We're learnding.
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Around 12 years old or so. I've been hearing something similar to this my whole life. I didn't understand how true it was until I started recruiting in 2009.
Not that it started with Bush, but after 'No Child Left Behind' act schools were incentivized so pass all students. They tied school funding to graduation rates and passing students. Teachers taught more just to the test and not comprehending the material.
I'm sure it's gotten worse COVID.
In my high school they were passing people who were functionally illiterate to keep funding up. It was pretty much assumed those kids were a lost cause so they never got any extra help either. School would just look the other way as someone was lost in the cracks and passed on paper. The very rare ones that did manage to get extra help would take tests in a different room and it was well known the aids would just give them answers if they took too long. Everyone hated it especially the kids being passed through. They got ostracized for "having it easy" while also being frustrated they're spending all day being told to focus on stuff they don't understand and aren't getting real help with
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That's higher than I thought. Aren't newspapers written at around third or fourth grade levels?
At this rate, in about a decade, tabloids will be formatted like comics with more pictures than words to make it easier for people
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There was already a precedent for all this. After the Second World War, American jumped right into the Cold War with the Russians and wanted to take the lead in science, technology, rocketry, space and engineering. They quickly realized that their country at the time was ill equiped and not well trained or educated for all this ... so they took the shortcut of using former Nazis to head their science and technology fields for a few years. Then to take up the slack, the government heavily invested in education and training to pump out the scientists, engineers and professionals they needed to gear up their technological war with the Soviets.
So the 50s, 60s, and 70s got filled with a lot of bright well trained, well educated and informed young people. They were able to power the American war machine but a side effect to all that was all these insightful young people became the backbone of a counter culture that fought against war, capitalism, inequality, conservatism and racism and supported black rights, Native rights, women's rights, minority rights, animal rights and environmentalism.
Then they had to bring in people like Reagan and Thatcher to reign in these counter culture movements and swing the pendulum back again. Once they defeated the Soviets in the Cold War, conservative American had all the incentive to break everything down again and dumb down the population until it was a just a compliant pulp that could elect a clown.
Using former Nazis wasn't because there was a shortage of educated people in general in the US after WW2. The vast majority of Nazi scientists who made major contributions to US progress (or Soviet progress, for that matter), were in rocketry, which the Nazis put disproportionate effort and funding into.
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That's higher than I thought
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And they all get votes
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This post did not contain any content.wrote on last edited by [email protected]
Hot take but I think this article is hyperbole. Think about it. Half of adults are underachievers. That tracks with most metrics. Your average person is not smart. Intelligence follows a bell curve and it only makes sense that the bottom half is going to be terrible.
Edit: ok just realized this is the meme sub lol.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote on last edited by [email protected]
Who is that sexy mother fucker in the picture?
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As much as I enjoyed Idiocracy when it came out, I wish its proposed answer/crux of the issue wasn’t “smart people should have kids” and instead focused on educating the ones that are already here/brought into this world.
As unpopular this may be: With some, or probably some more, there are limits to what can be achieved with care and education.
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Hot take but I think this article is hyperbole. Think about it. Half of adults are underachievers. That tracks with most metrics. Your average person is not smart. Intelligence follows a bell curve and it only makes sense that the bottom half is going to be terrible.
Edit: ok just realized this is the meme sub lol.
Thank you for pointing this out, and also for doing it in a politer way than I was able to above.
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Who is that sexy mother fucker in the picture?
you mean president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho?
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God, no. Even tabloids are generally written at an 8th grade+ level.
There's some mentioning of things going downwards here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age, like simple machines for the masses where the buttons are moving pictograms of what happens when that thing is pressed... Where on the other side, there's nanomachines built by the educated.
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Another comment here gives an example of how a 6th grade reading comprehension test could be formulated. Essentially, it's about how complex sentences you can parse, and how large your "context window" is while reading.
Imagine a small child just learning to read. They struggle with every word, so if a sentence grows more complex than "The dog is brown.", they simply can't get to the end of the sentence while still remembering what the start was about. This also applies at a higher level: Keeping track of a complex "scene" which describes a setting while also describing dialogue between characters and inner dialogue in parallel requires more cognitive effort than the simpler "scenes" in children's books. A higher reading level means you spend less cognitive effort reading and understanding the words and sentences, so you have more cognitive capacity in reserve to actually understand the full picture.
Shit, is that why I can't understand fuck all in Finnegan's Wake?
