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Notes -
(Stupid) Kids These Days
Article link - no paywall
Rough summary:
(Emphasis above added)
Excellent CW quote:
UCSD isn't an online for profit school. It has traditionally admitted kid from middle to upper middle class families that maybe weren't deeply thinkers, but were assumed to be strongly better than average. Their grads go on to form the professional classes of California suburbs, albeit not the ones with $2m media home price gated communities. Far from a bad life.
And the faculty be saying kids are real, real dumb. Like, really tho.
The rearward looking CW angle is too obvious; DEI, affirmative action, grade inflation in High Schools and a "no child left behind" attitude. I'd sprinkle on some helicopter-parent pressuring as well. For those of you interested in that angle, I await your hopefully hilarious takes.
I'm more interested in the future CW angle. Color me skeptical that these kids, already 18+, are going to really buckle down and crack the books now. If you've been retard-maxxing for nearly two decades, it's hard to slow the Downs and speed up the study. But, as the Dean in Animal House, said, _"Fat, Drunk, and Stupid" is no way to go through life. So what happens to these kids?
10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes. A lot of well intentioned liberals have been smashing the vote button for welfare programs for going on six decades now because they see "structural" problems everywhere - of course the less fortunate need our benevolent support (definitely not noblesse-oblige). But when it just becomes plainly obvious that the COVID generation just has permanent banana brains, does that suicide empathy actually start to dry up?
There's a lot of discourse on the online dissident right about what will finally "wake up" the productive members of society. It usually ends up in HBD adjacent spaces. I wonder if the real "oh shit" moment will be far more obvious - stupid people, of any race, create massive problems and we've been boosting the stupid coefficient for somewhere near 15 years straight now.
My first inclination was to blame the COVID-era shutdown of schools. It fits the timeframe of the sharp decline well; the great down leveling of schools, although terrible, has been going on for decades and doesn't explain the cliff.
UCSD isn't just finding inability to perform high school math, though; it's had to start teaching remedial classes in middle school and even elementary school level math.
Maybe having no education in high school causes skills to decay? I wonder if these kids scored as competent in middle school math when they started high school; my bet is that they did, though probably marginally, and they've simply regressed.
We should have empathy for the kids, though: they've experienced actual harm, as opposed to the imagined abstract harm of disparate impact. Does give me an increased feeling of job security.
My wife and I were discussing something related yesterday: the question of the day was have we become Boomers, those most maligned of people.
Her little sister, a teacher, has made a series of bad decisions, and now wants to embrace a "tradwife" lifestyle. The issue is her boyfriend has no job. He's currently "studying" social media late into the hours of the night (as daytimes are reserved for chilling at the beach) so that he can become an influencer; he has no money and relies on her for housing, transportation, and food. They want to have kids ASAP and travel the world. And they are both in their early 30s.
We are not fans of this. But, are we just yelling at kids like old people now, not understanding all their challenges?
I don't know whether this is new or not, and whether it'd make me feel better or worse if it was new or not. All I know is that the kids are not all right.
You know what surprises me? I don't think I've seen a woodworking video where the woodworker does their own math. I understand mathing fractional inches takes a little bit more effort than decimal cm, but it's all still powers of two. And yet, almost everybody I watch whips out a cell phone, relies on CAD software, or avoids mathing entirely by marking their workpieces against the actual dimensions of the partially completed project.
Apparently that last method is actually the best as compounding errors/imprecision always throw off your calculations. But I feel like my point remains.
Did none of these people ever learn how to do fractions? Even 10-20 years ago when our education system supposedly functioned? I doubt it. I doubt it's just students that are being cognitively mutilated.
If you want to see lots of math and geometry, look at the folks doing (manual) machine shop stuff. Things like "the drawing gives this weird dimension relative to another face over there: I need to include adjustments for tolerance over the separate steps to make all the intermediate features". Lots of concerns about reference faces, accumulating error, cutter geometry, and a fair amount of trigonometry.
Only professional cabinetry woodworkers are going to care about repeatability: for everyone else, a single piece of furniture only needs to fit together by itself, not have interchangable parts.
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