the verb conjugations sound the same even if they are spelled differently, I feel that my speaking and listening skills could have progressed farther without a hyper focus on that baggage.
I personally find reading much easier that writing (I suspect many people do) and the reading seems to me to be the key to accelerating vocabulary learning, being able to regurgitate the verb endings could have come later IMO, behind learning to recognize the tense being used and the p
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I feel your pain. I took Latin in high school and ran into five declensions for verbs and multiple patterns for nouns, consisting of different suffixes for different cases. Not only that, Latin uses a construction called the ablative absolute that packs lots of information into tw
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They are related, but somewhat independent. I had the same problem in high school Spanish. We spent so much time conjugating verbs but almost no time speaking at length. There were people in my AP Spanish class who made almost no attempt at correct pronunciation. Worse, the instructor would often spend a substantial portion of the class speaking in English! Unless they did some sort of study abroad/immersion, plenty of people came out of 4 years of high school Spanish able to read and write the language wit
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I would argue they are more useful than any other skill. Being able to communicate via written text allows time to absorb and check your work. It's slower, but there's a reason it's generally simpler to read and write a language then it is to hear and speak it.
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*Comment is about learning another language, not learning your first language as a child, for obvious reason that one is learned by hearing and speaking first.
Watch the documentary 'Idiocracy' (Score:5, Funny)
This documentary from a few decades ago sorta covers what we can expect.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I was also thinking of the Futurama episode "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid"
Fry: What are we going to do?
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Duh, I know, let's play the lottery.
Amy Wong: No, let's buy internet stock.
Dr. Zoidberg: On margin. Zoidbee wants to buy on margin.
Hermes Conrad: [holding a board in front of his face] Look at me. I'm invisible.
Fry: Wait a minute, I know what's going on here. You've all become idiots.
Bender: Hey, let's all join the Reform party.
Everyone: Yeah!
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This documentary from a few decades ago sorta covers what we can expect.
The Marching Morons did it first. Though you'd have to lower yourself to read in order to ingest it, so it may be passe and icky to modern audiences.
You cannot convince a stupid person that they are (Score:5, Interesting)
In my job I spend a lot of time convincing companies that they can save a lot of money on improving software performance. However, they all seem very reluctant to even go there. It is really weird because it has all the upsides and none of the downsides, and it doesn't take that much of an effort either based on the prior work I have done and the systems they show me that are in need of improvements. Recently one of them posted major losses because of a "mismatch" between customer needs and runrate or something, but I know that they are paying >$10K monthly for bloatware and "LLMs" that cannot scale. I wish I could convince them otherwise, but since they are stupid it's a waste of my time.
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I mean how fast does it really need to be? There are always a few people who say the performance is good enough, and making it 50% faster doesn't make it shovel money any faster. I like chasing after milliseconds but the managers/execs don't until people choosing between our system and our competitors say ours is too slow.
No (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people are deeply stupid and that has always been the case. Education does nothing. The difference is that today, the stupid people are much more visible and louder. That does not mean there are more.
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
Reality TV and social media made the idiots louder, but worse than that it make them easier to manipulate. We saw interference via social media during recent elections and referendums, and traditional media like Fox News and GB News have taken lying to their audiences to another level.
It's basically a fight between billionaires and foreign powers to see how can screw things up the most in their own favour now, and useful idiots are the tools.
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They're all lying. People just choose to believe the lies they agree with.
Re: All news lies (Score:5, Informative)
Some lie more than others. Fox had to pay a $787m settlement for lying about voting machines. Internal emails made public showed they knew they were lying to gain ratings.
(Rupert Murdoch has a win-at-all-costs mentality. He'd pit his own children against each other to "spur their competitive juices" but it just created unnecessary family tension. All 3 children admit their father is a jerk that way.)
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Some lie more than others. Fox had to pay a $787m settlement for lying about voting machines. Internal emails made public showed they knew they were lying to gain ratings.
MSNBC is basically the same. Rachel Maddow had to pay 30 million to a single doctor for lying about ICE giving woman hysterectomies, and the only way she got around lying about OAN is because the judged agreed with Maddow that she is "Not a Real Journalist" and that her audience wouldn't be dumb enough to mistake her for one. Ironically a defense the Tucker Carlson tried to use.
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True. Not that the people themselves are easier to manipulate, that was always easy. But social media and TV (to a lesser degree) make it scalable and cheap to do so.
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I don't know if stupid people are actually more visible and louder than before. In the past, they were kings and queens and magistrates. Their activities were always an soap opera.
