Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>Yeah and when cars replaced horses, the next generation got dumber because they no longer learned the skills they would have acquired by learning how to ride a horse?

Well, at the time they merely replaced those skills with learning how to drive a car.

But, in a future where you won't have to replace previous skills with anything (e.g self driving cars, calculator vs having to know basic math in your head etc) it can be argued that it can lead into a general dumbness.

Some people will say that it will "free resources for higher level learning" etc, but in all probabillity it will just infantilize most people, a la "Brave New World". We already have huge resources for higher level learning and most people just spend their time watching 3 hours TV and day and learning celebrity gossip on the internet.

>If anything, based on what I have seen, the next generation will be shockingly smarter, more adept at fact-checking, much better at focusing and multi-tasking, much more disillusioned about institutionalized education and much more interested in self-directed learning

A few perhaps. For the majority it will be the same ever increasing dumbness that has been going on for decades.

> ever increasing dumbness that has been going on for decades.

Do you have evidence that it's increasing? Maybe there have just always been dumb people. Of course you can point to amazing discoveries or great literature from the past, but that only represents a tiny slice of the population. And we're still doing science, still writing books, etc.

>Do you have evidence that it's increasing? (...) And we're still doing science, still writing books, etc.

For those kind of things they is no hard evidence. One either sees that happening through historical changes, or does not. But there are lot of secondary indications.

For example the books we're writing don't compare at all favorably to past works.

Including the most cherished books of our era. Whereas literature, poerty, etc was constantly replenishing it's stock for centuries, there has been nothing like what we had even 50 years ago.

Same for the fine arts -- there have been no great new art movements since pop art (which even that was a lame immitation of older ideas). Same (and worse) for philosophy.

As for science, after the low hanging fruit (which demanded huge breakthroughs, like Newton's, Darwin's, Maxwell's, Einstein's, Cantor's, Turing's etc) have been picked, there's mostly boring incremental work -- we might as well have had stopped doing science. It's mostly engineering these days.

Literature and art are very subjective things. I don't think you can really judge them against other periods until you've got a century or so of hindsight. So I'm afraid that your assertion that they're not like they used to be sounds like it's prejudiced by your belief that people are getting stupider. I bet in a hundred years, there will be classics from our time as much as any other.

Science is an interesting one. Perhaps we have already made most of the big leaps in understanding the natural world. But that doesn't imply that scientists now are less intelligent than scientists 'back then'. I'd argue that it takes more knowledge and work to make even seemingly 'minor' discoveries. Besides anything else, we have to understand all that past work before we can build on it.

So in the US it might be harder to see as you don't have a proper examination system at the high-school level. But in the UK we've had examinations first at 16 (previously called O levels then GCSEs) and 18 (A levels).

You can objectively see that the requirements to get an A are lower in terms of knowledge of facts and methods than they were, say, 30 years ago.

And more students get an A than they did 30 years ago (I'm from the UK as well). So unless you can find evidence that the rate at which it's getting easier is greater than the rate at which grades increase, it doesn't show that people are getting stupider. Perhaps it shows that they're learning less at school, but I'm not convinced that the sort of rote learning that comprised traditional education was that valuable.

I'm somewhat playing Devil's advocate here - I don't like the idea that exams are getting less rigorous either. But it's important not to overstate the problem.

Grade inflation is a sign of the same problem though. The fact they had to introduce an A* because so many people were getting A is a sign that the exams have broken down.

The thing is when it's possible for tons of people to put in perfect papers you aren't really testing the depth of knowledge out there. You're measuring things like mistakes and compliance. You need to have more challenge in papers to really learn what people know or don't know. When it becomes almost pass/fail easy then more As doesn't really suggest people are getting smarter, just they are fitting the process of the exam better. I remember when 65% was the A mark. This was because they were hard. Nobody was expected to get a perfect score or near perfect score.

The thing is people attack each leg of the stool in isolation: don't overstate grade inflation; exams are just as hard they test different things; anecdotal evidence from hiring managers of the lack of skills of those entering the workforce; comparative league tables of international school age people (where we're backsliding); and just the general interaction with people over years and seeing less and less knowledge in graduating classes (anecdotal)... sure you can attack each for different reasons. But at some point the weight of evidence becomes compelling to reasonable people. The education system and other things in society that contribute to kids' pre-adulthood learning (family, tv, etc.) are clearly showing a decline in their ability to deliver young adults with solid education and skills in large numbers, over the decades.

Sure there are outliers and this board is full of them. But the complacency on this topic we all show by throwing out invalid arguments like "people have always complained about declining standards" is disturbing because once you pass a certain threshold it's damn hard to fix the problem.

I don't particularly think the situation at present is good, or that we should rest on our laurels. I just take issue with that way that it's presented as a decline from some golden age when we knew how to educate people properly. I don't believe humanity as a whole has ever been that smart.

The issue, as I see it, is that there are ever more jobs requiring intelligence, and ever fewer that don't. Employers complain about the shortage of people with technical skills because they need more of them, not because there are fewer than there were in the past.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect]

Jon Martin Sundet and colleagues (2004) examined scores on intelligence tests given to Norwegian conscripts between the 1950s and 2002. They found that the increase of scores of general intelligence stopped after the mid-1990s and declined in numerical reasoning sub-tests.[31] Teasdale and Owen (2005) examined the results of IQ tests given to Danish male conscripts. Between 1959 and 1979 the gains were 3 points per decade. Between 1979 and 1989 the increase approached 2 IQ points. Between 1989 and 1998 the gain was about 1.3 points. Between 1998 and 2004 IQ declined by about the same amount as it gained between 1989 and 1998.

(...)

In the United Kingdom, a study by Flynn (2009) found that tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period. For the upper half of the results the performance was even worse. Average IQ scores declined by six points.

Yep I did read that before I posted the link. My intention is not to "win" an argument but to inform and hopefully be educated in return.

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