this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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Are We Living in a Golden Age of Stupidity? - Slashdot (science.slashdot.org)
submitted 1 day ago by cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] tehn00bi@lemmy.world 4 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 5 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] giraffes@kbin.earth 5 points 20 hours ago

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.

[–] tehn00bi@lemmy.world 2 points 21 hours ago

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.