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Of course the article you're posting under is about a broad based drop in test scores and student comprehension as well as some evidence that those kids who depend more on AI turn out dumber so what you just wrote has nothing to do with any of this.
Elevate critical thinking (Score:5, Interesting)
Critical thinking skills should be included with the 3 R's: Reading, (w)Righting, (a)Rithmetic, and Reasoning.
The number of logic fallacies that pundits and trolls use is staggering. Typical examples:
1) A handful of (alleged) members of Group X did bad thing Y, therefore the entirety of Group X is bad. Proportions matter.
2) Guilty until proven innocent.
3) Buzzwords that have no clear meaning: "Weaponizing X", "Grooming kids toward X", "Real Americans", "Elites", "Deep State", etc.
4) If subject matter experts are wrong, then their detractors are right: it's often possible for both to be wrong. (Why one would expect amateurs to usually be better is puzzling.)
5) Slippery slope. The extreme of any viewpoint is usually undesirable, but in a democracy we have to accept compromise and probably should expect it.
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What about good old logical OR with regards to lies or incompetence where person X is either lying OR they are incompetent (it's a logical OR, so they can be both as well). Any possible option should disqualify them for whatever they are being considered for, but many people seem to work on the basis that, if they can't be sure they are lying, and they can't be sure they are incompetent, then person X must be neither.
Re:Elevate critical thinking (Score:4, Insightful)
I feel like epistemology (study of how we acquire and define knowledge) should be a required high school graduation requirement. They don't need to read Kant unabridged, but understanding some of the issues behind epistemology (such as the inherent limitations of both rationalism (pure reason/logic) and empiricism (observation)) and the genesis of the scientific method are increasingly important in today's information firehose. Most citizens are completely ill-equipped to parse everything coming at them.
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I agree. Will mean a lot fewer high school graduates, but the degree will again mean something.
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in a democracy we have to accept compromise and probably should expect it.
We learned in the 1940s that you can't compromise with Nazis. Then we forgot all about it and now we've got Nazis everyfuckingwhere.
Too bad we didn't do what Germany did after WWII, but after the civil war, and educate people as to why being uber-racists is bad. Instead we gave them the electoral college so they could have more voting power than they deserved.
We're the only country which still has an electoral college and guess what? It's a fucking shit show which only serves to let shitty people have an ou
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Actually, if you look at how the Electoral Collage was set up, and the populations of the original states, you'll see that even with the Three-fifths Compromise [wikipedia.org] neither the North nor the South had enough power to control presidential elections on their own. Generally, the south managed to get either pro-slavery or neutral presidents elected right up until Lincoln took office then seceded because t
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I sincerely hope you're right about that, though it seems to me that stupidity itself isn't the problem we face, that would be greed combined with irrational fear along with the societal delusion that all of us are temporarily embarrassed billionaires, just waiting for our "big break". Spoiler alert: the big break isn't coming for *any* of us that aren't already billionaires.
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Most people are deeply stupid and that has always been the case.
Most people are not "deeply stupid". But that post was deeply arrogant.
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Or maybe the kids are smart enough to realize that the old skillsets are less valuable to learn, especially by rote. Find them some new skillsets that are not so easily automated away by AI or that are more relevant to their interests and educate them in those.
Training everyone to live without AI in case it is unavailable some time is like training them to write without a pen just in case the world's ink supply dries up
Even the most educated person needs a strategy to cope when their education is insufficie
Recall (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm... that's because they didn't write it. (And it's also not "their work".)
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Yes I think we need to make this distinction very clear. Copy-pasting something from a generative program is not writing. This is just the modern version of twisting the nerdy kid's arm until he does your homework for you. Even if you re-copy it into your own handwriting, everybody knows you didn't "write" it.
Think of it as evolution in action (Score:4, Insightful)
Drugs challenged society with addiction. Those who could avoid, or fight off, addiction continued, many were lost. Societal rules changed, as societies, not just species, evolve to resist challenge and continue to succeed.
Those who do NOT use AI heavily and keep up their own ability to solve problems will succeed over those who do not, in the long run. Parents will learn to restrict AI they way they fight "screen time" now, as they've always had to teach kids not to be lazy - a very default human choice, laziness!
Societal rules can change. It isn't "winning" a race to use a motorcycle. "Winning" at academics by using a writing motorcycle will have to acquire the same meaninglessness.
I have no fears for the species or even the society. Just for those who don't see the challenge and respond to it.
Re:Think of it as evolution in action (Score:4, Insightful)
Those who do NOT use AI heavily and keep up their own ability to solve problems will succeed over those who do not, in the long run.
