I did tons of electronic learning as far back as the 80s and 90s, and still do.

It’s algorithmic social media. There’s loads of both direct causal and indirect evidence that algorithmic attention hacking has made everything worse: mental health, learning, socialization, motivation, productivity.

Short form content makes it even worse. It’s an endless barrage of short pointless tidbits with no connection, no plot, no larger theme, and often little to no content in the actual shorts. It makes trash TV look like high art from a lost golden age.

I worked for an education tech company in the 90s. Seemed to clear to me even then that computers in the classroom were not going to be a positive influence. The way things have gone since then, it is no wonder that kids’ brains have turned into pudding.

Essentially every high schooler had an active Facebook account and essentially every school paper was written on a word processor by, like, 2010. By 2018 even Instagram is starting to be played out. I would be very surprised to see a material increase in the share of US or western students using social media over the 2018-2022 period.

Another modern problem with education is that every student has a smartphone now, which they bring to the class, then they get distracted by it.

What are you talking about?

Between 2018 and 2022, we had a global pandemic hit!

The only reason we were "digitalizing education" is because millions of people were getting sick and dying. Millions more lost their jobs.

Trying to blame any single aspect of what happened during that period, like moving to remote learning, is hopelessly myopic and blinkered.

When I was a freshman in college taking CS courses, they were just rolling out a new Java curriculum. And Java being fairly new, the textbooks that we were assigned were absolutely terrible. Just garbage books.

But if the drop between 2018 and 2022 was AS LARGE as the drop between 2022 and 2026, this implies that something happened that was as large as a global pandemic for students' education happened in the last four years. I believe the OP is implying this could have been AI. However, something else could be happening, such as use of phones and other devices or another fundamental problem in the education system.

Yeah, I am genuinely confused how the grandparent comment just glossed over it.

I believe that both COVID and LLMs are disrupting educational metrics. But in terms of which one did more short-term scale damage (i.e, within 4 years), I would wager it was COVID.

the event in 2020 would've only been the last straw in a series of bad policy in education. It might've brought forward this same outcome a few years in advance, but it isn't a root cause.

Tied test scores to what outcomes? Bush the second tried tying test results to one kind of outcomes (school funding), and the result was schools getting worse.

Like in South Korea?

Isn't recreational drug use way down (especially alcohol)? All the others are definitely not helping.

> short form text

Underestimated. Turn off keyboard customizations that let your phone learn you're a literate adult. Then discover how much it really expects you to be swiping: butt, sup, lol, rofl, bruh ... Interspersed with plenty of emojis.

It's much more effective to address the obesity problem on the front end.

We have fast food and junk food advertising targeting kids. Kids are driven to school instead of walking or biking. School lunches are optimized to be cheap not nutritious. Pediatricians have to tap dance around weight. When the Obama Administration tried to push for healthier lunches there was pushback from the right over government bad, from industry over higher costs, and from school districts over costs. Healthier food for kids could not win a durable political coalition!

Because the political will doesn't exist. Because being fat is portrayed as a moral failing. Because the Protestant work ethic's[1] virtue of self-discipline extended to health and eating. I guess it's kinda strange to carry the mantle of the protestants without being protestant one's self, yet it happens.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249628161_The_moral...

Hell, let's just reduce the Medicare eligibility age (alllll the way down) so everyone can afford the care they need or would benefit from.

Ironically that GLP-1 blocker prescription would potentially make you ineligible. You have to take that pill for the rest of your life, and the military generally doesn't want to deploy combat troops dependent on a consistent supply of non-life saving medications.

There is no value for a government in long-term thinking, if the electorate only votes on short term issues.

I don't think so. I think what was meant was what was literally said: that 88% of youth qualified for the military are in college.

66% of youth are not qualified for the military or college, leaving a remainder of 34% that are qualified for the military, college, or both.

X% of youth qualified for college but not the military (qualified for college here meaning attending college, I think.), leaving (34-X)%.

Of those, 88% attend college .88(34-X)%,

leaving .12(34-X)% eligible for recruitment. Which ends up a successful recruiting number like 63.5K, which is from one of the references.

I could be wrong, but it could make sense.

But also, 2/3rds of 34% also leaves a remainder of about 12% (which is a bit coincidental), so maybe what was meant to be said was that only 12% of (all American youth) are (qualified) and not (in college), rather than only 12% of (the qualified) are not (in college.)

