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- 🇨🇦 tunetardis@piefed.caEnglish2 days
As a Gen X whose brain cells were supposedly fried in childhood breathing tons of leaded gas, I look upon my Gen Z offspring and have to say, a drop in intelligence is not at the top of my list of concerns for that generation. They seem a generally dispirited bunch. So much depression, anxiety, and isolation, coupled with bleak future prospects. I just want to give them all a hug, honestly.
- 2 days
Fun fact: Depression affects many things. Attention span, reaction time, engagement, memory, higher reasoning, spatial awareness… All things that (tangentially or directly) affect perceived intelligence.
Pretty damn good chance that we’re all sad because we know damn well just how fucked the world is, and we burned out before we ever got a chance to try.
… that said, I’ll totally take that hug. Hugs are great. 🫂
- 2 days
And yet, intelligent people are also far more likely to be depressed. Imagine how smart all those sad smart people would be if they weren’t sad about the state of the world all the time!
- im_fine_sandy@nord.pubEnglish2 days
If someone offered to make me dumber and happier I would take that deal.
- stembolts@programming.devEnglish2 days
But that would require us to so something about it. Icky! I hate doing things!
Second point, what if we make the world a better place for no reason. You’ll really have egg on your face then.
How does it feel to be outsmarted. (very smug look)
- 2 days
Yep, we got shit thrown at us, and in some ways it built good traits in us. But there was still some hope along with the fears in our time. I don’t think we passed much of that down.
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
Same. However, it doesn’t make this any less true. And things aren’t boding well for Gen Alpha.
- 2 days
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.
- GalacticRobot@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
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.
- 2 days
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.
- Brainsploosh@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
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.
- GalacticRobot@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
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.
- GalacticRobot@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
So did Vietnam. Not sure what your point is other then reinforcing mine.
- Brainsploosh@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
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.
2 daysunderfunded education, extremely bleak prospects for the future that lead to mass anxiety and depression (which is bad for your brain, shockingly), and having your formative years during a pandemic whose long-term effects include cognitive impairment will do that to you, yea
- III@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
Listen, conservatives haven’t been working tirelessly for decades to erode American education just to have someone on the internet give the credit to the outcomes they cultivated…
- jaybone@lemmy.zipEnglish2 days
They will live in the shithole world they cultivated, and be angry about the fact they live in a shithole.
- Mog_fanatic@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
Gotta trust the process. Just a few more Bibles in the classrooms and we’re there!!
- CosmoNova@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
Also AI chatbots. LLMs pretty much sealed it and will make Gen alpha perform even lower. Well, it will make everyone perform lower long term but Gen Alpha won‘t learn a lot of important thinking skills.
it’s not excuses, just (informed) theories about material conditions that could lead to this
what’s your explanation for this? genuinely curious
i’m kinda doubtful that the blanket “technology = bad” thesis in the article is true, honestly. i’m obviously not a neuroscientist but it seems super reductive and simplistic to me, and altho i believe that yes reliance on short-form content and ai summaries isn’t good for your attention span, that’s 1. not the same thing as intelligence and 2. faaaaar from being exclusive to gen z (or gen alpha for that matter). look at any older person with a phone and you’ll see it. my parents waste a ton of time on the glowing rectangle too and they treat the google summary like the gospel
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
Check the other comments. Someone posted links from better sources that cite the actual studies. You may not like the results, but that doesn’t make them less true.
- Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish2 days
This has a ring of “it’s not racist if it’s true”. The people aren’t different, they were dealt a different hand. Nobody is disputing that the studies, which probably just measure test scores, are incorrect.
The idea that there’s no reason, and they’re less intelligent inherently with no causes is an entirely new kind of magical thinking.
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
Yeah. Go ahead and disregard proof. And in doing so, you’re just proving them right.
- BradleyUffner@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
No, you’re not. You’re giving quippy little one sentence replies and accusing anyone that disagrees with you of not reading the article.
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
Why bother going deeper when all I’m met with is bullshit excuses and hand-waving the accountability of an entire generation.
It’s all someone else’s fault. It always is. Therefore it’s pointless to bother with anything more.
- pH3ra@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish2 days
This really starts to sound like “Mommy didn’t show me any love if I got a B+” kind of behaviour…
- pH3ra@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish2 days
Always deflect, never correct. Definetly at least one abusive parent. What they did to you wasn’t right OK? Young people have no responsibility, stop blaming yourself for what happened. Start loving your inner child so you can love others as well, peace
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
I don’t think you’re qualified to make such an assessment, kiddo- you need to finish high school before it can get a therapy degree.
But best of luck to ya. Take responsibility for your shit some day. It’s cathartic.
Oh. And you’re blocked. So don’t waste your time responding.
- Croquette@sh.itjust.worksEnglish2 days
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.
Sorry to be so direct - this is a frankly terrible article.
