I worry that as a smart person you are too optimistic about what your fellow youths are staring at. TikTok and its copycat short vertical video sites are primarily full of content designed to make you dumber, whether it’s prurient content, simplistic and stupid political/cultural takes, or fads. And it of course comes with a joke of a promise that if you waste your own time making the same garbage, then you too can have a career as an “influencer”! I don’t think any of this is giving the benefits your YouTube viewing has.
They’re just adapting to be better at teaching to the tests. Those tests are the yardstick which grade the schools, and the school admins and teachers must pass them sufficiently or else they’ll be replaced with others who will. So there has always been shenanigans where they exploit their foreknowledge of the test contents to help kids be prepared for very specific things, instead of teaching them thinking skills.
Tests that legitimately are attempting to measure the thinking skills of individuals aren’t going to see improvements, I predict.
Some of it seems to be education-related though, and parents had insufficient influence there. The Chromebook generations are just handed a device and told this is how we do school.
But I’m not really sure how much is education and how much is everything else. We don’t have a control group of kids who have EdTech educations but don’t have brains addled by TikTok (etc) into having no attention span and manipulated by algorithms into having whatever beliefs best optimize “engagement.”
Everyone can see that GenZ isn’t all right, everyone knows that children shouldn’t be raised by makeup tutorials, Jake and Logan Paul, and now ChatGPT, but we as a society are doing little to stop it. And what little we do (social media bans for example) are incomplete and have to be questioned on whether they have bad consequences for adult freedom and privacy.
Why “must”? To accept your argument as written, it sounds like you would consider it impossible for the typical intelligence to decline from one point in time to a future point in time.
I tend to believe the argument made in the article because when I see someone young try to fact-find, the effort usually begins and ends with a Google AI overview. They then accept that unilaterally and are incapable of independently analyzing or verifying what it claims. Hell, they don’t even click its meager “citations”!
Multiple studies have found that Gen-Z is more gullible to scams.
All of this points to critical thinking weakness and learned laziness. A belief that everything should be easy and simple. I think it even explains some of their common political beliefs in both parties: absolutist opinions are more popular than ever, rejecting nuance.
Can you support that last clause? I havent witnessed “progress” being produced yet by the cohort that grew up with tablets and Chromebooks. And I don’t hate them. I do feel bad for them, though. They didn’t choose their upbringing.
It’s weird that that opinion occurred in a comment where they already knew about the reverse decision. It’s more of a case of pragmatism than cultural dominion.
I suppose they think that if America didn’t have so much cachet, that calls to 911 in Europe should route to a recording of someone chewing you out (in whatever the local language is) for being a cultural imperialist.
That’s super cool of them. I guess fire is one of those things where jurisdiction doesn’t have to be exact. And with the lack of physical border there, they could easily just hop over and do their Dutch colleagues a favor.
Emergency services work cross border lots of times but I had never seen it in action. They were super fast too, far faster than I thought was even possible and their dutch colleagues weren't all that far behind. They managed to save the surrounding buildings but the building where the fire started was lost.
I mean they were possibly going to help anyway or even physically closer. And I imagine that sitting around in the fire department does get boring, something to do occasionally is welcome :)
Yes. This article’s main drive is that because organizationally the PD often (sometimes? Idk) runs the PSAP where calls are received, that they have a bias toward assuming a cop is the correct responder.
I actually disagree with this. The reason why people call police is that they know that the so-called “mental health crisis” is extremely dangerous, in a physical way, not just “emotionally triggering.” Like the dude I saw on the news in NYC last week who was lunging at the police with scissors who eventually ended up shot after the taser failed to get him to stop.
I guess people would like to believe that there’s an army of well-trained social workers out there who could be dispatched to the scene to simply talk someone down from a total psychotic episode, but the fact is that the type of person who’s going to be shot by the police would’ve also stabbed the social workers with scissors too.
The reality of the matter is that people who are severely mentally ill can be very dangerous to others. There’s not an easy way to guarantee they’ll never come to harm unless you’re willing to sacrifice the safety of everyone else by renouncing any possibility of using force.
That’s certainly one possible way to address, at least when considering rural sheriffs or small-town police forces. But that kind of suggestion starts making people feel pretty uncomfortable in the US. Local control is better at convincing people that those empowered to police in their communities are accountable to local voters.
As with anything, of course it’s going to be partisan, too. NYC leftists don’t want Albany dictating how their police operate, and rural Californians don’t want the uniparty government in Sacramento controlling theirs.
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