Ya, that struck me as real truth. It’s a nice summary, gets quickly to the root of the problem. If you are facing yet another moron, this elucidates what’s going. People do not aspire to mature beyond 5th grade anymore. Adjust your strategies accordingly.
Comment on Unified Theory of American Reality
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
The average American is as literate as a 5th to 6th grader.
thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-litera…
5th to 6th graders are 10 to 12 years old, normally.
So uh… yep, mhm, the average American is about as stupid as a 12 year old, that’s a bit on the optimistic side though.
Dude’s theory isn’t really wrong, Americans are dumb and immature as fuck, and yes the statistics exist to back that up.
dbtng@eviltoast.org 3 weeks ago
anomnom@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I honestly would take a fifth grader over most seventh graders most of the time.
Middle school was just a series of brutal fights where I grew up. Physically for the boys and psychology for the girls.
I’m just saying we should be careful what we wish for, though we really do need much better reading programs in schools.
dbtng@eviltoast.org 3 weeks ago
My point was more about what you need to do in response, rather than the exact level of lack of maturity you are facing. I think modeling the moron as if they were a child gives good predictive power and suggests management strategies one may employ.
anomnom@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Sure, I’ve tried it a little bit, but some of them are insufferably immature to the point of them basically responding with: “I know you ware but what am I?”, or plugging their ears and yelling lalalala until you give up or leave.
Reverse psychology come close until they realize the outcome. Some never realize it though.
Captainautism@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
As an American, this is accurate. I had a conversation with my wife not too long ago about how until I met her, I felt like I was always surrounded by idiots. I don’t mean that in a hyperbolic way. I did not know one person who continued any sort of self education in adulthood. Once they were out of school, that was it. It blew my mind. Life should be a daily striving to learn more. They seriously would not pick up a book, or research any topic outside of headlines.
Hackworth@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Curiosity is as important as raw intelligence, and curiosity can be encouraged. Mostly it’s discouraged.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Yet 54% of U.S. adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level
So US was a 3rd-world country all along?
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
3rd world country with a knock off gucci belt.
Middle eastern terrorism?
Nah, we got ya’ll qaeda right here at home, proud boys all joined ICE, gonna be 4th of July every damn day for the forseeable future.
Jumpingspiderman@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
12 year olds are on average a lot smarter than your usual GOP congresscritter. In fact howler monkeys are smarter than your average GOP congresscritter.
ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Honestly it terrifies me when I think about this.
I’m too stupid to be smarter than this many people.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Sadly, nope, if you can read at a high school level, there’s roughly a 75% chance you are smarter than any rando you meet.
I am starting to notice this in the slop youtube throws at me that I am sometimes dumb enough to click on.
Somebody reading some article to give commentary on it, and you can just tell they are reading one word at a time, misunderstanding what 15% of them mean, have to actually stop on 5% of the words because those ones they’ve never read before, and then they start complaining that the author must have just been using a thesaurus… because a few of the vocab words in the article are 8th grade or above.
… I picked up reading quickly, so quickly that when I was in 2nd grade, I was assigned to go out into the hall when I was done with my classwork (I always finished rapidly) and then go help a 4th or 5th grader who was behind in reading skills, go sit with them and have them or me read aloud, help them with words they didn’t know, etc.
Everyday, even on the net, I encounter more people who… are beyond graduating high school age, who barely read better than 5th graders with dyslexia.
Capricorn_Geriatric@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I love how today literacy isn’t even a thing. No one talks aboit teaching things (in the EU, at least). It’s all about financial literacy, digital literacy, social media literacy, hell, even (and bear with me here) AI literacy. Yes, really. There’s prpbably 800 of these literacies floating around.
Whoever thought of this is an idiot. The word literacy means one thing: the ability to read and write (and understand what you read/wrote). Nothing more, nothing less.
It isn’t just stupid, it’s also malicious. Kids all over the globe are suffering from poor literacy, and instead of fixing the problem you quite literally shift the goalposts.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
When AI services enshittify by raising their price barriers, or when just… infrastructure generally collapses to a serious degree…
Much of Gen Z and A, either reliant of or just raised on using AI to do their thinking and work for them…
They will basically go feral, they won’t be able to get their fix, a part of their ‘brain’ will have been ‘removed’, and they will literally be dysfunctional.
And I shouldn’t just single out younger people, though its more prevalent and severe with them, there are certainly many millenials and older who’ve also just given up good chunks of their thinking abilities to AI, which is largely a proprietary service that go undergo a price hike just like Xbox or Netflix.
… I used to think the ending to DX Human Revolution was a tropey cop out, that broke from basically the rest of the game’s narrative and gameplay themes, just a zombie apocalypse at the end of your spy thriller.
Now I realize that was the point, maybe still a bit hamfisted or over the top, but… yep, yep, people become reliant on things they aren’t actually 8n control of for just basic day to day living, and then you actually break that, take it away from them?
Yep, zombie apocalypse is not too far off from what would actually play out.