Comment on Unified Theory of American Reality

• LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  If the oldest Gen-Zer is 28, and youngest is 13, assuming an even distribution, that puts the average Gen-Z is roughly 20 and a half, long past done with school, assuming school means school and does not include university or higher ed and stops at 18, then in fact the vast majority of Gen-Z are done with the vast majority of school.

  This invalidates your point, and while I’m curious about your rather odd source link that I’m not clicking till I can verify what that is at the desktop, I doubt it supports your free-associative generational generalisations about ill-defined spooks like “mindset” and some ramblings about tech scams that you happily append to your maybe-true data point about AI tool use.

  As one of those “kids these days” who is 27, from my experience, very much including this exchange, boomers and the vast majority of Gen X have absolutely no intellectual capabilities and interacting with one makes it exceedingly obvious.

  They often cannot read, and if they can - they cannot read more than a paragraph without getting lost, and they often cannot write properly either.

  This makes sense when you consider that even in the laziest pursuit of talking with a chatbot – the average Gen-Zer probably reads more text in a day incidentally than an average Gen Xer reads in their entire life even if they’re fairly well-read.

  A thought that’s been popular during the pandemic is how “our brains” weren’t “meant” to process all the information that comes from the internet and that it leads to some sort of overwhelming of the faculties, but in personal anecdote - I’ve never experienced this or even known anyone who has. If I trust my eyes and ears (and pretend like IRL isn’t just another, arguably far more self-serving selective echo chamber than any corporate algo even like the olds do), I could easily conclude that misinformation in general is a phenomenon almost entirely confined to people over the age of Gen-Z.

  While the move to video is a real phenomenon, I would argue that it does not by itself evidence a decline in basic intelligence, and is a self-fulfilling prophecy where monetisation on video was much easier to do well due to inherently better CTR/engagement/impact on impressions than traditional banner ads that supported written sides, leading for it to be more widespread and therefore concentrating a lot of useful and entertaining content and information in video, leading people to read less.

  Again, though – the above is a side tangent because most Gen-Z were born long before this phenomenon occurred.

  And before you bring this up - yes, literacy rates have gone down due to the economic decline/collapse of the western capitalist model and monetary policies of austerity alongside the culture of anti-intellectualism and gerontocracy who perpetuates it like their arteries perpetuate lead in their bloodstream, but again – this does not impact the vast majority of Gen-Z who are done with the vast majority of schooling.

  Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s embarrassing to make such an obvious error in an argument where you claim “kids these days” are somehow dumber.

  The skill involved in not simply parroting points that fit your conclusions, but actually understanding what you’re parroting is called critical thinking.

  While I’m no scientist and I actually don’t think I’m smart at all, I do think what thinking skills I do have - I owe to exposure to various “tech scams”, making mistakes, examining them, disregarding authority, not blindly trusting, learning the difference between an opinion and truth, and learning to reason correctly.

  I focus my equally free-associative personal anecdote observations (the immovable object to the unstoppable force of an overly broad generalisation) on the boomers and the gen-x, but millennials to me while definitely more outwardly intelligent probably due to better education, diet, habit and lesser alcohol consumption, overall they lack a certain rigour and intensity required to truly drill deep.

  Looking back at political debates and discussions during the Great financial crash in 2008, it really does feel like I’m watching simpletons talk about rather basic things as if they’re complex and puzzling. I stand on the shoulder of giants etc. etc. but this even applies to ideas that to them and me are equally from the distant past.

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  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You could just look up actual population distributions, they’re not that hard to find, and you’ve just completely rejected my sourced claims, while acknowledging that’s what you’re doing.

    I didn’t say all Gen Z.

    I said younger Gen Z.

    You’re getting massively hung up over misunderstanding that.

    You then say me repeating what my source says is “an embrassing mistake”.

    You then make a bunch of anecdotal claims and just operate as if they are objective fact.

    You then say you find the … very established concept of information overload to be ludicrous, because you specifically do not apparently experience this.

    I guess uh, see also: choice paralysis, a very similar and also well established concept in economics and marketing.

    You then pontificate about general intelligence levels… when again, you can just look these things up, you can just see that US literacy scores in schools and colleges peaked around 2010-2012 and have then rapidly declined, similar with numeracy.

    And yes, I am bringing that up, because uh… yeah, most Gen Z would have graduated either high school or college after that peak.

    But you’re more interested with your own internal idea of what facts may exist, as opposed actually refering to any sources.

    Its extremely ironic to me, perhaps you could even say embarassing, that you Zoomer tell me Millenial that I lack the intellectual rigor to drill deep, when… you are the one who refused ro view my source, mocked it and me, and then went on to invent a scenario that makes sense based on your vague recollection of some data and also personal anecdotes.

    Go on then, find the data I’ve here referenced, you will discover I am correct, and you are largely making things up and doing logic based on fuzzy data.

    … you put in air quotes “mindset” as if that was something I said, a word I used in anything you are responding to.

    I daresay you are overwhelmed with too much information and have been uh, fudging the details of your evaluation of it.

    In other words, you’re doing the autistic version of projection, all the reasoning faults you are accusing me of doing are… thebones younsre doing, and I know what that looks like because I am also autistic and used to do that when I was younger and/or flustered, seen a lot of other autists do it too.

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    • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      you’re doing the autistic version of projection, all the reasoning faults you are accusing me of doing are… the ones you are doing, and I know what that looks like because I am also autistic and used to do that when I was younger and/or flustered, seen a lot of other autists do it too.

      Unhinged.

      I’m not wasting time writing an in-depth response to someone who holds up economics and marketing as if they are sciences and their concepts hold serious value, and does so to accuse me of having autism lol wtf

      I think if anyone has information overload it’s you, I’m not viewing your dodgy source link that starts with “read-vip.variety” until I can verify it’s legit, as I said.

      I wasn’t even suggesting that your data point was incorrect either, I said it was “maybe-true”, it wasn’t relevant because the rest of your argument barely connected to it.

      you can just look things up

      Yeah I thought so too, but then people like you take numbers and just not understand them, so I guess maybe you can’t just look things up.

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