The unfortunate problem is that this is technically true, but practically...less-true.
If HAL9000 understands what an HR hiring filter is looking for better than a person, then the person using AI has a higher probability of getting the job, because the process of *getting* a job has been so heavily abstracted away from knowing how to *do* the job. "Doing well on an interview" and "Doing well in the trenches once hired" are similarly distinct skills. Those with charisma are, as a rule, more likely to be hired if they are interviewed, than those without charisma who are a savant as the skill the job requires.
The problem with the premise that those doing the work without AI will outperform those who rely on it, is that the premise assumes that job performance is a company's metric of success. It *should* be, but more that a particular company is concerned with appearances and relationships and market capture, rather than the ability for a product or service to meet the needs of the customer, the less the skill of the worker is relevant to the worker's success.
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Those who do NOT use AI heavily and keep up their own ability to solve problems will succeed over those who do not, in the long run.
Only in a world suddenly devoid of useful tools. Someone who learned to do long division may have a great skill, but is practically demolished in every case by someone using a calculator. Providing a person has a calculator they don't need to know how to do long division, as long as they have a calculator handy.
My niece can do long division, she just learned it at school. I can't, I'm just an engineer who uses complex math daily as part of work.
If AI can do the work of the thinking, then it stands to reason
Shift to in school work (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is schools aren't adjusting correctly to new realities. What we need is a shift to in class work making up the bulk of grades so kids can't use AI and have to use their brains instead. Sending kids home with homework nowadays is more or less pointless if AI is just going to do it for them.
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Indeed. The ever increasing homework demands have been a problem, not a solution, for years. Today's homework is usually mainly busywork, kind of like how in corporations, most paperwork is busywork.
AI is leveling the playing field, forcing education to go back to its roots. In-class assignments are still possible and effective. There's no need to keep children occupied with schoolwork every waking hour.
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Some say to "block all home internet-connected devices from children" but that's easier said than done. My kid had MacGyver-like ability to find internet gizmos. I suspect they hacked into neighbor's wi-fi, as we changed house passwords twice. (Or bartered with a sibling or stayed with friend).
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The problem is schools aren't adjusting correctly to new realities.
Yes. This from the summary is not so much a statement about the students as it is an open admission that the teachers' testing and/or teaching methods are ineffective:
Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material
Re: Shift to in school work (Score:2)
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Technically it might have been cheating, but I had to know the basics well enough to teach the computer how to answer my homework questions. (This was pre-WWW so I couldn't just go on-line and look up how to code the solution.) So I g
Shocked, I tell you (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, it's hardly a surprise. Doing research and putting words together takes cogitation which stimulates the brain. A stimulated brain is a sharp brain. We've known this for decades, perhaps centuries.
The people in my workgroup lean heavily on ChatGPT and Copilot and the like because it's faster and easier, but I wonder if it's more effective. Is it faster only initially? After we've used these tools for a while, and our brains have atrophied, maybe we slow to the point where the time saved is a wash.
Where does this lead? Are we condemned to become Eloi?
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I know the article is about the effect on thinking, but I would hypothesize that your workgroup may run into trouble in a shorter time than the time it takes for your brains to atrophy.
The group is going to end up with a body of material with which they are not familiar, due to a lot of it spewing out of AI instead of being written by the members. They won't know the material well.
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That's a really good point. If you create the content yourself, it might be slower and headache inducing, but you will at least know the material.
Great for dictators... (Score:4, Informative)
AI and social media like tiktok is a fantastic thing for autocrats and dictators.
They allow to tell their subjects what to think and what to do.
Everyone thought the time of autocrats and dictators is done and tech companies made everyone wrong giving second life to food old feudalism...
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Yes and the GAS generation ... (Score:2)
... is blowing smoke up their own asses.
In the USA, yes (Score:5, Insightful)
One of these nations is growing and gaining influence globally, the other elected an orange clown as it’s president and is the butt of jokes the world over.
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There is some evidence that secondary education in China is mostly wasted. Grades and degrees are often used as status symbols but the actual work is often unrelated to their education content. (That's a problem everywhere, but more so in China.)
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Huh? The US still has one of the higher spend both as a percentage of the GDP and money per student. Trust me, it isn't the money flowing into the schooling system, it's where that money actually goes (usually to testing groups and administration). That's why Biden's student debt resolves would never work long term: it would just enable the next generation to continue to be shafted as schooling prices rise.
