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.