Idiocracy, here we come.
Not from your article but from one of the links someone else posted.
When students self-report classroom computer use, higher daily screen exposure consistently corresponds to lower scores in reading, mathematics, and science. The relationship is monotonic: more screen time, lower performance
So it’s not about the generation getting dumber as the headline would suggest, it’s screens rotting our brains. So it’s very likely that all generations intelligence has dropped.
The media did so well with putting the millennials against the boomers that they’re desperate for another version of the same fight. Their rich pay lords also probably won’t let them out a more honest headline which would be:
“it’s official: increased screen time reduces intelligence”
The pandemic is likely responsible for a lot of it, even though people don’t want to talk about it. Covid is proven to reduce IQ, every infection is damaging the brian and the key finding is that people aren’t aware its happened to them.
The teachers I talked to told me children who had remote classes for a year were all behind both mentally and emotionally, not even because of infection, just because they basically skipped a year of life.
That’s most likely more the reason than the virus itself.
They had a year to nonstop melt their brains on social media.
poor brian
He’s not the messiah.
He’s a very naughty boy!
Are you still bright, BrightCandle?
Sometimes their brian hurts
Stop this bullshit of old gen vs new gen.
100%
I’m Gen X and starting to see a lot of the boomer “uphill both ways to school in the snow with no shoes” bullshit from Gen X. STFU you asshats. My generation simultaneously says it had the greatest time and then turns around and whines about whatever manufactured hardship they come up with when talking about outher gens.
Yeah, we DID and DO have the best of both pre- and post-tech worlds, we arguably had the last shot at the traditional school, college, walk-in-your-resumee career, then buy a home, and the generational motto is “fuck you” if anyone even remembers us, but siddown. Don’t turn into our parents, you assholes.
Millennials are already doing the same thing. Suffering Olympics about how they have had it worse than anyone else but at the same time are the best generation ever produced. FFS. We are all on this planet together, we really should work on improving it for everyone, rather than trying to tear each other apart of perceived slights.
I’d argue that the Millennials did have it bad. They got told they’d have the traditional path, then got shat on by boomers constantly telling them it was their fault for not succeeding because “avocado toast” and “Starbuck’s coffee”. Meanwhile the boomers kept yanking the rug out from under eveyone with boom-bust recessions while saying “oh, that just happens every “x” years” while pillaging the economy by deregulating and consolidating. The milennials got lied to, hard. Generations after them had the “benefit” of knowing they were already fucked.
The millennials did/do have it bad, but more worryingly they’re only the first to have it worse than their parent generation.
Gen Z have lived through almost as much, and have plenty more coming.
Gen Alpha might be the last generation to experience the weather patterns that built the current world order.
Every generation has it’s own problems. I am sure Millennials think they had it bad until you realized Silent Generation had WWII, Boomers had Vietnam, Gen X had Iraq, it goes on and on. And yes, there is certainly a problem with society in general that has allowed for the rise of rampant consumerism following the 1950’s and hasn’t stopped. Millennial’s didn’t get lied to, they decided to act like their parents and not care about fighting a system that doesn’t care about them. Then they had children that care even less.
Iraq directly affected millennials as well, by the by.
So did Vietnam. Not sure what your point is other then reinforcing mine.
No, I mean millennials fought in Iraq.
The current post-covid slump is worse than the Great Depression, and has similarly lead to wars and deaths comparable to WW2 combat casualties (not holocaust/pogrom level cleansing yet, although Israel, China and US/ICE have made some respectable efforts).
Vietnam was 20 years long, but the Ukraine war is already comparable in number of casualties.
Gen X Iraq is comparable to the war in Afghanistan.
But I’ll give the Greatest Generation some leeway, the Spanish Influenza was much deadlier than Covid, and they also had to live through the two world wars. That’s comparable to the Millennial experience (especially if we include HIV/AIDS pandemic), and we don’t yet know if the Millennials will experience a similar subsequent rise in life quality and wealth accumulation.
I will when they will.
there is a big argument on this reporting to be nonesense.
But if it has any truth to it, we should see it as previous generation failing on gen z, not them being dumb.
zero accountability. I swear, it’s always someone else’s fault. lol.
Accountability where it belongs. You dont blame someone for not walking after shooting them in a leg, unless you would be disingenous asshole.
Fucking hilarious.
Most of kids gets a smartphone before their teens and it’s not like they bought it for themselves… How can you hold a 12 years old accountable?
GenZ is like a giant, unaware focus group for a product (the smartphone/social media environment) that has been beta-tested after release. Only now, as a society, we’re starting to adjust to it
What’s funny is, Gen X, and millennials seems to have no excuses for the mistakes they made.
Imagine that.
- That’s the same for every generation, isn’t it? Have you ever heard a boomer recognize a mistake? And I’m not even going to mention GenX as they’re the least relevant generation of all time.