China's individual families pay a lot more for education as well, ~17% of their yearly income compared
Re:In the USA, yes (Score:5, Insightful)
"Underinvestment" Sure, that's it.
China's spending per student, per year:
primary: about $2000
secondary: about $3000
tertiary: about $7000
OECD $14000 avg
US:
Primary/Secondary about $18000
Tertiary: $34000
Maybe it's not the spending that's the problem? Maybe it's the shit-value we're getting for the $ we spend?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/p... [forbes.com]
1976-2018:
students: +78%
full time teachers: +92%
full time admin: +164%
full time other professionals: +452%
And meanwhile, yes, OBVIOUSLY Trump's 10 months in office is clearly the driver of USA's dismal educational performance for the past 50 years.
It's certainly not "educational professionals" doing things like applying double-standard racism to persistent disciplinary problems. Just punish black kids less for the same stuff = statistics even out! Solved! https://www.apmreports.org/sto... [apmreports.org]
Re:In the USA, yes (Score:4, Insightful)
You seem to be making two incorrect assumptions
1. It costs the same to educate a student in China as it does in the USA, not the case, the profit driven school system in the USA results in significantly higher costs than those in China.
That I am blaming Trump. Also incorrect, the US education system has created a population where the majority are incapable of critical thinking and rational decision making, hence why someone like Trump could ever get elected. This would not happen in most other developed democracies.
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Sure but you do notice all those decisions are local decisions so the question is do we still want to leave education de-centralized and local or do we actually want more top down requirements on curriculum?
The crowd you are espousing is incoherent since they are hopping mad about decisions made locally but fight against any top down control particularly Federal.
Stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Stupid (Score:2)
+6 insightful
The US has become an Idiocracy (Score:2)
I don't know too much about the rest of the world but I can observe the US decline into an Idiocracy run by clowns and thugs with a compliant population which seems to only pay attention to "entertainment".
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I live in Canada and we see the same thing going on here. I suspect it's everywhere. Classism breeds corruption which produces incompetence.
have always been entitled and stupid - parent time (Score:3)
Short lived premise of idiocracy? (Score:2)
This is just a theory, but I wonder if the basic premise of Idiocracy will burn itself out within the next generation. That basic premise was that more intelligent people tended to have fewer/no children while less intelligent people have many children. I think that has run its course and started to reverse.
There was probably some truth to this over the last 75 years or so. As safe and effective birth control first became available, it was the upper and then middle classes who got access first. Their family
Is this a question? (Score:4, Informative)
Have you seen who's in the White House? Remember: he was voted in. Twice. That only happens in a nation with a widespread case of mental retardation.
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This kind of thing happens when only given two choices ... Tweedledee or Tweedledum.
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You're right, I forgot about Tweedledeedee.
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To whom was the issue of cognitive decline attributed?
Re:Is this a question? (Score:5, Insightful)
Both sides am I right guys?
Ignoring the fact that the party wants to do away with child vaccine requirements under the guise of Make America Healthy Again.
https://apnews.com/article/flo... [apnews.com]
The ruling elite (Score:2, Insightful)
Intelligent people who can think critically can't be scammed into giving 50 to 75% of their income to the top 1%.
There's an old meme about working the first two or three months of the year for the irs. But at least I get something for my taxes. Healthcare for the poor, a military that prevents
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This has more to do with entitlement than AI (Score:2)
Way too many privileged people just think paying for an education is the same as earning one. Meanwhile, schools are watering down course difficulty in order to accommodate privilege and maximize profit, this is classism in our classrooms. Not to even mention how corrupt academia has become.
once again, our greed is wrecking everything for everybody
It only seems that way because... (Score:2)
...pop culture celebrates the stupid and lazy and social media gives the stupid a global platform to spew their stupidity.
Hard working, intelligent people have always been ridiculed while stupid, attractive, socially adept people have been celebrated, especially if they are good at sports
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People who are good at sports generally have to work at it to stay at the top. I suspect the influencers have to put in significant effort to cultivate their images too.
Unequivocally (Score:2)
Coming back from a 3-day weekend working in IT..... YES.
Ability, merit, intelligence (Score:2)
You need none of these things to be successful. Money and connections do more for a person's outcome than any amount of brains. A century of middle managers marrying their secretary has brought us to this point.
Now don't blame middle managers for this, they as simply dumb beasts acting according to their nature. But blame a system that values the function of management over the actual work that labor performs.
demo- (Score:2)
-graphics. It's always demographics. Who has been having the babies since birth control and feminism became available and legal? Higher socio-economic class women had either zero or none, while the lower classes and religious fundamentalists had many. Intelligence is like 90% genetic.