We have heard this so many times. The future was mechanized warfare, or missiles, or aircraft, or stealth jets. It seems that now in Russia/Ukraine, pretty much all forms of mechanized warfare have been rendered irrelevant and you can't achieve military objectives no matter how many bombing runs you conduct with your planes. And those planes are not safe either. Same goes for Iran. You still need the guys to go in.

> The future of warfare is robotic warfare, specifically large volumes of cheap attritionable autonomous munitions

The robots are made to kill people on the other side until you hopefully win, otherwise political disagreements could be settled via best of 3 CoD games - or chess if you're more traditional. Recruitment of humans is still required for fodder.

The meat robot still has a long way to go

Ramp up Adderall production and drug em into soldiers

The “poverty draft” narrative is old and tired and not true. The stats are 60% are from middle class, about 20% poor and 20% wealthy.

I’m not sure it’s social media so much as the smartphones. It’s been surprising to me watching my parents become slightly senile in a way that seems related to phones – much less ability to cope when the phones aren’t quite working and a lack of the habits I see in my own generation (eg one should obviously try to avoid having a phone out at the dinner table).

I don’t think I agree with your take around religion or ‘evil’. (Imo two big advantages of religion we are currently or will soon be wanting for society are firstly the social/community component and secondly the idea that one can lead a worthy and fulfilling life through acting virtuously and faithfully, rather than through the worth implied by educational or career achievements, which are often a rough proxy for certain kinds of intelligence, that are neither evenly distributed across the population nor easily changed, and which may become unimportant as machines outcompete us there)

> Things have been spiralling out of control ever since social media was introduced.

Where do you observe things "spiralling out of control"? It isn't everywhere, but it is certainly true of at least one country.

> I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.

The lense that has replaced religion is callous for-profit exploitation.

> the populus looses a lot of their rights

People will certainly lose the rights that they do not exercise.

I'm not that doomer about what you are referring to. I think a lot of kids are wising up to the echo chamber.

Nah to me it's more about a loss of connection with the physical world, les slowing down, less being bored. Without that, it's a different reality and I think studying requires that kind of brain. Otherwise you're just flitting this way and that and never really focusing.

> I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.

Yeah it's a fun situation to be in I'm also an atheist but while not perfect the Judeo-Christian moral and legal framework is pretty damn good compared to everything else we've created.

Yes the Chromebooks are pervasive and used in every subject. Probably because they are cheaper than buying overpriced textbooks for every subject.

why leave out intermediate years that show the rise before the fall?

    Group                          1998 NAEP  2013 NAEP  2024 NAEP  Change 98–13  Change 98–24  Change 13–24
    -----------------------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  ------------  ------------  ------------
    White                                268        275        266            +6            −2            −9
    Black                                242        250        243            +8            +1            −7
    Hispanic                             241        255        245           +13            +3           −10
    Asian/Pacific Islander               261        279        280           +18           +18            +1
    All public-school students           261        266        257            +5            −4            −9

Coincidence? Of course not.

1998? I wanted a quarter century of Grade 8 and that gives me 1998 to 2024 with NAEP. 2000 reading assessment was Grade 4 only. You can do it with any pair of years.

I don't assume that. See the first table, even better in shagie's nicely reformatted version.

You are the person in this discussion invoking race genetics. Why does your mind go there?

Not sure why this was downvoted. Memory is one of the most important skills imo

Having a good memory enables you to think deeper - if you remember certain concepts, you can reason better because you remember more concepts so your thinking is more in depth.

You were downvoted but also right. Memorization is an extremely useful skill to develop.

> More than half of the USA believes the Earth is less than 10k years old

Source?

I thought it was around that magic 20% [1] figure for which you can find support in America for almost any idiocy.

[1] https://ncse.ngo/americans-scientific-knowledge-and-beliefs-...

Aside from the facts that a) the polls don't actually show that and b) people professing religious beliefs aren't necessarily as serious about them as you'd think (and can accept quite a bit of contradiction in them depending on the context), learning consists of something more than "doing the reading" and then choosing correctly what to believe from among what was read. When your outgroup doesn't agree with you on something, generally it isn't because they haven't heard from your authorities; it's because they don't trust your authorities. (And why would they, given their perspective?)

What percentage of people drag us forward kicking and screaming into the future?