- You’re using the Donald Trump’s “strategy of avoiding my question with disdain for the opposite”: do you seriously think a 12 years old (or younger) can be held accountable if you give them a highly addictive, brain-rotting, paranoia machine?
Whatever you say kid.
Gen Z did nothing but grow up in the world made for them. Zero accountability indeed.
As did Gen X and millennials. Yet they don’t seem to have this built-in excuse to do no wrong.
Every generation seems to have the same excuse of it ‘not being their fault’, by and large they are accurate. Millennials didn’t cause the Great Recession, they lived through it. Gen Z didn’t cause COVID, they lived through it.
Damn OP, you need help
This is some intergenerational rage bait. Gen Z is just as smart and capable as any other generation. Human generations aren’t a hierarchy of ability and anyone who thinks they are better than a broad category of people is part of the problem. Racism and bigotry both stem from the same idea: some people are better than others and those people need to be discarded from society.
This article is pointless speculation by someone stirring up unwarranted sentiment.
Gen Z is just as smart and capable as any other generation.
The introduction of social media, with all the addiction, depression, anxiety, etc. associated with it has somehow managed to not affect peoples problem-solving skills? There are so many studies confirming how fucked the younger generations are regarding all kinds of mental health that it’s frankly absurd to believe those findings are completely independent of things like attention span and problem-solving skills.
Also:
- Article: Refers to an actual study.
- You: “This article is pointless speculation”.
Gen Z is just as smart and capable as any other generation
But they’re not. And there’s evidence to back it up.
They have the exact same potential as the generations around them - they didn’t get blasted with mutagen. The environment that contributed to allowing people to maximize their potential has been scuppered, tainted, and monetized, and particularly for the young, their own mental proclivities, which by the way, they have no ability to understand or override on their recognizance at early ages, are being weaponized against them by an army of psychological research.
LMAO!
Do you think they aren’t human beings just like yourself?
Of course they are. wtf kind of stuidnqueseij is that?
OH GOOD GAWD THE CHILDREN
Almost everything we know about Socrates is via Plato (Xenophon also mentions him, and there are some satirical references to him in Aristophanes). Plato ran an academy for the offspring of aristocrats, so he had a strong vested financial interest in propagandizing in favor of hierarchy and authority. This is one example.
I guess we can easily say this is a cycle. I wonder what’s the interval.
I’ve seen this story before. Seems the kids didn’t like it then either.
Don’t they say this same shit about every generation?
And there’s always some “study” proving it. Proving that the last great, smart, cool, respectful generation was whichever one the author was from…
No. They don’t.
But they did?
Growing up all I heard was “wahh millenials, theyre so dumb because computer and calculators. Millennials aren’t as skilled as parents because soft and indoor office jobs. Millennials can’t fix/handyman things cuz lazy/consumerism”
Right. You heard people whining about dumb shit. This isn’t the same. This is a study done with factual results.
Yea, that’s what they said about their takes too…
W/e man, take the bait. Do the artificial generational division bs. Around and around we go. Its totally different this time… totally
For almost a century, the Flynn Effect was the standard. Yet, suddenly, it ended with Gen Z. This isn’t opinions bud. It’s science.
You just don’t like the outcome.
Okaykiddo
How to tell when someone is out of gas:
Okaykiddo
The society we created for them is doing exactly what it id meant to do. Make docile consumers that don’t know better, with underfunded education and pretty much underfunded everything young people need, to maximize the juicy juicy profits for shareholders.
This is terrible, and I hope we can steer the ship around.
15 years ago if you started talking about intelligence in a scientific context, it feels like people would jump all over you. Now I notice it seems to be far more accepted. What changed?
Spend enough time talking about something, and people will start to consider a serious topic worth discussing.
Drop in intelligence made people trust IQ scores were more than the garbage science they are. 😔
Fads? Science on intelligence is solid and progressing steadily. We now can point to specific neural processes that determine how well brain operates and explain differences in intelligence. Popular understanding of intelligence is still stuck on basic IQ tests used to compare completely different populations. At some point some feel-good concepts like EQ caught on and it was fashionable to dismiss IQ as ableism or something. You can still see a lot of it but I guess enough research on intelligence is done and some of it still leaks through to the public.
If you use IQ as a valid measure of intelligence which there is copious amounts of data to suggest it is not beyond high school grades.
Did you read the article, or just commenting on the headline like everyone does nowadays? Be honest.
“Author” is a Senior News Editor
Doesn’t mention their sources or anything related to the study per se, just a bunch of “this guy said…”
I’ve seen you edited the post for the sources, good job.
I just wanted to point out that I don’t disagree with the article, I think it’s just poorly written: if you talk about “intelligence” you have to write “intelligently” otherwise it’s just old man yelling at cloud type of content.Okay.