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Hot take but I think this article is hyperbole. Think about it. Half of adults are underachievers. That tracks with most metrics. Your average person is not smart. Intelligence follows a bell curve and it only makes sense that the bottom half is going to be terrible.
Edit: ok just realized this is the meme sub lol.
It’s not hyperbole, this is an actual serious issue in America. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not have high enough reading skills to extrapolate and cross reference data from things like text books and journal articles. Something like 40% of American adults can’t read well enough to comprehend multi-step prompts (e.g. they struggle with stuff like bus schedules). About 15-20% of American adults can’t read at a basic level, very simple things like medicine bottles. Depending on the survey these numbers can vary a bit
Part of this statistic is because we have a high immigrant population that doesn’t speak English as their primary language but the main reason is that we’ve simply eroded education quality for decades. I work with teenagers who are in high school and can barely throw together a coherent email. Statistically, most adults don’t read for pleasure at all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
Look under “literacy rates” section
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you mean president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]You forgot my title of Five Time Ultimate Smackdown Champion scro
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Another comment here gives an example of how a 6th grade reading comprehension test could be formulated. Essentially, it's about how complex sentences you can parse, and how large your "context window" is while reading.
Imagine a small child just learning to read. They struggle with every word, so if a sentence grows more complex than "The dog is brown.", they simply can't get to the end of the sentence while still remembering what the start was about. This also applies at a higher level: Keeping track of a complex "scene" which describes a setting while also describing dialogue between characters and inner dialogue in parallel requires more cognitive effort than the simpler "scenes" in children's books. A higher reading level means you spend less cognitive effort reading and understanding the words and sentences, so you have more cognitive capacity in reserve to actually understand the full picture.
Ah I see. That makes sense.
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Using former Nazis wasn't because there was a shortage of educated people in general in the US after WW2. The vast majority of Nazi scientists who made major contributions to US progress (or Soviet progress, for that matter), were in rocketry, which the Nazis put disproportionate effort and funding into.
Agreed ... but in order for the US to push through their rocket program, they needed scientists and researchers to develop, test, build, test, retest, and test some more all of the applied science that had been developed. The country needed to build an entire community of thousands of professionally trained technicians, scientists, engineers, professionals ... and with them had to come teams of administrators, academics, trainers, bureaucrats, office workers ... and with all of them had to come entire groups of trained builders, workers, electricians, plumbers, draftsmen, planners and all the people that came with ... and all that had to be supported by an industry that needed to build and develop all the things that had to be needed to get this monolith moving, which meant that all these corporations and businesses needed their own teams of professionally trained people.
It was a massive investment in education in order to get the ball rolling in industry to build the rocket program. It wasn't just building rockets ... it was building an entire industry upon industry upon industry to get to the point of building a single rocket that could launch anything into orbit.
The reason why any of it happened was that the government heavily invested in educating and training an entire population to make it all possible.
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Hot take but I think this article is hyperbole. Think about it. Half of adults are underachievers. That tracks with most metrics. Your average person is not smart. Intelligence follows a bell curve and it only makes sense that the bottom half is going to be terrible.
Edit: ok just realized this is the meme sub lol.
“Terrible” is a threshold that can move, though. You can bang on about “half the world is below average” until you’re blue in the face but you will still always miss the point that the average should be much higher than it is and the spread should be nearly as wide. There will be a rough limit to intelligence at some point but the US, for all its resources and money, still seems more interested in finding the lower limit than the upper one.
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As much as I enjoyed Idiocracy when it came out, I wish its proposed answer/crux of the issue wasn’t “smart people should have kids” and instead focused on educating the ones that are already here/brought into this world.
Pretty sure the smart folks waited till they could provide for their kid well before finding out they couldn't even have any. Implying that even if they did that kid would have been outnumbered by the mass breeding of fuckwits who's only objective in life was rawdoggin after a good time.
It actually feels crazy that I know dudes who emulate the idiots from the beginning montage almost exactly. They didn't used to be that way, it ramped up the last couple years
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As much as I enjoyed Idiocracy when it came out, I wish its proposed answer/crux of the issue wasn’t “smart people should have kids” and instead focused on educating the ones that are already here/brought into this world.
I don't think that the movie was proposing that the issue or solution is eugenics based. I would argue that educated people are probably able provide a better education, and that uneducated parents are less likely to be able to provide their children with a quality education.
I don't specifically remember Idiocracy really going into depth about "passing good genes".
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In case you were wondering why we're losing our democracy to a felon rapist.