The paraphrased sections are not directly cited, the quotations are extremely brief and general, and sources either are not given or only the general publication (without specifics) are given, no numbers or comparators are given. The site layout appears intentionally messy to make it harder to avoid ad or ad-placed articles. Overall this seems to be content as a pretext for ads.
For anyone clicking through because they would like to read something more thought-out, here’s an article I found by googling the name of the person quoted, which gives more details: https://fortune.com/article/how-did-us-spending-30-billion-dollars-on-laptops-result-in-first-generation-less-cognitively-capable-than-parents/
This also is low on numbers, but here’s a link to Horvath’s testimony which appears to include comparator charts: https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/A19DF2E8-3C69-4193-A676-430CF0C83DC2
- Physnrd@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
Yeah, this is Horvath again. My biggest complaint about his research is that it is almost entirely correlation. Horvath specifically blames “edtech” as the reason for the decline, completely glossing over what this article seems to claim as the cause, short form videos and content. Not to mention all of the other societal shifts during this time, like the effects of No Child Left behind on schools.
Anytime I see this guy trotted out and his claims said as fact I just can’t take the article seriously.
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
I don’t think it’s meant to be an academic write up- just a basic idea of the study and results. Though your links do cover it much better.
I have an ad blocker so I see no ads on mine.
I support people posting content, so no worries. I guess if anything, I just want to help people who were frustrated like I was find better content. I don’t mean for it to make you feel bad, keep posting, but the more you can share something that helps the reader, the better for everyone.
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
Oh absolutely! I do t feel bad at all, and I appreciate the lift! We need to see more of this here.
- BrightCandle@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
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.
- 2 days
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.
- 2 days
They had a year to nonstop melt their brains on social media.
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!
- Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish2 days
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.
- rozodru@piefed.worldEnglish2 days
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.”
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.
Having less lead floating around probably helped raise the intelligence level a bit from when boomers were mainlining that shit from all the cars driving around.
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
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.
…um… would you mind pointing me to the other internet that wasn’t soiled by AI that genZ is using to dodge all the AI slop that would otherwise be forced on them? I’d very much like to use it.
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
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.
- 2 days
This comes off as you disliking an entire generation more than anything else, not gunna lie.
- pupperdreams@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
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.
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
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.
- Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
Ah shit, you got me with that one. That right there is undisputable.
ggs 🤝
- phutatorius@lemmy.zipEnglish2 days
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.
- muhyb@programming.devEnglish2 days
I guess we can easily say this is a cycle. I wonder what’s the interval.
- sanzky@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
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.
- pH3ra@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish2 days
Most of kids get 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 very recently, as a society, we’ve started to adjust to it
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
What’s funny is, Gen X, and millennials seems to have no excuses for the mistakes they made.
Imagine that.
- pH3ra@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish2 days
- 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?
- Jiggs@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish2 days
Accountability where it belongs. You dont blame someone for not walking after shooting them in a leg, unless you would be disingenous asshole.
- 2 days
Gen Z did nothing but grow up in the world made for them. Zero accountability indeed.
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
As did Gen X and millennials. Yet they don’t seem to have this built-in excuse to do no wrong.
- GalacticRobot@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
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.
- pH3ra@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish2 days
“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…”
- pH3ra@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish2 days
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.
- 2 days
IQ is a shit index, that shouldn’t be taken seriously
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
So…. You didn’t read the article, and it shows. Maybe it is on to something.
For reference:
Gen Z is the first group to score lower than the generation before them. Their attention span, memory, reading and math skills, problem-solving abilities, and overall IQ are lower than those of millennials.
All of these things are quantifiable.
The article does mention IQs being lower, though. It’s just not the only measure mentioned. I’m curious how the others were measured
Yeah, well I think this thread has a very angry vibe and needs a picture of a cat!
- 2 days
Did… you read the comment? They made a simple statement. They didn’t go beyond that and made no other claims. You’re the one assuming, here.
- zbyte64@awful.systemsEnglish2 days
No that doesn’t make IQ a good measurement of intelligence. Volumes have been written on this and how it is more a measurement of one’s heritable environment. Source: I am a millennial with an above average IQ.
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
And again…. They tested for more than just IQ. Read the article. Try and understand it.
- zbyte64@awful.systemsEnglish2 days
Both things can be true: that IQ is not a good index to use in this context and that other measurements have shown cognitive decline.
- thebestaquaman@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
So… when used at a population level rather than at an individual level, and used for comparison between generations from the same place… they’re a good metric?
- zbyte64@awful.systemsEnglish2 days
Good in what sense? Consider that people do better on an IQ test if you offer to pay them more based on their performance. One might conclude that Gen Z values the IQ test than prior generations, or it could be reflective of the environment having more food swamps.
Yes, as a means of measuring intelligence. What it was designed to do, and what it is used for in a clinical context, is to measure for impairment against your peers.
- Mercer@lemmy.zipEnglish2 days
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.
- Pratai@piefed.caEnglish2 days
Did you read the article, or just commenting on the headline like everyone does nowadays? Be honest.