Millennial here. The only thing surprising about a downward trend is that it didn’t start with Gen X and get progressively worse, to include us, with each generation.
As time goes, our planet gets closer to cooking us alive, Nazis are fucking surging in popularity, and the economy spirals further out of control… Yeah, that’s gonna have a not-so-great impact on our brain.
Looking at gen Z specifically, between COVID and AI slop, we kinda just destroyed like half of their education, so if they’re performing poorly on some academic metric: YEAH NO SHIT.
Alpha is even more fucked… But not as fucked as then gen after them!
Covid was forced on them. AI slop wasn’t. Each generation has its share of shit they were handed, and shut they could have easily avoided.
AI slop was absolutely forced on them. Even if they’re not personally balls-deep into ChatGPT or some shit, they’re still stuck navigating an enshittified internet that’s gone from bad to shitstorm in just a few years almost entirely due to AI.
It’d be frustrating as all hell to try to write a research paper or piece together a presentation using today’s internet.
It wasn’t. But to do you.
…um… would you mind pointing me to the other internet that wasn’t soiled by AI that genZ is using to dodge all the AL slop that would otherwise be forced on them? I’d very much like to use it.
No one forced Gen Z to use the trash to validate themselves with it. No one forced them to use it to do their thinking for them. We all use the same internet. Yet it seems only Z got dumber from it.
Imagine that.
We absolutely do not use the same internet. The internet millennials grew up with in their developmental period no longer exists.
I’m not really sure what your point is. Did they all use the internet wrong and become dumber due to some sort of inherent moral failing predestined for humans born after the late 90s? Does being gen z on its own make someone somehow worse than everyone else? If the same people who now are gen z were somehow born instead in the 80s or 60s would they somehow improve or be the same people we see today? Are you suggesting it is their genetics from some generational decline? Or is there a supreme being who decided people born in that time frame wouldhave souls more inclined to make worse decisions for their intellectual development?
I can understand that you feel attacked and therefore defensive, but understand that saying a generation is bad because some studies prove it is not useful. We can say that overuse of LLMs or social media or digital classrooms has hindered their development. Blaming them for the fact that the people that raised them provided a provably poor developmental environment seems to be ducking the very accountability you claim to be striving for.
I never said a generation is bad. Just that it’s obnoxious that they consider themselves blameless and seemingly perfect in every way with next to no accountability for anything. I don’t hate them, I just have zero respect for anyone that doesn’t take respond for themselves.
This comes off as you disliking an entire generation more than anything else, not gunna lie.
No, it comes off as finding lack of accountability fucking annoying.
*Gestures broadly towards boomers, who seem to be accelerating their dementia by consuming endless facebook slop reels.
Counterpoint with proof: yes it was.
Okaybuddy.
Ah shit, you got me with that one. That right there is undisputable.
ggs 🤝
I’m hopeful that by the time my nephew has worked out what his fingers are for the AI bubble will have popped and we can have moved back to some sort of reality.
The thing with us Millennials is we had to learn like multiple generations worth of stuff and then proceed to not only teach the older generation what we learned but also the younger generations. So naturally there are gaps.
It didn’t include us because we taught ourselves a lot of things because we had to, there was no one teaching us these things. We went from living in the early 80s and having dial up phones, tvs with maybe 3 channels, and for the vast majority of us no access to a computer. then suddenly we transition to cable tv, computers, cell phones, the internet, how to use the internet, how to build websites for the internet, how to communicate with others on the internet, online gaming, smart phones, how to use smart phones, high speed internet, CRT tvs to Plasma to HD, Beta to VHS to Laser discs to DVDs to bluray. having access to very little information to suddenly having access to all the information.
We had to learn how to use ALL this stuff and then teach Gen X and older how to use it followed up by Gen Z and younger. and that’s just the technology. that’s not including all the massive changes to society that happened during our formative years.
The younger generations don’t have any of these massive leaps because it’s all kind of stagnated or regressed. They’re not “forced” to learn anything new to use it or navigate it because we already did that for them. Gen Z doesn’t have to create content like we did, it’s all provided for them and most of it is of poor quality. Our content creation consisted of building our own websites, PHP forums, IRC rooms, building our own social networks, chatrooms, games, etc. They don’t have to do this.
And as far as education it’s the same deal. Remember we were told that we had to learn all this math because we’d never be able to “carry around a calculator with us at all times”. or we had to learn cursive because “that’s how everyone writes”. or that we MUST go to college because THAT’S the only way to get a job. Again because of the technology we built Gen Z and younger doesn’t need any of that, they don’t need to learn it and they’re not learning it.
At the end of the day we thought we’d be making their lives easier with what we HAD to learn but in turn, we’ve made their lives harder because we didn’t tell them WHY we had to learn it. we just handed it all to them and said “good luck.”
Yeah this is made up nonsense mate
Enjoy mate.
