Have we passed peak intelligence?
In international tests, student scores for reading and maths sunk to a new low.
US teens are struggling to concentrate & evaluate information.
The excellent
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What's going wrong?
US 18 year olds increasingly say they have trouble concentrating and learning new things
As you can see, that line was stable till 2013
What caused the sudden spike?
Almost half of US teens said they "hardly ever" spend their leisure time reading a book
The share of adults who are unable to “use mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements” has reached
- 25% in high-income countries
- 35% in the US
. suggests there's a "broad erosion in human capacity for mental focus and application"
My question: how do we reverse this trend?
Superb piece!! ft.com/content/a8016c
yup, millennials are the peak; everyone before us was lead poisoned boomers and gen x; everyone after is kids raised by ipads and with AI
A: No
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Crémieux
@cremieuxrecueil
I'm glad the issue of raw score comparisons across cohorts over time has finally hit a dataset besides the NAEP.
In the PISA, PIAAC, etc., trends are eliminated by accounting for measurement non-invariance and demographic change.
But very few people care to analyze correctly x.com/jburnmurdoch/s…
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No arguing the idiocracy trend but would be curious to see trends within specific demographic groups as a comp. The US has a lot of low skill immigration and has seen a massive rise in single parent households. It’s not clear if it’s due to compositional effects or a broad
Our aging world will also be a Wall-E world: fatter and lazier humans served by smart machines. We work less, reproduce less...but have more (cheap & shallow) fun.
Our brains are flexible, we just use them more for entertainment (which makes them weaker), and less for
We can't let human flourishing be prioritized over so-called tech "progress".
Clearly you don't think about that virus that's been circulating...and how much this correlates to exactly that timeline.
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Ziyad Al-Aly, MD
@zalaly
Replying to @zalaly
3/ Cognitive Disabilities Skyrocket
Most alarming is the rise in cognitive disabilities. The population reporting only a cognitive disability has grown by nearly 1 million—a 43% increase since 2019.
I think it can be largely attributed to our failing education system, which has increasingly prioritized accommodating the lowest-performing students at the expense of overall academic rigor. As someone who works in education, I’ve witnessed firsthand how this shift has turned
The solutions are simple but take some willfulness and habit changes to implement:
1) Give kids flip-phones and desktop internet in a public room in the house - no smartphones till they near 18, and then train them up on attention usage with controls. Books should be their main
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Need to control this by race. Might be true, but this trend could also be fully explained by demographic shifts.
I mean - obviously yes. you serve ppl brain rot 9 hours a day their brains rot
The smartphone + social media onslaught of nonsense was bad enough.
Now LLMs that "do work" for students can seal their fate as they now skip both the reading and the writing about what they could learn.
I made a 5-min video about this in 2018...
Didn’t read yet, but just a thought, maybe we just give too many people access to education, obviously as you expand college access from top 10% to 80% of population, not even to mention foreign populations, obviously average performance of students will drop,
It’s almost like… parents can take away the devices with social media on it… parents can actually start parenting instead of trying to keep their children quiet all the time, then blaming the very thing they keep them quiet with.
Excellent trend for who'd feast on US teens: to prevent any risk of struggling over how butchering feels to them, it's preferable they be without mind, is it not? /s
But doesn't that chart show that the reading, math and sandwich scores are all improving over time?
All thanks to the anti-science thought movement in schools. Kids need to be challenged.
Averages are declining. Huge issue.
But my family is getting smarter. It's never been easier to expand your capabilities, learn rapidly and maximize your IQ & knowledge.
But it's even easier to minimize your attention span and develop the habit of never thinking clearly.
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Here’s the historical context:
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For the most part, these look like relatively small shifts on a wide scale range. What's the full range of possible scores?
Test scores are going down but this doesn’t mean intelligence is going down because intelligence isn’t synonymous with test scores
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A Swedish antropologist said peak intelligence was 1880 in the UK. Going down since 1980. Reason, dysgenics (medical advances keep people alive, diseases and hardship kept the smartest alive) and migration.
Well, Marxism does like ‘em stupid and uneducated (except in the Marxist dialectic), so it’s probably true that our children are getting dumber because that’s what they are being not-taught.