Furthermore, thanks to the introduction of widespread welfare and free medical care, fewer stupid people die before prorcreating, and fewer defective babies die perinatally. So, not only genetics, but evolution.
This is not about AI (Score:5, Interesting)
When I went through school, reading comprehension involved reading a few full pages, followed by questions to test understanding. Nowadays, reading comprehension involves a 25-50 word passage (about the length of a tweet). It's just plain easier.
When I went through school, entire books were assigned for reading, followed by book reports and tests on retention of the entire book. At least a solid dozen books would be read over the year, in addition to several plays, a poetry unit, and some short stories for good measure. I'm watching my kid go through HS english. The books are really good, but they read way less overall, and each book is broken up into many several-page sections that they're tested on in sequence. It's much less demanding. At no point does my kid say "aw man I gotta read 50 pages of my book for english". That was pretty regular in my time, at least in the honors course.
The article seems focused on reading and writing. Yeah, I'm sorry to say that emphasis on rigorous reading and writing has degraded over the past 20 years. People who train to bench press 100 lbs regularly are gonna be stronger than people who train on 10-15 lbs. Is anyone surprised?
I'm not sure this applies to math and science. STEM in the US seems to still be fairly solid.
Verbal skills (Score:2)
A perfect storm (Score:2)
Anti-intellectualism and the defunding of education and science, combined with the advent of AI, is going to accelerate this trend, at least in the US. We're not only getting dumber, we're facilitating and celebrating it.
As dear leader wants (Score:2)
Pivot Point (Score:2)
Which is not unusual after a big upheaval. Fortunes were made over the last few decades, and the new rich (well, most of them were already r
Learning vs. just getting ahead. (Score:3)
I saw an extended report on ABC something like 20 years ago about students cheating in HS and college. Those interviewed said they didn't really care about learning the material. They just wanted to get good grades so they could get a good job and make lots of money so they could have a good life. Students using AI now seems like an extension or next step along those lines. Perhaps many just don't think it worth the time/effort to actually learn things when they can just look them up on the web - obviously ignoring the issue of how that information, if correct, got there. Maybe that's actually good enough for those that need to use information, but not create/discover anything new, but that thinking could slowly lead to knowledge stagnation over the long haul - for the individual and society.
We need more wars (Score:2)
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I know (or at least hope), that you meant this in jest, but hear me out anyway: there is this common perception, that war clears out the deadwood, burns away the dry shrubbery, and after all the killing has been done and done to, fresh minds will spring to life and reinvigorate society. Reality shows a very different pattern, though. Russia tried to bring this concept to life in the last almost four years, lost over a million convicts, misfits and whatnots, and total alcohol consumption went up, not down.
If
Yes, because we helped stupid people to congregate (Score:2)
Prior to the advent of social media, exploiters had to put in a LOT of work to market their scams to stupid people because mass, targeted communications was complex and expensive. Then comes social media which allows people to widely advertise their stupidity, congregate online on the basis of their stupidity, and for them to be easily targeted en masse by people who specialize in exploiting stupid people.
Now we have people who started stupid, self-identified as stupid, and have been taught by exploiters th
Hydrogen and stupidity, the most common elements (Score:2)
The answer to the headline is, atypically, "Yes". But in fact every age has been the golden age of stupidity. When the microcomputer revolution was occurring... most people were idiots. When the transistor was invented... the world was full of morons. When Einstein and Bohr and Heisenburg and Planck and Maxwell and Schroedinger were revolutionizing physics... yes, they saw stupid people everywhere. When Newton was publishing on gravity... yep, dumb people everywhere. When Aristotle was teaching promis
The Stupidularity is at hand! (Score:2)
Ask Donald Trump (Score:2)
No (Score:2)
It gets stupider...this is morelike bronze.
Give them their degree. (Score:2)
But whereas some might carry the modifier, "With Distinction", use the model my drivers license has. "Requires glasses". So the degree comes with an asterisk and a footnote that says, "Requires AI".
But I doubt it'll happen. Illiterate people routinely graduate as it is.
No pain, no gain (Score:2)
It may be a trite saying, but it's as true in education as it is in a gym. If you don't exercise your brain, it's not going to improve.
There's a reason weightlifters don't use a forklift or crane to pick up the barbells and do a dozen reps. The problem is not that the weights are in need of lifting. And that's the same problem with homework. The teacher doesn't need a stack of 5 page reports; what they need is for their students to practice using their brains.
Unfortunately the education system is design