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Thursday, August 27, 2026
Idiocracy
The internet promotes simplified extreme views over more nuanced and complicated considerations. Thus you probably have seen somewhere on the internet over the past few years headlines in which the 2006 movie Idiocracy is claimed to have come already true. Or heard about the "reverse Flynn effect", in which Gen Z is the first generation measurably dumber than previous generations, with Generation Alpha doing even worse. Then everybody attaches their own favorite scapegoat to those headlines, and confidently proclaims that it is "social media", or "AI", or "screen time" or whatever that makes young people dumb.
The reality is a lot more complicated. That starts with the question of how you measure how clever and/or well educated a generation is. As it turns out, there is an observer effect, related to the Heisenberg principle, and you can't measure intelligence and education without at the same time affecting it. Thus standardized testing led to schools "teaching to the test", which affected what pupils did and didn't learn to do. But an ever greater problem, unsurprisingly, as it is very often the culprit, is statistics.
Statistics say that by various measures of intelligence and education, the world roughly got smarter in the 20th century, the Flynn effect, and dumber in the 21st century, the reverse Flynn effect. The fundamental problem of headline numbers in statistics is that an average frequently hides the truth. The average wealth between Elon Musk and me is half a trillion dollars, but that simply doesn't tell you anything about my financial situation. Only if you drill a lot deeper and look at more detailed statistical data like percentiles a better picture emerges.
The truer picture about intelligence and education of young people is that even in the latest generations, the top 10% of pupils are better educated and more intelligent than the top 10% of previous generations were, and the Flynn effect continues. But the bottom 10% of pupils today are much, much less educated and are often lacking very basic problem solving skills. The gap between the best and and the worst has gone up very much, and the bottom has sunk so precipitously that the average has been going down.
Now again you can attempt to attach your favorite scapegoat reason for everything to those data. Personally, as I have always been worried about the rise in economic inequality, I can't help but think that a rise in economic inequality also results in a rise in educational inequality. Or to say it differently, the way that things are taught at school are not sufficient for a pupil without additional adult supervision at home to end up with a good education. With the likelihood of a pupil getting adult supervision when doing his homework being very much linked to socio-economic factors. Richer kids have tutors and prep schools, poorer kids are left to their own devices.
Homework in itself is a flawed system. Imagine a page with 20 math problems, all about addition of two numbers between 10 and 99. With some guidance, a kid of the appropriate age could learn a lot about fundamentals of addition from doing those 20 math problems. But chances are that nobody has explained to the kid that the purpose of doing those 20 additions is for him to learn something about additions. He just got handed the piece of paper and been told that he has to return it with the correct results on it. As long as the kid has any access to any electronic device, he'll realize that the fastest way to fill out the results correctly is by the use of anything from a calculator to Google search, without going through the hard and seemingly unnecessary step of learning about addition yourself.
Of course the advances in technology are partially to blame. Calculators existed already when I was young (and led to intense discussion in education). But ChatGPT can also write that essay about "what I did this summer" or do that book summary for a pupil, bypassing the need to develop writing and reading skills. Thus the scary headlines about pupils getting a high school degree without being able to read competently. At the same time another lucky kid is helped to develop skills in reading and writing, PLUS being taught about when to use ChatGPT, and how to competently judge and use the result. Guess which kid will do better in life afterwards.
In summary, if you were to go into hibernation and wake up in the future, chances are that society isn't ruled by idiots then. There will be highly intelligent and educated people around, and they will have most of the power in society. The question is how dumb the least educated people in society are, and that could possibly be some sort of dystopian future. Or humanity learns how to create better education systems, in which pupils aren't left alone with homework and have to decide for themselves whether to use quick fix technology to return it.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:47 AM Permanent Link
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I think there is an important aspect missing: optimisation.
Who here still knows how to tie a stone to a stick, hunt down that mammoth, carve it up and cook it over an open fire you started yourself?
The majority profits from our optimised workflows and go to the supermarket, buy groceries and cook a meal.
But what if you don't need to problem solve shopping for groceries any more because they are delivered to your door?
Why stop there and skip cooking as well when your food can be prepared and delivered?
Humans love to optimised and it does lift us to new heights. But we are sacrificing the associated skills when the optimisation replaces the skill.
So similar to the calculator allowing you to skip knowing addition when you know how to match the symbols, everything else will also allow you to skip knowledge.
Educational and economic inequality are hen and egg. They go hand in hand.
For a poor person, unnecessary knowledge doesn't add anything to their day to day life. But not having knowledge does drop your economic value as well.
The biggest mistake people then make, is to assume economic redistribution would fix the problem. But it is mandatory education that would somewhat alleviate the issue and would allow some smart people to raise up.