My personal model is that everyone is cognitively tired and undermotivated. Orienting in social media is cognitively hard, but very rewarding, so everyone is doing this constantly and end up very tired and uncapable to do hard tasks.
Maybe it's time to expand research on learning, but in epidemiology and neurosci/cogsci departments (not education, econ/business/policy, social sciences departments).
People know what they need to know.
We used to think classics and poetry were important.
Name 10 living American poets, recite one of their poems and explain its significance to you.
Forget the poems. Name 5 poets.
Name 1.
Who do you think will win March Madness?
#CallForPapers JMIR Nursing welcomes submissions to a special theme issue examining Artificial Intelligence (AI) in #Nursing
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JMIR Nursing welcomes submissions to a special theme issue examining Artificial Intelligence (AI) in #Nursing
Find out more & submission requirements at: hubs.la/Q02KqyNp0
#MedTwitter 
Read more books on paper and long form writing, wayfind without your phone, stop advancing/graduating kids who are failing, no phones in school, back to basics on courses.
I am blaming social media. Information is provided in 10-30 second clips. More than that is too much for our attention spans apparently. We are expecting kids to run when they've never practiced to walk...
Financial Times knows exactly why this is. It's why all those graphs omit plot points from around 2019 to 2021. Here's what they wrote back then.
gee, it looks like the major shift on all of these graphs happened right as the 2020s began... Hmmm... I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
The issue in the U.S. is that the focus shifted from prioritizing the well-being of the collective society to fostering individual competition. As a result, the 1% are thriving, while the country as a whole is not benefiting.
The real questions to ask are: Which students’ scores are going down? Which students are struggling learn? Which students aren’t learning? Once you find the answer to these you will understand.
We have peaked, as a civilization. In the coming years, we are looking to achieve new local peaks, not reprise the glory of our parents (that won't be ours, though it might recur for some descendants, if we are fortunate). Peaking & troughing is normal. Life ebbs & flows.
You all really don't like mentioning what happened after 2019. That first graph is very telling.
It's starts with a C has 19 in it and is neuroinvasive.
In every, single, age demographic.
There are a lot of different things that could impair concentration and learning.
Some could be stress, depression and anxiety and sleeping disorders. Pretty common problems in modern day society.
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We-ell it’s dark if you truncate the charts so as to make the (proportionally) small changes in recent years seem so significant. They’re relevant but amount to very few percentage points.
No. Fields are getting more complex and we require new educational tooling to deal with it. The polymath once roamed the earth, they will return.
As we can all see the progress the Department of Education has made, clearly they had other goals.
But yes - let’s keep pushing to get AI tools everywhere. I don’t get this - Haidt and others have proposed reasonable age limits for this tech, which would seem to help immensely.
Even mild cases of Covid can cause severe issues such as brain damage.
“Some patients lost up to 2% of brain volume & gray matter thickness, which is a 10X greater loss than that experienced every year by older adults due to normal aging”
#LongCovidKids
Kids would rather go on their phones and get served short videos through an attention-optimize algorithm than read. I'm not surprised.
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phil oliver
@oliver_phil
Replying to @oliver_phil
"Infection results in”… “the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease”
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P
*US teens* have passed peak intelligence.
Most Americans don't want to hear about the rest
Not everything is about screens and attention. There's also a demographic explanation.
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Lucas Gortazar
@lucas_gortazar
Great piece by @jburnmurdoch of the decline in cognitive skills of youth and adult population in the West.
I agree with the hypothesis but there's a critical factor not mentioned which is having a large composition effect: low-skill migration.
ft.com/content/a8016c
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My take, the effort it takes building and maintaining these skills does not match future benefit anymore. In the past, strong academic skills correlated to high paying jobs. Now, skills mostly take a back seat to BS ability. Shows the kids can do this analysis correctly, though.
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It’s the screens. It’s child abuse to let them have them but many adults are just over sized children so they’re abusing themselves as well. We are fucked
The kids are cooked! But so are the adults. I’ve clearly overestimated the intelligence of the average person. This becomes more clear every year.
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how grave is the decline? the % points - do the account for that? or ist it more exponential or logarithmic?
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Social media becoming the replacement for varied experience and input