And the non smart? Well, they will stay where they are and there is no way around it. You can't teach a man to fish who only wants to have a fish.
Who here still knows how to tie a stone to a stick, hunt down that mammoth, carve it up and cook it over an open fire you started yourself?
The majority profits from our optimised workflows and go to the supermarket, buy groceries and cook a meal.
But what if you don't need to problem solve shopping for groceries any more because they are delivered to your door?
Why stop there and skip cooking as well when your food can be prepared and delivered?
Humans love to optimised and it does lift us to new heights. But we are sacrificing the associated skills when the optimisation replaces the skill.
So similar to the calculator allowing you to skip knowing addition when you know how to match the symbols, everything else will also allow you to skip knowledge.
Educational and economic inequality are hen and egg. They go hand in hand.
For a poor person, unnecessary knowledge doesn't add anything to their day to day life. But not having knowledge does drop your economic value as well.
The biggest mistake people then make, is to assume economic redistribution would fix the problem. But it is mandatory education that would somewhat alleviate the issue and would allow some smart people to raise up.
And the non smart? Well, they will stay where they are and there is no way around it. You can't teach a man to fish who only wants to have a fish.
In the US Education is decentralized because for some reason about half of voters seem to be very afraid of unified national standards for curriculum. This unfortunately ends up with the quality of Education in this country being largely determined by first what state you live in and second what area in that state you lolive in.
Since most schools are funded primarily through local property taxes this also leads to affluent areas having more funding fir their schools then poorer areas. There are federal and state programs that try to combat this issue but again about half of voters think thats bad for some reason so results vary.
I've worked in Education for about 16 years now. I started as a Teacher Assistant in a classroom and moved around to various positions, learned programming and became a database programmer for my local school district.
People will often point to things like you said Tobold, screen time or social media or whatever as the cause for the "dumbing down" of younger generations. In my opinion, from what I've observed, in the US, in my State, one of the most damning things to Education has been the obsession over standardized metrics.
Nearly every Education standard in my state is designed in some way that supposedly boost standardized scores on state tests. Teachers receive bonuses when students gain % points on standardized tests. Administrators and teacher evaluations depend on standardized testing scores.
We've all heard of teaching to the test. But what is happening is in my opinion the result of the entire system revolving around standardized testing. After Covid, test scores plummeted in my state. How did my state government respond? Did they change curriculum? Did they decide to increase school funding?
No. They have lowered testing standards or created alternative avenues to meet standardized testing requirements every single year since 2021. Districts game the system by doing things like recommending parents take their low performing students to private schools or charters since it gets these students off their books for graduation rate and student performance calculations. Students are shuffled from grade to grade even if they dont actually learn the things they need because failing students hurts school grades and teacher evaluations.
When you Google (Florida) my state it comes up as supposedly ranking high in education in the US.
The sad thing is neither party even talks about this. They'll give nebulous "we need to support our teachers" messages but ive not seen a real Education reform plan by any political entity in my state or at the national level.
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Since most schools are funded primarily through local property taxes this also leads to affluent areas having more funding fir their schools then poorer areas. There are federal and state programs that try to combat this issue but again about half of voters think thats bad for some reason so results vary.
I've worked in Education for about 16 years now. I started as a Teacher Assistant in a classroom and moved around to various positions, learned programming and became a database programmer for my local school district.
People will often point to things like you said Tobold, screen time or social media or whatever as the cause for the "dumbing down" of younger generations. In my opinion, from what I've observed, in the US, in my State, one of the most damning things to Education has been the obsession over standardized metrics.
Nearly every Education standard in my state is designed in some way that supposedly boost standardized scores on state tests. Teachers receive bonuses when students gain % points on standardized tests. Administrators and teacher evaluations depend on standardized testing scores.
We've all heard of teaching to the test. But what is happening is in my opinion the result of the entire system revolving around standardized testing. After Covid, test scores plummeted in my state. How did my state government respond? Did they change curriculum? Did they decide to increase school funding?
No. They have lowered testing standards or created alternative avenues to meet standardized testing requirements every single year since 2021. Districts game the system by doing things like recommending parents take their low performing students to private schools or charters since it gets these students off their books for graduation rate and student performance calculations. Students are shuffled from grade to grade even if they dont actually learn the things they need because failing students hurts school grades and teacher evaluations.
When you Google (Florida) my state it comes up as supposedly ranking high in education in the US.
The sad thing is neither party even talks about this. They'll give nebulous "we need to support our teachers" messages but ive not seen a real Education reform plan by any political entity in my state or at the national level.
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